After Elon Musk declared his daughter dead because she was trans, I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop. It has. Vivian Wilson has delivered an interview that is pure fire.
“I think he was under the assumption that I wasn’t going to say anything and I would just let this go unchallenged,” Wilson said in a phone interview. “Which I’m not going to do, because if you’re going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions, I’m not just gonna let that slide.”
Wilson said that, for as long as she could remember, Musk hasn’t been a supportive father. She said he was rarely present in her life, leaving her and her siblings to be cared for by their mother or by nannies even though Musk had joint custody, and she said Musk berated her when he was present.
“He was cold,” she said. “He’s very quick to anger. He is uncaring and narcissistic.”
Wilson said that, when she was a child, Musk would harass her for exhibiting feminine traits and pressure her to appear more masculine, including by pushing her to deepen her voice as early as elementary school.
“I was in fourth grade. We went on this road trip that I didn’t know was actually just an advertisement for one of the cars — I don’t remember which one — and he was constantly yelling at me viciously because my voice was too high,” she said. “It was cruel.”
I know how some of that felt — my father was a high school football jock, and he did accuse me of being weak and effeminate because I took after my mother, being bookish and quiet, but he grew as a person as he got older and he was also caring and supportive. Musk was a monster. He is still monstrous. He doubled down on Twitter.
And in a post on X, Musk said Monday that Wilson was “born gay and slightly autistic” and that, at age 4, she fit certain gay stereotypes, such as loving musicals and using the exclamation “fabulous!” to describe certain clothing. Wilson told NBC News that the anecdotes aren’t true, though she said she did act stereotypically feminine in other ways as a child.
Wilson also addressed Musk’s recent comments in a series of posts Thursday on the social media app Threads.
“He doesn’t know what I was like as a child because he quite simply wasn’t there,” she wrote. “And in the little time that he was I was relentlessly harassed for my femininity and queerness.”
“I’ve been reduced to a happy little stereotype,” she continued. “I think that says alot about how he views queer people and children in general.”
Jesus Christ. Using three-syllable words and liking Rodgers and Hammerstein are not diagnostic of sexual orientation. How shallow and inane can he get? And he used that as an excuse to abuse his hown child!
Fortunately, Vivian had one supportive parent.
Wilson said she came out twice in life: once as gay in eighth grade and a second time as transgender when she was 16. She said that she doesn’t recall Musk’s response the first time and that she wasn’t present when Musk heard from others that she was transgender, because by then the pandemic had started and she was living full-time with her mother.
“She’s very supportive. I love her a lot,” Wilson said of her mom.
Maybe, instead of working to cure the non-existent “woke mind virus,” Musk should refocus his efforts on treating the “bad dad virus.” He could be the first patient!
None of this is exactly a surprise considering Vivian legally separated herself from Musk a couple of years ago upon turning 18, but she seems to be a very level-headed young adult.
Musk has a far more serious condition than that.
He has the “terrible person virus”.
Guy is a failed human being who has only got one thing going for him. Tens of billions of dollars.
Two years ago, I had never heard of Musk and had no opinion one way or another.
Everything he has said and done since then screams terrible person, stay away and watch out.
We will see more of him over the years and it will always be the same thing. Musk says and does something horrible to someone or all of us.
He is a lot like Donald Trump. Incapable of being a benign human being.
Hearing about all the people who grew up with terrible parents really makes me appreciate my own good parents. Anyone out there, find whatever support you can. Everyone deserves supporting figures as they grow up.
One thing stands out here.
Vivian Wilson is a very brave person.
The power imbalance between one of the richest people in the world Elon Musk, and his 20 year old Trans daughter is immense.
And Musk is the creepy weird guy who can and will retaliate against his own children for who they are instead of what Musk wanted them to be.
He’s already started doing that.
Musk bullied her in the past and he is bullying her right now.
Yet again, another example of GOP family values.
raven@2–
For a while I used to feel that whatever else I disliked about Musk, he had at least pushed the development of electric vehicles as a market share. Now, though, with his increasingly unhinged descent into alt-right lunacy, his efforts to derail important public transport projects just so he can sell more Teslas, and the mounting evidence that he isn’t just an awful person, he’s an abusive partner and parent, that little skerrick of respect is long gone.
The part that’s really going to hurt Musk:
I was adopted when I was just three months old, and I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know that, so my parents must have told me as soon as I was old enough to understand the concepts.
I’ll be forever grateful that I was raised by supportive parents and in a family where ethics was neither all about me nor all about my tribe.
The fact Musk was worried about Vivian not being masculine enough when she was a 5 year old is disturbing. I’m guessing his own parents did the same thing to him.
“It was cruel” really sums it up for me. Not only is Elon cruel, he is selfish, mean, and ignorant. To exploit your children while otherwise ignoring them, and even demeaning and abusing them, is unforgivable. He is one of the prominent people in our world that I would rather not hear anything about ever again. You can guess some of the others.
I’d say my opinion of the man has lowered… but it was at rock bottom already.
@10 cartomancer wrote: ‘I’d say my opinion of the man has lowered’
I reply: While I don’t disagree with your sentiment, I still maintain he is not a man (human), I think the elongated muskrat should be classified legally as a venomous invertebrate life form.
As per cartomancer, this doesn’t change my opinion of Musk. It does, however, improve my opinion of Wilson.
I can’t imagine how horrible it would be for your own father to make such terrible public statements about his child. Claiming she is slightly autistic is just as valid as claiming that children shouldn’t have high pitched voices.
I’m happy to know that Vivian has a wonderful, loving, supportive mother, and has decided to live her best life by publicly rejecting his claims and name.
Absent an actual diagnosis to this effect, calling one’s own kid “slightly autistic” is basically an abuser’s lazy callous brush-off: “he/she ain’t right in the head.” Or worse, “he/she is a weirdo/antisocial/nonconformist nerd/geek/brainiac.”
It’s also a pretty obvious excuse to treat said kid like crap and not actually do anything specific for them: “he/she is messed up, what can you do?”
Team Vivian!
@raging bee, #14:
Absofuckingtively. It is that.
But also there is a right-wing anti-health care narrative out there right now that autistic kids and adults are regularly falsely diagnosed as trans simply because they are different. This is an important and repeated point of the Hilary Cass Report to the UK’s NHS.
Now there is no actual evidence that autistic kids or adults are more likely to be misdiagnosed, there’s only a correlation where trans people are more likely to fall on the A spectrum and A spectrum folks are more likely to be trans when compared to the general populace.
As I know I should have to repeat here, though obviously I am going to, correlation doesn’t equal causation, and even if it did, to prove causation of false diagnosis, you’d have to prove that those autistic kids were more likely to be falsely diagnosed, not just diagnosed. This evidence does not exist. Indeed what we know so far is that there is no reason to think that A-spectrum folks who come out as trans (with or without a formal diagnosis of gender dysphoria) are falsely diagnosed or detransition at a rate any different from non-A spectrum folks.
So with that aside complete just so that people are clear that the right wing is full of shit on this issue, it is still true that anti-trans activists repeatedly assert this as if it was true. Musk knows this as he has repeated the myth himself.
So when he says that Vivian Wilson grew up “slightly autistic” what he’s actually saying is that Vivian’s gender is explained better by my wacky theories of misdiagnosis than by anything else.
Which is in turn an effort to prop up the A-spectrum misdiagnosis myth, which in turn is used by people like the entire fucking UK government to kill trans health care coverage, and even private pay trans health care.
He’s crafting a false narrative, using Wilson involuntarily, in order to strip rights and medical care from millions of people around the glove.
So, yes, he’s an abuser who doesn’t give a fuck about Wilson, but there’s this other piece as well, where he’s appropriating Vivian’s experiences before lying about them just enough to change them into something useful to him in his efforts to stomp down on not just Wilson, but on every trans person who lives anywhere ruled by a government the internet might reach — which is, of course, all governments.
It’s spectacularly evil that he would not just go on X to harm her, but then grab her story away from her to use as a weapon to harm others.
And I’m still pissed at his attempted redefinition of “deadname”.
I’ll add this to what Crip Dyke just said.
Elon Musk himself has claimed to be “slightly autistic” whatever that means. He has said that he has Asperger’s which is on the autistic spectrum.
Given that, I don’t think he can then turn around and claim that being “slightly austistic” leads to being Trans or a misdiagnosis of being Trans.
Being on the A spectrum doesn’t explain a whole lot of things.
It doesn’t even explain at all why Elon Musk is a terrible person.
Huge numbers of people on the A spectrum are neither Trans nor monsters.
They are all individuals as much as everyone else and are also far more than just…”on the spectrum.”
@Crip Dyke #17,
Just speaking from my armchair here, but that second part is not remotely surprising to me. There’s a reasonable number of studies showing that children on the spectrum tend to be more non-conformist and less susceptible to peer influence. Why wouldn’t that non-conformism apply to gender identities as well?
Prax: To put it a little more precisely, those who, for whatever reason, “tend to be more non-conformist and less susceptible to peer influence” are not necessarily thereby more likely to BE trans; but they are more likely to be able and willing to come out and admit it, if they find they are.
I never said it didn’t. But being trans isn’t “gender non-conformism”. One can be a non-conformist with respect to gender without being trans. Raging Bee already made the relevant point: social opprobrium of trans people is less likely to stop an A-spectrum trans person from coming out publicly. But that has nothing to do with whether or not an A-spectrum person is trans to begin with.
Contrary to the “social contagion” theory, positive peer pressure and social approval of trans people would be LESS likely to influence A-spectrum folks if this were all about non-trans people saying that they’re trans for the social benefits.
In other words, if they thought about it for 5 minutes, the people using “vulnerable A-spectrum kids coerced into being trans by peer pressure” would realize that the existence of a positive correlation is evidence against their pet theory, not for it.
Indeed it is. And if Musk realized it, he’d quit provoking her and lie low for a while.
You go, girl.
BB @22, that’s fucking obvious.
Basically, the power imbalance between one of the richest people in the world Elon Musk, and basically anyone else is also immense.
(That is, his daughter is not special in that regard, nor remarkable on that basis)
@8 There was a story about his father impregnating one of Elon’s stepsisters, so I’d say he’s a chip off the old block. If there’s one thing a narcissist hates, it’s another narcissist hogging the limelight.
Good for Vivian for standing up for herself. I feel sorry she has to share chromosomes with that idiot.
@Raging Bee,
Yes, but I think they’re also more likely to find out that they’re trans in the first place. A lot of gender-diverse folks go through an “egg” stage where their conscious gender identity is still cis & binary; it lasted thirty years for me. Back then, I thought I had to be a man (who was just really bad at being one), because nothing else was feasible given my body and choice of partners. That reasoning was heavily shaped by social influences, and I imagine that people who were less susceptible to such influences might have reached the “aha, maybe I’m just not a man in the first place!” moment much more quickly than I did.
@Crip Dyke,
But being trans falls under that umbrella, and I think that if you’re more non-conformist about gender in general, you’re probably more comfortable acknowledging your trans status to yourself and others.
Well, again, there’s the egg thing. There’s a step between being trans and coming out publicly, which is the personal realization that you are trans. Social opprobrium may prevent that step as well; most people would prefer not to think of themselves as sick, perverted, confused or abnormal.
FWIW, there may also be a correlation between being on the A-spectrum and simply being trans. There have been a number of studies, such as this one and those cited here, which have found positive correlations between autism diagnoses or autism-associated traits on the one hand, and gender diversity (being trans, non-binary or genderqueer) or discomfort/dysphoria on the other hand. But of course most of the measures of gender diversity/discomfort/dysphoria are still self-reported, so this could be driven entirely by A-spectrum folks’ greater willingness to be publicly open about that stuff.
That’s what I’m saying. Modern society is obviously still transphobic; it’s just less so than it was in the past. There are almost no social benefits to coming out as trans, and lots of benefits to staying in the closet. So if A-spectrum folks are more likely to say they’re trans, that’s probably because trans folks who are not A-spectrum are more likely to stay in the closet.
I agree completely.
On threads, Vivian has more dirt to dish out on her toxic father; in particular, that he is being equally toxic to other of his children:
I just came up with a belated pun: Musk is Vivian Wilson’s dadname.
Xanthë: I’ve heard absolutely NOTHING of this dirty custody fight in the media. I don’t follow any TV outlet with any regularity, so I may have missed such coverage — but I’m sure I would have heard someone screaming their heads off about such news if it ever aired on prime-time, like Johnny Depp’s (far less relevant) public legal fight with his ex.
Seriously, are all our “news” outlets quietly conspiring to keep quiet about this? We know they wouldn’t be quiet if Joe and Jill Biden went at it like this.
Raging Bee, thanks for your comment. To paraphrase a recent remark by one of those folks you mention, I’ve an opinion, but I don’t have many facts.
Since it doesn’t seem likely that more facts are developing, I hope you don’t mind if I share my opinion. It hardly seems as though either Elon or Grimes are sensible parents, when you consider that they named one of their children ‘X Æ A-12’ (but the birth registry baulked at the number twelve, so they instead substituted the Roman numerals xii). They both live in artificial social bubbles of the multi-billionaire and celebrity class where they are very likely insulated from contact with anyone displaying anything remotely approaching common sense and are instead surrounded by an audience of toadying flatterers and sycophants, where publicity and marketing is everything. Musk certainly does not want to advertise his delinquency as a neglectful absent parent, and Grimes certainly would not want for the custody battle to be blown out over the media like the Amber Heard fight was, considering the size of Musk’s bully pulpit.
I’m sure there are some niches of the mainstream media, those that concentrate on the scandal sheets and celebrity gossip, where stories are being collected and occasionally might even see publication if the publishers feel confident they would not find themselves in receipt of a lawsuit (though their response might be along the lines of Arkell v. Pressdram*). I doubt the scandal would progress to mainstream media news unless something really dramatic happened; say Elon goes fully bonkers and dangles one of the kids out the window of a multi-storey building, or figuratively tries to nuke Grimes from orbit.
The well-known publication Private Eye received a bogus libel claim from a solicitor on behalf of an aggrieved client (Arkell) who ended with the line “His attitude to damages will be governed by the nature of your reply.” The classic response is worth quoting in full: