Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk ushered in LGBTQ Pride month by stopping pretending his views on transgender people in the world: he doesn’t support them.
In a series of tweets on Thursday and Friday, Musk actively promoted a transphobic “documentary” produced by an extremist expert, agreed that medical providers who care for transgender children should be sent to prison without parole, and declared his support for a movement to remove trans people from the LGBTQ umbrella.
Increasingly flirting with far-right pundits, Musk has been critical of trans issues in the recent past.
But his comments this week gave a particularly riotous window into his personal politics, which The New York Times labeled “complicatedNot six months ago.
Despite boasting around this time last year that his electric car company had scored “100/100 for the seventh straight year for LGBTQ equality” in a workplace inclusion survey, Musk said he doesn’t advocate all acronym.
“Totally agree”, the billionaire answered below a tweet from an account called The LGB Group that reads: “We don’t even want Pride Month anymore, we just want to break away from the TQ+ cult.” (LGBTQ stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer.)
“All parents should watch this,” Musk previously wrote alongside the movie “What’s a Woman?” produced by far-right conservative Matt Walsh.
The film begins with the suggestion that women are mysterious creatures that were incomprehensible even to astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and continues from there. While he questions whether transgender people exist, he is especially critical of the idea that children can be transgender.
“Now our culture tells us that the differences between girls and boys don’t matter,” Walsh says in the introduction, which is interspersed with images of himself standing on a riverbank in sunglasses, casting a fishing line as he ponders. about parenting.
Several trans activists accused Walsh of inviting them to be interviewed in the film. under false pretenses last year when “What is a woman?” was released for the first time.
Twitter initially moved to label the film “hateful conduct”. When a Twitter user accused Musk of stifling free speech, he responded directly by saying that he “fixed” the problem with the film. The movie was made available in its entirety on the platform, with Walsh calling Musk’s endorsement “a huge win.”
Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, resigned in the wake of “What is a woman?” controversy, followed by AJ Brown, the brand’s director of safety and quality, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Musk also offered some clarification on his personal views, apparently indicating that he has fewer issues with transgender adults. Beneath the film, he wrote: “Consenting adults should do whatever makes them happy as long as it doesn’t harm others, but a child is not capable of consenting, which is why we have laws that They protect minors.”
However, gender-affirming medical care is carried out in a professional setting, and many major medical groups support the provision of such care to child patients, including the american academy of pediatrics and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. The transition generally includes a social element that begins before any potential medical elements.
On Thursday, Musk said he would be “actively pushing to criminalize making severe and irreversible changes to children under the age of consent.”
But gender-affirming surgeries are rarely performed on patients under the age of 18. trans kids are often prescribed puberty blockers so that they have more time to understand their identities; The drugs have been shown to improve mental health in such patients, a group that has been shown to be at increased risk of suicidal ideation.
Among his 10 children, Musk has a transgender daughter, who said last year that she no longer wish to be associated With his father. When asked for his response to his decision, Musk saying that he had good relations with his other children.
And he added: “I can’t win them all.”