Elon Musk’s estranged relationship with his transgender daughter exposes a dark trend of familial divide in the age of anti-trans politics
This week, the world’s richest person launched an unseemly public attack on his estranged transgender daughter.
In an interview released on Monday, Elon Musk – electric car entrepreneur, US government rocket contractor, and outright owner of the social media service X (formerly Twitter) – claimed that his daughter Vivian Wilson’s transition was the trigger for his recent right-wing turn.
"Essentially... my son is dead," said Musk. "Killed by the woke mind virus. So I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that. And we’re making some progress."
Wilson soon fired back on the rival social network Threads and in an interview with NBC News, saying that Musk was "lying blatantly" about her childhood and of bullying her for expressing femininity. (The Independent has contacted Musk for comment, via his companies.)
For many trans people, these events were sad but not surprising. That is because all too many have witnessed their family members’ politics becoming more extreme and more anti-trans since they came out.
Here are the stories of three trans and non-binary people who spoke to The Independent about their experiences. Their identities and certain other details have been blurred, and their answers have been edited for length and clarity.
In most cases, their family members’ political shift didn’t come from nowhere; some had a prior interest in anti-trans politics. But all our interviewees said that things had got worse since their transition began.
'Felicity', 26, UK
I started transitioning around a year and a half to two years ago, and came out to my parents eight months ago. I think multiple members of my family are undergoing anti-trans radicalization.
After I came out, my mum took time off work due to stress and claims to have had panic attacks. My sister sent me a very unpleasant message blaming me for our mum’s mental state. Our relationship hasn’t been the same since.
I didn’t expect the level of vitriol I’ve received.
Felicity
My dad started obsessively reading anti-trans literature to the point where one of their church leaders (who is by no means accepting of trans people) told him he needed to slow down. The only members of my family who have responded in a way I would describe as ‘normal’ are my brother and his wife.
I think this radicalization started before I came out; I come from quite a conservative Christian background. But I didn’t expect the level of vitriol I’ve received. I think it has been exacerbated by my coming out. Before, there might have been the occasional attack helicopter joke or talking about what some commentator said. After, it became very personal and sometimes quite nasty.
What makes it harder is that in spite of all this, since I came out, I’ve been generally a lot more positive and a lot happier. I got a job that I really loved, and which has led to me going back to university... I’m in a really supportive relationship with a woman I love. I have meaningful friendships.
But they can’t appreciate any of this. My mum even said she hopes this ‘lie’ comes crashing down. My happiness matters a lot less than the state of my soul.
'Noah', late twenties, south England
I started transitioning socially in 2017, and medically in 2018. My parents found out in 2017 when I told them. Initially they were very against it, but my dad came around eventually, and as long as I am happy, safe, well fed, have money etc, he’s chill with whatever. My mum was negative at first, then came around, but now "blames herself for my situation".
As soon as I came out, she refused to call me by my name or use my pronouns, as she didn’t want me to “influence” her daughter in my “lifestyle” (despite having a gay older daughter herself).
Noah
My mum’s partner is the one I think is leading her down a bad path. He is incredibly hard right, believes in ‘the great replacement’, uses racial slurs with no regret, and believes all women should have three kids by 35 (white with white only etc); that people on benefits and immigrants should be sterilized in order to get those benefits.
Before my mum was with him she was okay with LGBT+. She’s still convinced one of our relatives is gay for attention (despite the fact she’s married and has two kids with her wife), but she’s been more and more led down that path since leaving my dad...
One of my cousins is a nurse, and was so cool with the LGBT+ community growing up. She has a kid who is 13 years younger than me. As soon as I came out, she refused to call me by my name or use my pronouns, as she didn’t want me to "influence" her daughter in my "lifestyle" (despite having a gay older daughter herself). So I went no contact with her.
It’s hard sometimes, as I wish I still had contact with my cousin and her kid. They lived with us for the first five months of her [kid’s] life, and I was heavily involved... but she dug her grave and now she has to lie in it.
‘Satya’, late twenties, English midlands
I can’t pin down exactly when my mother started with the Terf-y talking points. It was probably around 2018, 2019. She would go on Twitter and be reading stuff about some kid in the US who transitioned and then won a sports game – the usual scare stories. At first, for her, it was all a very interesting philosophical debate...
I came out as pansexual when I was in my early teens, and she was completely fine with that. She’s never been homophobic or anything. I remember a couple of years beforehand, we were at an event where [a trans celebrity] came up, and someone was using the wrong pronouns. She stepped in and was very aggressively correcting him, saying “no, that’s not right.” So it’s interesting how things ended up.
The weird thing is, in looking up ‘well, what’s all this weird stuff my mum is on about?’, I ended up exploring my own gender identity. [I realised that] I don’t feel any sense of my own gender, I don’t feel anything towards it, and when you dig into it all of gender’s a social construct...
So then the arguments would get more heated, and to be honest more violent. She could get properly p***ed off about stuff. There were times when she’d throw me out of the house, or get physically aggressive. At one point, she basically press-ganged me into going to [an anti-trans] conference. She came out of it like, "wow, that was pretty crazy. That was not the ‘just looking for an honest debate’ I thought it was."
Then we got into lockdown, and the tension of being in the house together got quite a lot. I started making plans to move out, and once I’d moved out I was going to come out... I wrote a letter to my parents, explaining that I was coming out, and what that meant, and how I wanted to be referred to. I hand wrote it as well. I don’t usually have very good handwriting, but I made a special effort.
It’s hard to say exactly how badly my coming-out directly affected [her politics]. It’s a little bit chicken and egg. But her mental health seemed to spiral. I’d try and make an effort to see her and talk to her, and we’d get into fights. She would be really hot and cold, and kind of stalkerish. She’d come to [my city] randomly, or act really weird when I was back home. And I’d hear from family that she’d been going to gender critical events. That wasn’t anything new, but it seemed to step up. Before, she would usually try to be somewhat respecting of pronouns when talking about me or my sister’s [trans] friends, and that started changing.
It all came to a head when I went to a family funeral with my [trans] boyfriend. I was going to stay with my dad, and we’d decided that mum wasn’t going to be there. And then she was there... she started misgendering my boyfriend, misgendering me. She stopped me being able to leave at first. Eventually I stormed out.
For quite a long time, I completely cut her off. Then I started hearing from my dad that she’d become part of the entourage for Posie Parker [aka Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, a British hardline anti-trans activist who has often been accused of courting the far right]. She’d travelled to Scotland and Ireland when Parker was doing various things [there]... Last I heard, she fell out with that crowd.
It was the classic ‘my trans kid won’t talk to me, so now I’m going deeper down the rabbit hole’ type thing. Before that, it was an intellectual exercise. She was clearly going down that path, but I doubt she would have been going around the country with Posie Parker if it hadn’t been for the fact that I’d come out and we’d fallen out and stopped talking.
Obviously there was a lot of personal issues aside from my gender identity, but that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It opened my eyes to the fact that there’s a lot of other s*** going in the relationship that’s not right. But I think she has an idea that it was entirely about [gender]. That I got ‘transed’, and then stopped loving my mum.