National Post Fri, 26 Jul 2024
http://epaper.nationalpost.
Musk, the gender heretic
BILLIONAIRE SAYS ‘WOKE MIND VIRUS’ ‘KILLED’ HIS CHILD
AMY HAMM · 26 Jul 2024
National Post
TO GENDER ACTIVISTS, THERE IS MORE THAN ONE WAY TO BE A HERETIC.
Elon Musk is now the world’s greatest threat to gender ideology. Musk told the world Monday that he has made a vow to “destroy the woke mind virus” that he says took his son from him.
In an interview with Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, Musk posited that Xavier had been killed by wokeness, in the form of gender ideology.
Xavier is not literally dead. Rather, his child, 20, now goes by Vivian Wilson and identifies as a transgender woman. “I lost my son, essentially. They call it deadnaming for a reason. The reason it’s called deadnaming is because your son is dead. So, my son Xavier is dead. Killed by the woke mind virus,” said Musk. (“Deadnaming,” for those unaware, is the practice of referring to a transgender person by the name they used prior to transition — considered akin to literal violence by the most fervent of gender activists.)
Musk detailed how he felt “tricked” into signing the papers that enabled his son’s medical transition based on the oft-repeated, yet thoroughly discredited claim that gender dysphoric children will commit suicide if not allowed to change their gender — if they are not allowed to step onto a medical pathway that leads in a single direction and ends with potentially sterilizing puberty blockers, synthetic hormones, and disfiguring surgeries. “I was told Xavier might commit suicide,” said Musk, appearing flatter and more sombre than usual.
His revelation is unprecedented: if Musk — armed both with the resources of a billionaire and an IQ that dwarfs the average score — can be persuaded to approve the transitioning of a child based on poor or zero evidence, then any parent could be.
His admission also opened a largely closed door into a public discourse about regretful parents. How many parents could muster the humility and courage to admit that they harmed what is most precious to them — their own children? How many parents could admit to what Musk has, rather than choosing, for their own sanity, to believe that they made the right choice when they greenlighted their own children for the world’s largest — and arguably the worst — medical scandal in history? What a horrific reality to have to confront. Few are willing. Can we really blame them for ignoring or dismissing both the Cass Report and the WPATH files? I don’t. Let’s hope that Musk’s courage is contagious, as courage often is. Musk is not the first famous person to wade into the toxic debate over gender ideology. Among them, we of course also have the famous billionairess J.K. Rowling — whose contribution toward protecting women’s rights and child safeguarding have been immeasurable. There are several more, Jordan Peterson included. Bless them all. But it is by virtue of Musk’s deeply painful admission that he is now the largest threat to gender ideology out there.
To gender activists, there is more than one way to be a heretic. You can, most commonly, be the type of heretic that rejects any of the tenets of their gender based pseudo-religion. You can refuse to believe that a literal sex change is possible in humans. Heretic! You can suggest that no one is “born in the wrong body” and that kids should wait until they’re adults to decide to transition. Heretic! You can say that anyone born male (“assigned male at birth,” according to their doctrine) does not belong in women’s spaces. Heret—you get the idea.
Another way to be a heretic — and the activists particularly dislike this type — is to detransition. Gender activists will say, out one side of their mouth, that we must believe anyone and everyone’s claim about their gender identity, at all times — while out the other side of their mouth spitting venom at those who detransition, saying that they were “never really trans” to begin with. You cannot have it both ways. But gender activists — allergic to reality as they are — insist that they do. They treat vocal detransitioners, such as America’s Chloe Cole, horribly. Women like Cole are dismissed, with great irony on the behalf of gender activists, as fakers or cons.
Elon Musk represents a new type of heretic: the contrite parent. And it is both a result of this important discourse Musk initiated and, critically, by virtue of the fact that Musk, who — in all seriousness — is the only person on earth who can reasonably be believed after saying he will colonize Mars, that he is now the world’s largest threat to gender ideology.
Musk is currently the greatest living example of a human with the resources and the drive to do the things that he says he wants to do. “I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus,” Musk said. He believes that gender ideology is part of it. Did he buy X (formerly Twitter), where gender critical speech was once verboten, because of his Xavier?
What will Elon’s next move be in destroying this harmful ideology? We eagerly await.
