Thoughts on the tragedy of Elon Musk's son

If I have a rule for writers on this website which is close to an unbreakable one, it’s this: We don’t talk about the families of public figures. This is purely and simply because the families of public figures don’t choose to become public figures themselves and are entitled to the same level of indifference to their lives as that enjoyed by Mr and Mrs Smith of Rialto who have no connection to anybody prominent.

It is with some hesitation, then, that I venture into the area of Elon Musk’s public revelations about his son. I do so only because Mr. Musk has publicly chosen to make his son an issue, saying the following in an interview with Jordan Peterson:

As regular readers will know, and in order to put my own cards firmly on the table for less regular readers, my views on the broad issue of transgenderism are broadly in line with those of Mr. Musk. The idea that somebody can simply switch their genders and become a woman when they were born a man – or vice versa – has no basis in science, logic, natural law, or biochemistry. It seems to me to be entirely self-evident – and confirmed by a mounting number of tragic cases – that this is a path of self-deception, laden with emotional and physical pain, and a lifetime of self-inflicted misery.

It further seems to me that in a case like this, some of the boundless compassion that our friends on the left have for those suffering with gender dysphoria could and should be extended to Mr. Musk: He really has “lost” a son, as he sees it, and likely feels condemned to watch a child he fathered living a life of struggle and torment.

The left will extend no such compassion, of course: Mr. Musk’s feelings will be dismissed as a kind of brutal filicide – the killing of one’s own child – in which his former son is the only person to have their feelings considered. This dismissal will be aided by Musk’s language – his description of his son as “dead” – is going to instinctively make liberals and progressives empathise further with the child and less with the father on the grounds of “imagine what it’s like hearing your dad say that about you”.

Now, it should be said here that Musk seemed to be referring to “deadnaming” rather than actual death – and that the point he was making is that it’s called “deadnaming” because a transgender person considers their former, natural born identity as a person of their original gender, to be “dead” legally and spiritually. They consider themselves often to be “reborn” as a new person of the opposite sex. That can be explained, but there’s an old adage about explaining and losing that comes to mind.

In any case, despite this caveat, I confess that though I agree with Musk on the underlying issue, that his language still troubles me, also. His son is not dead, either physically or legally or spiritually. Even if you concede that Musk was referring to “deadnaming”, that point still stands because to concede it is to concede in essence that the transgender miracle of rebirth is a real thing. But more to the point, most people will not hear it that way – they will just hear “my son is dead”.

That kind of language from a parent, while a child still lives, is more usually heard from the parents of mass killers or brutal rapists, rather than the parents of a child who has attempted the impossible task of changing their sex.

It is relevant here, I think, that Dr. Peterson is a psychologist. The whole interview, from setting to tone to the kind of questions asked, has more of the feel of a therapy session than a public interview. Mr. Musk’s feelings are doubtless shared by a great many more parents in his position than just him, but those feelings are rarely broadcast so openly for the world to hear. The central question is whether by broadcasting those feelings so openly, Mr. Musk has done a service or a disservice to the rest of us.

A disservice, I reluctantly think, is the answer.

It’s a tough call because there’s an argument that he’s done the world a real service, too: We simply do not hear, in the mainstream media, stories of the pain and suffering that cases like this one inflict on families. If one were determined to present him in the most favourable light, then one could write pretty honestly that his interview was a display of pain and rawness and vulnerability which will resonate with many, and draws real attention to what many more families than his are going through.

But I still don’t think that the good here outweighs the bad.

The first reason I think so is the obvious one, mentioned above: Mr. Musk’s son is not dead. One may arrive at various theories as to why Mr. Musk’s son took the course he did, up to and including Mr. Musk’s assertion that his son was the victim of a callous medical industry eager to sell cross-sex hormones to vulnerable young people, but one cannot honestly describe his son as “dead”. Further, I take the old-fashioned view that parents have a duty for the welfare of their children even when those children make mistakes. Mr. Musk’s son is still his son. He still has a duty of care to his child. There simply is no environment I can imagine where going before tens of millions of people to declare your own child dead is in the best interests of that child. Doing so is not advice that any of us, I think, would give to a friend who we cared about in the same position as Mr. Musk is in. It seems to me that Mr. Musk’s words stand a much greater chance of hurting his own child than helping him. Whatever about culture wars and the imperative to challenge “the woke mind virus”, those imperatives cannot come before the duty of parents to their own children.

Second, and related, I’m increasingly of the view that the “woke mind virus” has spawned an equally virulent and damaging mutation: The anti-woke mind virus. As Senator Michael McDowell has noted, whether we like it or not a growing number of young people are declaring themselves to be gender-questioning or transgender. Like most of my regular readers, I regard this as an unfolding child abuse disaster which will, in time, acquire the infamy of the Catholic Church at its worst. That said, it seems to me that the objective of those of us who believe it to be so should be to try and talk those young people back into the realm of sanity, rather than alienating them with a sense that we hate them. The anti-woke mind virus, it seems to me, makes us all forget that it is compassion for children in this position that makes us oppose the care they seek – not loathing for them. Casting such people into rhetorical non-existence, it seems to me, is more likely to drive them into the arms of the hormone salesmen than it is to make them reconsider.

Third, while I can empathise strongly with Mr. Musk’s evidently painful sense of loss, and while I share his commitment to free speech, I also think that free speech comes with responsibilities and duties, especially when you have the kind of platform that he has. If I had a penny for each tweet yesterday from a clout-chasing moron on American twitter saying “they killed Elon’s son!!” then I could take the next month or so off. “They” did not kill Elon’s son. In fact, as Elon himself makes clear, he himself signed the consent papers, and now says he was tricked.

Mr. Musk is entirely correct, I think, to highlight the pitfalls of the life choice that his son has made. He is entirely within his rights to point out that families feel huge pressure to “go along” with these treatments. He is also entirely to be empathised with in his feelings of loss. In fact, it would be helpful if more parents in his shoes would speak up.

But language does matter. Both to Elon Musk’s son, who is very much alive, and to everybody else who is affected by this debate. Really though, I blame Peterson, who should have had the common decency to cut that line from the interview before he aired it. He did a disservice to his interviewee, I think, and to the rest of us.