It’s not often one feels sorry for a billionaire. Yet it was hard not to sympathise with Elon Musk as he told Jordan Peterson about the time he was ‘tricked’ into allowing his son to become a ‘girl’. His voice crackling with emotion, he said he was hoodwinked into ‘signing documents’ for one of his older sons, Xavier, to go on puberty blockers. What he didn’t realise at the time, he says, is that puberty blockers are ‘actually just sterilisation drugs’. The end result? ‘I lost my son’, he says, the grief for his boy who was turned into a ‘girl’ clearly etched on his face.
It’s a tough watch. ‘They call it “deadnaming” for a reason’, Musk continued, referring to the woke term for calling a trans person by their pre-transition name. It’s ‘because your son is dead’, he said. ‘My son, Xavier, is dead – killed by the woke mind virus.’ They’re strong words. And no doubt the trans lobby is fuming. Yet there are many parents out there – from the dad whose daughter comes home from her first term at uni with bound breasts and a pill-induced moustache to the mum who watches in agony as her beloved son becomes a phoney woman – who feel they’ve lost their kids to a cult; who feel the child they once knew is no more.
Musk’s most chilling claim is that he was told his son ‘might commit suicide’ if he was prevented from transitioning. At this point, Peterson leaps in. ‘That was a lie right from the outset!’, he says. No ‘reliable clinician’ would ever say there’s a link between keeping a kid off puberty blockers and a higher risk of suicide, says Peterson. Musk agrees. It’s ‘incredibly evil’, he says. He’s not wrong. The weaponisation of suicide by trans activists and certain therapists, who insist without the benefit of anything resembling evidence that ‘trans kids’ will top themselves if they’re not allowed to transition, is low moral blackmail masquerading as medical advice. It’s a sinister effort to force parents to bend the knee to the trans ideology by telling them their child will die if they don’t.
Musk’s experience of losing his kid to the gender mania, to the pharmaceutical doom spiral of so-called transition, seems to have radicalised him. In a good way. ‘I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus’, he tells Peterson. ‘And we’re making some progress’, he says, no doubt referring to his acquisition of X and his transformation of it into a far more free-thinking space than it had been under its previous overlords who banned users for life for such tweetcrimes as referring to an oafish Canadian ‘transwoman’ who tried to force immigrant beauticians to wax his bollocks as ‘he’. Literally.
So perhaps Musk is not the annoying edgelord of the liberal media’s imagination. Maybe he didn’t buy Twitter just to ‘own the libs’, as claimed by wet columnists who far preferred the platform when it was silencing the uppity bitches of the gender-critical movement and suppressing news stories that threatened to hurt the Democrats. Maybe it was Musk’s agony at being ‘tricked’ by experts into sacrificing his boy to the delirious religion of trans that made him so intently anti-woke.
Musk’s pained reminiscence has helped to humanise the anguish – and, yes, grief – felt by many parents who’ve likewise lost kids to the trans contagion. It’s a thing you’re not meant to talk about. The only acceptable response to your child coming out as ‘trans’ is to revel in it. To play along with the post-truth farce that your boy is now magically, mysteriously a girl, or vice versa. Any parent who refuses to do this risks being branded a bigot. Worse, they might feel the law breathing down their necks.
Under Britain’s new Labour government, ‘conversion therapy’ looks set to be banned. This will outlaw ‘abusive’ practices designed to change not only a person’s sexuality but also their ‘gender identity’. What might this mean for the dad who flat-out refuses to let his son wear a dress or the mum who forbids her daughter from binding her breasts? Might they be branded ‘abusers’ and find themselves grilled by the cops? In California, the state distrusts parents so much it has passed a law saying schools no longer have to notify them if their kid ‘changes gender’ in schooltime. So children will be transitioned behind their parents’ backs. Your child will become the ideological property of the state, to be moulded and remoulded in accordance with the post-scientific whims of the woke ideologues who are legion in the education system.
Both the UK and California laws are justified as a means of protecting kids from the ‘harm’ of their parents’ supposed bigotry. In truth, the laws will expose kids to harm – the harm of delusional transition. As Michael Shellenberger says of the Californian law, far from protecting children it will make them more ‘vulnerable to irreversible and lifelong medical abuse and mistreatment’. That’s far less likely in Britain, where Labour has banned the prescription of puberty blockers to gender-confused kids. And yet, in essentially outlawing all firm efforts to discourage kids from ‘changing their sex’, Labour will still ensure that youths are put on the unhappy road to pretend gender, while disempowering their parents who only want to protect them from the very modern hysteria of trans.
Shellenberger is right that the transing of kids frequently entails ‘irreversible and lifelong medical abuse’. The handing out of puberty blockers like candy in recent years has been insane. We’ve essentially witnessed the rise of large-scale and state-approved medical experimentation on children. As the American College of Paediatricians says, puberty blockers can ‘cause mental illness’ and ‘permanent physical harm’. If a kid takes puberty blockers and then moves on to cross-sex hormones – as many do – they ‘will be sterilised, as gametes have not developed’. Musk is right: puberty blockers are essentially ‘sterilisation drugs’, or at least they frequently lead to the medical inducement of sterilisation. That the sterilisation of children – many of whom are simply gay, some of whom are autistic – has become not only acceptable but celebrated is nothing short of horrific. It is a testament to the horrors that can emerge when reason sleeps and ideology rules.
The blocking of puberty in healthy children is the lobotomy of the 21st century. Where docs once interfered with the brains of the mentally unwell, with little regard for the horrendous side effects, now docs meddle with the bodies of the mentally unwell, again with seemingly little concern for the lifelong harms that can arise. Future generations will surely look with as much horror upon our era’s pumping of gender-confused kids with biology-altering drugs as we do upon yesteryear’s violent intrusion into the grey matter of people who were only ill.
The challenge for trans activists and their noisy allies in the elites is how to make parents bow down to such a clearly harmful and unhinged ideology. And this is where the sick weaponisation of suicide comes in. This is why parents, including Musk, are warned that their kid ‘might commit suicide’ – because such a dire threat is a surefire way of making mums and dads assent to the transition of their kids, to the bodily lobotomisation of their sons and daughters.
The repulsive weaponisation of death was much in evidence in the UK last week when Labour confirmed it would ban puberty blockers. The Guardian’s Owen Jones said ‘there is already evidence of a huge surge in the deaths of young people since their healthcare was trashed’. Activist barrister Jolyon Maugham grimly conjured up an image of ‘a future of bereaved parents tipping ashes outside No10’. So horrified was the Labour government by this talk of a suicidal wave in response to its banning of puberty blockers that it commissioned a review to see how true it is. It turns out it’s not true at all. It is ‘insensitive, distressing and dangerous’, the study’s author said, to say that restrictions on puberty blockers will ‘kill trans children’.
It’s hard to think of anything more unethical, or indeed outright wicked, than the cynical dangling of the spectre of suicide to try to cajole people into conforming to an ideological worldview; than this marshalling of a fantasy army of dead children in an effort to shame and silence one’s critics. Not content with experimenting on kids, trans activists and their allies also darkly promise piles of dead kids unless everyone in society, from government ministers to everyday mums and dads, goes along with their lunacy. So, good on Musk for speaking out. For exposing these sinister methods of trans ideologues. For discussing the grief felt by parents of ‘trans kids’. For being honest. Let’s now normalise every parent of a ‘trans kid’ having the right to express their distress, without persecution, and certainly without prosecution.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
Musk’s most chilling claim is that he was told his son ‘might commit suicide’ if he was prevented from transitioning. At this point, Peterson leaps in. ‘That was a lie right from the outset!’, he says. No ‘reliable clinician’ would ever say there’s a link between keeping a kid off puberty blockers and a higher risk of suicide, says Peterson. Musk agrees. It’s ‘incredibly evil’, he says. He’s not wrong. The weaponisation of suicide by trans activists and certain therapists, who insist without the benefit of anything resembling evidence that ‘trans kids’ will top themselves if they’re not allowed to transition, is low moral blackmail masquerading as medical advice. It’s a sinister effort to force parents to bend the knee to the trans ideology by telling them their child will die if they don’t.
Musk’s experience of losing his kid to the gender mania, to the pharmaceutical doom spiral of so-called transition, seems to have radicalised him. In a good way. ‘I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus’, he tells Peterson. ‘And we’re making some progress’, he says, no doubt referring to his acquisition of X and his transformation of it into a far more free-thinking space than it had been under its previous overlords who banned users for life for such tweetcrimes as referring to an oafish Canadian ‘transwoman’ who tried to force immigrant beauticians to wax his bollocks as ‘he’. Literally.
So perhaps Musk is not the annoying edgelord of the liberal media’s imagination. Maybe he didn’t buy Twitter just to ‘own the libs’, as claimed by wet columnists who far preferred the platform when it was silencing the uppity bitches of the gender-critical movement and suppressing news stories that threatened to hurt the Democrats. Maybe it was Musk’s agony at being ‘tricked’ by experts into sacrificing his boy to the delirious religion of trans that made him so intently anti-woke.
Musk’s pained reminiscence has helped to humanise the anguish – and, yes, grief – felt by many parents who’ve likewise lost kids to the trans contagion. It’s a thing you’re not meant to talk about. The only acceptable response to your child coming out as ‘trans’ is to revel in it. To play along with the post-truth farce that your boy is now magically, mysteriously a girl, or vice versa. Any parent who refuses to do this risks being branded a bigot. Worse, they might feel the law breathing down their necks.
Under Britain’s new Labour government, ‘conversion therapy’ looks set to be banned. This will outlaw ‘abusive’ practices designed to change not only a person’s sexuality but also their ‘gender identity’. What might this mean for the dad who flat-out refuses to let his son wear a dress or the mum who forbids her daughter from binding her breasts? Might they be branded ‘abusers’ and find themselves grilled by the cops? In California, the state distrusts parents so much it has passed a law saying schools no longer have to notify them if their kid ‘changes gender’ in schooltime. So children will be transitioned behind their parents’ backs. Your child will become the ideological property of the state, to be moulded and remoulded in accordance with the post-scientific whims of the woke ideologues who are legion in the education system.
Both the UK and California laws are justified as a means of protecting kids from the ‘harm’ of their parents’ supposed bigotry. In truth, the laws will expose kids to harm – the harm of delusional transition. As Michael Shellenberger says of the Californian law, far from protecting children it will make them more ‘vulnerable to irreversible and lifelong medical abuse and mistreatment’. That’s far less likely in Britain, where Labour has banned the prescription of puberty blockers to gender-confused kids. And yet, in essentially outlawing all firm efforts to discourage kids from ‘changing their sex’, Labour will still ensure that youths are put on the unhappy road to pretend gender, while disempowering their parents who only want to protect them from the very modern hysteria of trans.
Shellenberger is right that the transing of kids frequently entails ‘irreversible and lifelong medical abuse’. The handing out of puberty blockers like candy in recent years has been insane. We’ve essentially witnessed the rise of large-scale and state-approved medical experimentation on children. As the American College of Paediatricians says, puberty blockers can ‘cause mental illness’ and ‘permanent physical harm’. If a kid takes puberty blockers and then moves on to cross-sex hormones – as many do – they ‘will be sterilised, as gametes have not developed’. Musk is right: puberty blockers are essentially ‘sterilisation drugs’, or at least they frequently lead to the medical inducement of sterilisation. That the sterilisation of children – many of whom are simply gay, some of whom are autistic – has become not only acceptable but celebrated is nothing short of horrific. It is a testament to the horrors that can emerge when reason sleeps and ideology rules.
The blocking of puberty in healthy children is the lobotomy of the 21st century. Where docs once interfered with the brains of the mentally unwell, with little regard for the horrendous side effects, now docs meddle with the bodies of the mentally unwell, again with seemingly little concern for the lifelong harms that can arise. Future generations will surely look with as much horror upon our era’s pumping of gender-confused kids with biology-altering drugs as we do upon yesteryear’s violent intrusion into the grey matter of people who were only ill.
The challenge for trans activists and their noisy allies in the elites is how to make parents bow down to such a clearly harmful and unhinged ideology. And this is where the sick weaponisation of suicide comes in. This is why parents, including Musk, are warned that their kid ‘might commit suicide’ – because such a dire threat is a surefire way of making mums and dads assent to the transition of their kids, to the bodily lobotomisation of their sons and daughters.
The repulsive weaponisation of death was much in evidence in the UK last week when Labour confirmed it would ban puberty blockers. The Guardian’s Owen Jones said ‘there is already evidence of a huge surge in the deaths of young people since their healthcare was trashed’. Activist barrister Jolyon Maugham grimly conjured up an image of ‘a future of bereaved parents tipping ashes outside No10’. So horrified was the Labour government by this talk of a suicidal wave in response to its banning of puberty blockers that it commissioned a review to see how true it is. It turns out it’s not true at all. It is ‘insensitive, distressing and dangerous’, the study’s author said, to say that restrictions on puberty blockers will ‘kill trans children’.
It’s hard to think of anything more unethical, or indeed outright wicked, than the cynical dangling of the spectre of suicide to try to cajole people into conforming to an ideological worldview; than this marshalling of a fantasy army of dead children in an effort to shame and silence one’s critics. Not content with experimenting on kids, trans activists and their allies also darkly promise piles of dead kids unless everyone in society, from government ministers to everyday mums and dads, goes along with their lunacy. So, good on Musk for speaking out. For exposing these sinister methods of trans ideologues. For discussing the grief felt by parents of ‘trans kids’. For being honest. Let’s now normalise every parent of a ‘trans kid’ having the right to express their distress, without persecution, and certainly without prosecution.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and blogs regularly on Spiked where this article was sourced.
5 comments:
Spot on article. Something is very wrong that politicians are allowing the social contagion of trans ideology (where the victims are often autistic and have other medical conditions) and making policy around these children victims to be trans by the state in terms of their upbringing and removing the rights of parents. This is going to be the 'abuse of state care' in the future as the child victims grow older and realise that they were programmed into state cult conditioning going on in schools.
Excellent piece. Extremely well written - objective and yet appealing to the emotions and fears of parents (and rightly so).
One little comment I'd like to make:
>"No ‘reliable clinician’ would ever say there’s a link between keeping a kid off puberty blockers and a higher risk of suicide, says Peterson".
Clinical practitioners are not trained statistical analysts. As soon as we get beyond single cases we are on about statistical populations and analyses based on that esoteric branch of maths, inferential statistics. We hear a lot of opinions of clinicians about such matters, but they are almost always speaking as laymen. Reporters need to speak more to qualified quantitative analysts about population-level issues.
Don't talk of much more advanced we are now compared with the bad old past when people were tried for witchcraft. This transgenderism is not just last centuries lobotomies but quackery and superstition peculiar to practices of eg the so called Dark Ages.
Now pseudo science and fraudulent statistics are being used to support all sorts of cults.
It is completely offensive that this article was written from the father's point of view. I don't know many fathers that would weaponize their children to support a political agenda. They usually love them too much to do that.
Elon Musk has completely destroyed any privacy his son (and now daughter) had and it is all about him. Where is the voice of his child - the repect for what was obviously a very difficult time for that child?
Anon 11:44, would it have been OK with you if this article had been written from a mother's point of view?
The writer is tackling a political agenda - that of subverting our youth - he is not setting his own.
We have had plenty of child victims telling us of their ordeal. Their parents too are victims and can/should share their experiences with us - that includes fathers.
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