Fighting Words

Elon Musk: Supervillain or Superhero?

This is what I got when I asked AI to make me an Elon comic book villain

Elon Musk’s son is dead. The woke mind virus killed him. And now he will destroy the woke mind virus.

Sounds like a fantastic comic book movie plot—and still could be!—but it’s actually what Musk told Jordan Peterson in an interview released yesterday. His son’s given name, Xavier, is a “dead name,” because his son is dead. At least to him. Vivian Jenna Wilson, as Musk’s transitioned child goes by, is alive—and estranged to him. Which, sadly, is the case in many families where a parent questions the medicating of gender identity, and the child rejects the parent.

There’s actually some good information in the interview, for parents of transitioned children. Musk explains how the threat of his child’s suicide “tricked” him into supporting transition. The way advocacy groups, clinicians, and activists wield the suicide threat is incredibly irresponsible, and deeply inaccurate. The Dutch’s experiment—to transition young people before puberty—arose from concern over the suicides of adult trans women—in part, it was thought, because they couldn’t pass as biological women. Clinicians made a huge leap in assuming that getting to gender dysphoric people younger, so that they could successfully pass as the opposite sex, would make eventual adulthood easier. They also made a huge leap in assuming that children with dysphoria were the same cohort as the adult trans women.

We still don’t have any good, long-term research to prove that hypothesis true or false, especially not in this country where we didn’t evaluate children in the same way as the Dutch did.

Back to the interview: Musk falsely calls puberty blockers sterilization drugs. Not exactly. It’s understood that going directly from puberty blockers to cross-sex hormones, without going through one’s natal puberty but a simulacra of the opposite sex’s puberty, will likely cause infertility. And certainly anyone who removes their gonads can’t have their own kids.

But that’s enough of the fact-checking, because what interests me is Elon’s mission to “destroy the woke mind virus” and the role Twitter/X, which he paid $44 billion to acquire, plays in that. Maybe we know why he named it X, for one thing.

Many in my royal blue circle saw Musk’s acquisition as the end of truth-telling on Twitter, a sign of its decline. But for those in the gender rabbit hole, it was the chance to speak more freely—to tell not just our truths but some objective truths. Twitter had banned many people for such offenses as writing that “men aren’t women” or that biological sex is real. (Here’s a great thread that kept track of these events.) Suddenly, post-Musk, some of those accounts reappeared. Suddenly, we could use sex-based pronouns if we wanted to, without someone accusing us of hate speech or disappearing our accounts.

What I appreciate about the current state of Twitter/X is that I still don’t have to use sex-based pronouns. I am not a pronoun purist. I think it’s vitally important to be faithful to the reality of biological sex in law and policy, but I leave wiggle room—not just for people I know personally but for people whom I perceive to be she or he. I do what causes me the least amount of cognitive dissonance for my own sanity, while always knowing the reality of sex. I also regularly and passionately critique the media for shifting style guides so that writers must adhere to a belief system in order to report on this subject. Forcing reporters to use gender identity-based pronouns or to avoid words like detransitioner embeds a worldview into the writing, getting in the way of the job of informing people. (I’m working on a style guide now—please leave any suggestions in the comments!)

At the same time, I’m trying to use the language of the people I want to reach. I’m trying to speak to people who have adopted this belief system in a way that they can hear me. It’s a strategy, to not always use sex-based language. And I’m glad that I’m allowed to continue this strategy on X, because I think nuance weakens the mind virus more than anything else. (Maybe you disagree? Please tell me.)

It wasn’t that long ago that we could call drag queens she, or that I could address a bunch of my female friends as guys without it destabilizing anyone or anything. (I’ve argued that we can and should still use guys.) We had room to transcend the literal, and could leave a little bit of space between what we said and what we meant.

I haven’t quite figured why we now need to be completely literal all the time—even while an entire generation uses the word “literal” to mean “figurative”—but it seems to be some kind of purity test. But I could never pass any purity test, and certainly not this language-based one. Hence, getting criticized for not using sex-based language sometimes and for using it other times.

The other reason I think we’re clinging so fiercely to words and fighting over them is that social media creates clans without clear boundaries and rules. One slip up, one ideological schism, and you’re out, piled on and shunned as if you were never welcome. It’s such a fundamentally destabilizing way to live, with no chance of rehabilitation, no room for complexity, for negotiation, for reentry into the tribe you thought was yours. No chance of forgiveness, that divine gift bequeathed by a civilized mind.

That’s all part of the woke mind virus, too. It’s not just a set of beliefs about a gendered soul—around which we’ve created a vast institutional structure. It’s a painfully narrow vision of right and wrong, good and bad, black and white. It’s a demand for moral purity, or else.

I don’t believe that children are born innocent. I believe we’re born with the instinct for survival, and for humans that means belonging to a clan, whatever it takes. I think that the rules and boundaries of clans profoundly changed among post-nomadic humans, once we developed agriculture and settled into cities, once we saw multiple clans overlapping in shared territory. I don’t believe we’ve ever completely figured that out. But social media has presented us with the worst case scenario of overlapping clans in a shared space. It reminds me of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, where I saw Jews and Copts and plenty of other sects screaming at each other in what is supposedly a sacred site.

We can continue to scream at each other this way, or we could try to create new clans, built around shared goals, a shared reality, and a commitment to nuance. I realize that “woke mind virus” doesn’t sound particularly nuanced, but I agree with Musk that this narrow belief system must be combatted. I want this to happen so that liberals and Democrats can be functional again. I want this to happen so that kids like mine can be left alone and allowed to be a little bit different. I want this to happen so that we can focus on big ticket issues like affordable housing and healthcare. And I want this to happen because I want to feel like I’m welcome in the place I’ve called home for most of the last 30 years.

I welcome your suggestions, critiques, ideas below.