An Open Letter to Elon Musk (and All Fathers of Transgender Girls)

Dear Mr. Musk,

I learned recently that you have a transgender daughter. I’m sorry to say that I learned this because of the public nature of your disagreement over her gender identity. I had known of your vehement opposition to trans and non-binary identities. But I had not known that the issue is personal for you.

I am a father of a transgender daughter too. I know what it’s like to have your “son” say emphatically that you have been misidentifying her and that, in fact, she is your daughter. It is very upsetting and disorienting. It takes a lot to accommodate a transgender child in a world of cisgender identities. For me, the most difficult part of her transitioning was social: new name, new pronouns, a daughter not a son. It was hard to do in practical terms: it is not easy to stop using the deadname and pronouns that you have spent years building your relationship with. But it is also just hard to accept. I kept hoping that my daughter was going through a phase and that she would change her mind. This was not because I was hostile to her identity, but because it felt as though I was losing my son.

Beyond the practical and personal obstacles to recognizing her transition, there was also a great deal of fear. The fear persists no matter how accepting a father is. To imagine your child as transgender in this world is terrifying because the world is so resistant to transgender people. I knew she would be vulnerable in countless ways.

And then there is the deteriorating political prospects for her safety and acceptance. Since the time she came out, things have only gotten worse. Now there are 25 states that have passed laws that make it illegal for her to get the care she relies on. The platform of one of the major political parties endorses naked hatred of transgender people. She has spoken openly about her fears for the future. Will she be able to see her doctor? Will she have to stop her medication? Will her parents be arrested? Will she be put in foster care? Should we leave the country?

But you do not seem to have these fears about your daughter. You are afraid of something else.

You said recently that your son is “dead.” You blamed this on something called a “woke mind virus,” presumably the very idea of transgender identity. If only “he” had not caught this virus, your “son” would still be alive. While you condemn the medical interventions sometimes involved in gender transition, it appears that you are unwilling to even accommodate your child’s social transition.

There was a time in my life when I would have likely responded to my daughter’s gender with the same hostility as you did to yours. I grew up in the same world as you and all the others who are now out in force to frighten trans children. In this world, men are supposed to be straight and tough and have certain body types. This “toughness” is defined in relation to the traits women are supposed to have—sensitivity, empathy, other-regarding care. Tough men are not womanly. We police boys and men to avoid femininity by using misogyny and homophobia. My childhood was filled with constant accusations of masculine failure. One wrong step and the world would pounce. I actively participated in this policing, always vigilantly looking for transgressions of manhood.

Ironically, to live as a “tough” man is to live in constant terror. We learn to police our inner lives. The constant vigilance leads us to keep a secret storeroom full of forbidden thoughts, feelings, desires, and relationships. We live in terrible fear that the wrong people will find out about these aspects of ourselves. To strive to be a real man requires that we reject vital aspects of ourselves. The beautiful possibilities of expressing delicate emotions, finding connectivity, appreciating interdependence, and achieving healthy intimacy are cut off and rendered shameful. Try as much as you like but these needs cannot be eliminated. They will continue to assert themselves and, because of the shame they produce, be expressed in unhealthy and damaging ways. “Real” men are a lot like closeted gay men. They are haunted by ghosts they cannot admit exist.

One thing that I have learned about parenting is that we parents are at our worst when our children do things that we are afraid of in ourselves. Our intolerances of our children are intolerances of our selves. If you have anxieties about your diet, body image, wealth, or likeability, these will likely be the source of damaging efforts to control your child’s behavior. If you are fearful of not being good at sports, you are in danger of pushing your child too hard to be athletic and to have abusive reactions to their interests that conflict with your goals for them.

For most men, having a son is perilous. They will project their fears of being unmanly onto their boys. As they do with themselves, they will surveil their sons and attack any signs of femininity. Don’t cry too much. Don’t show too much interest in dolls or clothes. Don’t avoid physical competitions. Don’t empathized with others. Don’t throw, or run, or talk “like a girl.”

Your daughter said that you were hostile to her femininity early on, before she came out. Perhaps you too learned that for a boy to choose feminine ways is to take a great risk. For men who embrace traditional masculinity, these boys are choosing vice, immorality, a bad path.

But one of the worst things a “boy” can do in this context is to proclaim not only their passion for feminine things, but that they are in fact not a boy at all but a girl. This is a complete rejection of the masculinity and its hierarchical binary. In a world where men are supposed to be tough, and tough means not womanly, transgender girls and women are a deeply unsettling gender transgression. Of course, all trans- and non-binary people face oppression and injustice. But it is striking how central the fear of transgender girls and women is in the current anti-trans rhetoric. The imagined threats are “men” in women’s sports, “men” in women’s bathrooms, and drag shows. To this movement, transgender women are the ultimate boogeyman. This makes sense given the misogynistic way we construct masculinity.

If you are one of these men I am talking about, then when you call your daughter “dead” and have no relationship with her, she is just one more of the ghosts that haunt you, a real thing that you need and secretly love but don’t have the ability to acknowledge or value. For men like this, the rejection of their transgender daughters is a rejection of themselves. Perhaps the pain you have caused your daughter is a manifestation of the pain you have caused yourself. The solution, then, is acceptance not only of your daughter but ultimately of your own full, complex nature.

I no longer see my daughter’s transition as the loss of a son. Listening to her and getting to know her experience has shown me that there is a perfect continuity in the person I knew before her transition and after. All aspects of our relationship before her transition remain. There is just a reorientation of the gender of the person I knew before the transition. My daughter is my child that I roughhoused with and took to get boy’s haircuts and caught trout with. We still share all of that. What threatened to come between us was not her gender identity. It was my assumption that her body simplistically determined her gender and my resistance to reimagining the connection. This is what made things so difficult. It caused her to struggle to find herself and assert it to the world. And it continues to make it hard for the world to accept her.

When my daughter came out to her fifth-grade class, they did not react negatively. In fact, they applauded her and told her she was brave. Unfortunately, that positivity did not make it to middle school. By the time sixth grade was over, she had been completely ostracized. She would go through the entire day without anyone saying a word in friendship to her. Her mental health collapsed.

If a mind virus survives on the positive reinforcement of others, your story of the origin of my daughter’s identity does not add up. She was the first student in her school’s history to come out as trans. She was unfamiliar with anyone who was trans or encouraging of it. And her declaration of trans identity cost her dearly among her peers. Your daughter too has clearly suffered due to her gender.

What do you think sustains this “virus”? What enables our daughters to remain so steadfastly girls through all of this?

I do not know what a mind virus is but if there is one here perhaps it is what keeps you from loving your daughter. And yourself.