Elon Musk Says He Was “Essentially Tricked” Into Transitioning His Son

Pressure to medically transition children and the availability of gender surgeries for minors continue in the U.S. despite pediatric gender transition being all but banned in much of Europe.

Jordan Peterson Interviews Elon Musk (Source: Screenshot)

In a recent interview with Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk said he was “essentially tricked” into putting his son on puberty blockers.

Musk is among the many who say parents are coerced into medically transitioning their children by being given frightening—and false—information about their children’s risk of suicide, and little to no information about sterilization or other negative effects of medical transition.

As detransitioner Chloe Cole’s lawsuit contends, her terrified and desperate parents, like others across the country, were asked, would you rather have a dead daughter or a live [trans] son?

But decades of research indicates that most children’s gender dysphoria desists (goes away). And the majority turn out to be gay. This raises additional concerns that treatment euphemistically referred to as “gender-affirming” can be sexual-orientation-rejecting. The real question, says gay activist and writer Ben Appel, is would you rather have a trans child or a gay one? He fears that in many cases, the answer is the former.

Meanwhile, in several American school districts, parents have found confusing material about gender and even pornographic content being offered to their middle-school age (and younger) children.

Parents whose children are “gender non-conforming” (don’t conform to stereotypes) or “gender dysphoric” (experience distress about a sense of incongruence between their biological sex and felt gender identity) have to navigate a confusing array of cultural and legal expectations while trying to address their children’s psychological struggles. 

In a 2022 NPR interview, trans-identified Assistant Secretary for Health Dr. Rachel Levine claimed that “among medical professionals—pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, etc.,” there is “no argument” about “the value and the importance of gender-affirming care.”

That statement was false even when it was made, but it is even less accurate now.

At the time of that interview, not only was there a paucity of empirical evidence that pediatric “gender-affirming care” (a set of psychosocial and medical interventions that involve unquestioningly accepting whatever gender identity the child claims) is beneficial, there was widespread disagreementabout how to best treat children who suffer from gender dysphoria.

Since then, additional evidence reveals that, medical treatments for young people who identify as transgender are often destructive to their health and well-being. And that's without even considering surgical interventions. Despite what parents are often told, drugs known as “puberty blockers” are neither reversible nor safe when used to halt a normally occurring puberty.

Carole Hooven, who taught at Harvard for 20 years and served as co-director of the undergraduate program in human evolutionary biology, explains that hormonal changes in puberty influence more than just secondary sex characteristics. They also affect the brain and behavior. While the effects on the nervous system aren’t well understood, disrupting that system in order to pass through a critical period of development without experiencing it is risky both physiologically and psychologically.

“Our reproductive hormones like estrogen and testosterone work during critical developmental stages—like puberty—to coordinate our behavior with our changing bodies,” says Hooven, who is the author of T: the Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us. “We just don’t have much evidence to support the idea that there are no significant cognitive, emotional, or physical effects of blocking those changes from occurring at the time they would have naturally.”

Adding cross-sex hormones after early-stage puberty blocking not only prevents the normal development of secondary sex characteristics (which is the goal), but in most cases, also disrupts or even destroys the ability to experience sexual pleasure as an adult. And a child who medically transitions with hormones after blocking his or her puberty becomes sterile.

In 2023, such pediatric medical interventions became illegal in Texas. But according to whistleblower Dr. Ethan Haim, Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) secretly performed “transgender medical interventions” on children, “including the use of implantable puberty blockers” even after it had publicly announced that it no longer would.

Another whistleblower, nurse Vanessa Sivadge, alleged that when doctors at TCH provided male children with female hormones (and the reverse), they falsified patients’ biological sex on hospital paperwork. For example, they pretended that female children were male, and then falsely diagnosed them as having abnormally low testosterone levels (for males) to hide the true nature of the hormone treatments. 

There was also no discussion of risks or long-term effects, according to Sivadge.

Several European countries have all but terminated the practice of medically transitioning minors, and there are increasing concerns that even “social transition” (“a process that typically involves changing a child’s pronouns, first name, hairstyle, and clothing”) may be unwise. It can set children on a path to medical transition—and it can also affect their peers.

According to trans-identified psychologist Erica Anderson, adolescents are “notoriously susceptible to peer influence.” Peers affect social and identity development and clearly influence gender-identity formation, says Anderson, who has been in practice for over 40 years. Yet, we don’t know exactly what makes some young people more susceptible than others to social contagion, how much of an accelerant social media is, what effect a “gender-affirming” culture has, or how to prevent adolescents who have mental health challenges from, as Dr. Anderson worries, “seizing upon an identity that to them may explain their distress.”

The answer to the question of whether, as soon as children say they are trans, everyone should “treat them as such, and expedite gender-affirming medical support” like puberty-blockers, Anderson says, is a resounding “no.” Things have “gone too far.”

Musk didn't have the benefit of Anderson's advice. But eventually, he came to recognize that “almost every child goes through some kind of identity crisis,” as he told Peterson. “It’s just part of growing up.” 

“We have an age of consent for a reason,” Musk said. “You’re taking kids who are obviously often far below age of consent... It’s very possible for adults to manipulate children who are having a natural identity crisis into believing that they are the wrong gender...” 

After Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law a bill that prohibits schools from requiring teachers to disclose to parents “any information related to a pupil’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression” without the child's permission, Musk moved his companies out of California. That was the “final straw.” ♦

_{For the latest information about gender ideology, transition controversies, legal issues, psychotherapeutic approaches, and international protocols for gender medicine, see work by Leor Sapir, Colin Wright, Lisa Selin Davis, Corinna Cohn, Abigail Shrier, Genspect, and Therapy First. To hear heterodox views from people who have undergone medical transition, there's the Heterodorx Podcast and Buck Angel's video podcast.}

More to come…