Elon Musk‘s views on trans people are quite clear. One of the reasons he set out to buy Twitter in the first place was his anger at awful right-wing Onion analog The Babylon Bee getting their account suspended for repeatedly misgendering government official Rachel Levine, since purchasing the company he’s revised Twitter’s hateful content policy to remove protections for trans users, and has repeatedly mocked peoples’ preferred pronouns.
In 2020, Musk’s then-partner Grimes was so alarmed by his bad takes she called him out, sending a tweet that said “I love you but please turn off ur phone or give me a [call]. I cannot support hate. Please stop this. I know this isn’t your heart.”
Now Grimes has given her perspective on why Musk is like this and it’s a doozy. Speaking to Wired, she said:
“We had a big, long conversation. I was like, ‘I want to dissect why you’re so stressed about this.’ Getting to the heart of what Elon says helps me get to the heart of what other people’s issues are, because it’s this über guy situation. And it came down to pretty much every way that you transition can cause fertility issues. I was like, OK, you don’t hate trans people, you hate woke culture. I get that it can be annoying, and you have concerns about the fertility thing. So let’s figure it out, because there’s a lot of fertility tech that could be innovated that would help trans people have kids, which would be great and would solve a lot of problems. He’s just on Twitter, and he’s unhappy with woke people, and the arguments happened.”
Firstly, and most obviously, a trans person’s (or anyone else’s for that matter) fertility is none of Elon Musk’s business. But, to be fair, Grimes’ take does make sense given Musk’s odd preoccupation with fertility. He’s fathered 10 children himself, and has said that “population collapse is the biggest danger civilization faces by far”.
Then again, we think Grimes is being rather charitable with her assessment. If Musk was simply kindheartedly concerned with trans people being able to have babies in future we doubt he’d be so unpleasant with his mockery of them.
It’s also notable that one of Musk’s children is trans and when filing a petition in California to legally change her name and gender identity to female give the following reason: “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”
Who can blame her?
