Elon Musk can’t stop tweeting anti-trans content.
Over the weekend, Musk, who owns the huge social media platform, praised England’s new restrictions on puberty blockers for trans youth, promoted tweets with disparaging imagery about trans women in sports and peddled harmful rhetoric about gender-affirming care for minors.
On Friday, England’s National Health Services announced it would limit the use of puberty blockers to children who are engaged in clinic trials. Musk signaled his approval by tweeting, “UK now understands. America will too.”
Then, on Sunday, Musk commented on a tweet that raised concerns about a California bill that would consider a parent’s affirmation of a child’s gender identity in custody proceedings.
“State-mandated sterilization of children is utterly contemptible! Shame on those who push it,” Musk wrote.
This false rhetoric around sterilization has been peddled by right-wing politicians and officials in the past and has been leveraged in arguments calling for the restriction of care for trans minors. Last year, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton misrepresented this care in an opinion in which he argued that gender-affirming care for minors constitutes child abuse.
Hormone blockers do not cause infertility. They are the most common treatments for trans youth and are used temporarily to delay the development of secondary sex characteristics during puberty.
After a right-wing commentator criticized a photo of the White House with a Pride flag draped over the balcony over the weekend, Musk commented that “their priorities are clear,” joining a chorus of conservatives freaking out over President Joe Biden’s support of Pride month.
The transphobic rhetoric is a somewhat recent development for Musk, who was until recently the CEO of Twitter and is the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. In 2018, he boasted that his car developer Tesla scored 100/100 on LGBTQ equality on the Human Rights Campaign’s corporate equality survey.
But the billionaire has since made it clear that he’s aligning himself with anti-trans pundits who are particularly concerned with ― and hellbent on disrupting ― the private decisions trans children make around affirming their gender identity. He has given us a “particularly unrestrained window into his personal politics” since Pride Month began, HuffPost reporter Sara Boboltz wrote earlier in June.
Michel Euler/Associated Press
Over the last two weeks, Musk has praised a plethora of transphobic tweets, including one with a rainbow swastika, promoted a harmful documentary by right-wing commentator Matt Walsh and said on the platform that he would lobby to “criminalize” medical providers who care for trans children.
The proliferation of Musk’s anti-trans content on Twitter comes on the heels of the company’s removal of protections for trans users.
In April, Twitter quietly rolled back its policy against “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.” It has also allowed content with hateful messaging to remain on the site with only warning labels, which in the past would be removed by moderators.
Critics have said the removal of these policies have made the site less safe for trans users.
