Many transgender people have family members, like Elon Musk, who lean politically to the right.

TThis week, the world’s richest man launched an inappropriate public attack on his estranged transgender daughter.

In an interview published Monday, Elon Musk – an electric car entrepreneur, U.S. government rocket contractor and outright owner of the social media service X (formerly Twitter) – said his daughter Vivian Wilson’s transition was the trigger for his recent rightward turn.

“Actually, my son is dead,” Musk said. “Killed by the awakened mind virus. So I vowed to destroy that virus after that. And we’re making progress.”

Wilson quickly fired back on rival social network Threads and in an interview with NBC News, claiming Musk “blatantly lied” about her childhood and bullied her for expressing her femininity. (The Independent Musk has reached out for comment, via his companies.)

For many transgender people, these events were sad but not surprising. Indeed, many have seen their family members adopt increasingly extreme and anti-transgender political positions since coming out.

Here are the stories of three trans and non-binary people who spoke to The Independent about their experiences. Their identities and some other details have been blurred, and their responses have been edited for length and clarity.

In most cases, the change in political orientation of their family members did not come out of nowhere; some already had an interest in anti-trans politics. But all of the people we interviewed said that the situation had worsened since they began their transition.

“Felicity”, 26, United Kingdom

I started transitioning about a year and a half or two years ago, and I came out to my parents about eight months ago. I think there are a lot of people in my family who are going through anti-trans radicalization.

After I came out, my mother took a sabbatical due to stress and claims to have had panic attacks. My sister sent me a very nasty message blaming me for my mother’s mental state. Our relationship hasn’t been the same since.

I did not expect the level of vitriol I received.

Felicity

My father began obsessively reading anti-trans literature, to the point that one of the leaders of their church (who is not at all tolerant of trans people) told him he needed to slow down. The only people in my family who have reacted in a way that I would consider “normal” are my brother and his wife.

I think this radicalisation started before I came out. I come from a fairly conservative Christian background. But I didn’t expect to receive this much vitriol. I think it was exacerbated by my coming out. Before, there might have been an occasional joke about attack helicopters or comments about something a commentator was saying. Afterwards, it got very personal and sometimes quite nasty.

What makes it harder is that despite all of this, since coming out, I’m generally much more positive and much happier. I found a job that I really love and that allowed me to go back to college… I’m in a very supportive relationship with a woman I love. I have meaningful friendships.

But they can’t appreciate any of this. My mother even said she hoped this “lie” would collapse. My happiness matters much less than the state of my soul.

“Noah”, late 1920s, southern England

I started my social transition in 2017, and medically in 2018. My parents found out in 2017 when I told them my decision. At first, they were very against it, but my father eventually changed his mind and as long as I am happy, safe, well fed, have money, etc., he is fine. My mother was negative at first, then she changed her mind, but now “she feels responsible for my situation”.

As soon as I came out, she refused to call me by my name or use my pronouns because she didn’t want me to “influence” her daughter in my “lifestyle” (despite the fact that she herself has a gay older daughter).

Noah

I think my mother’s partner is the one leading her down the wrong path. He is extremely right-wing, believes in the “great replacement”, uses racial slurs without any regret and believes that all women should have three children by the age of 35 (white women with white men only, etc.); that people on welfare and immigrants should be sterilized to get welfare.

Before my mother was with him, she was okay with LGBT+ people. She still believes that someone close to us is gay for attention (despite being married and having two kids with her wife), but she’s been pushed more and more down that path since she left my father…

One of my cousins ​​is a nurse and she was very comfortable with the LGBT+ community when she was growing up. She has a child who is 13 years younger than me. As soon as I came out, she refused to call me by my name or use my pronouns because she didn’t want me to influence her daughter in my “lifestyle” (despite the fact that she herself has a gay older daughter). So I didn’t have any contact with her anymore.

It’s hard sometimes because I would like to still have contact with my cousin and her child. They lived with us for the first five months of her (her child’s) life, and I was very involved… but she dug her grave and now she has to rest in it.

‘Satya’, late 1920s, English Midlands

I can’t pinpoint exactly when my mom started talking about TERF. It was probably around 2018, 2019. She would go on Twitter and read about a kid in the US who had transitioned and then won a sports game – the usual scary stories. At first, for her, it was a very interesting philosophical debate…

I came out as pansexual when I was in my early teens, and she was totally okay with it. She was never homophobic or anything. I remember a few years ago we were at an event where Chelsea Manning was speaking, and someone was using the wrong pronouns. She stepped in and corrected him very aggressively, saying, “No, that’s not okay.” So it’s interesting how that ended up.

The weird thing is that in searching for “what is all this weird stuff my mom tells?” I ended up exploring my own gender identity. (I realized that) I have no sense of my own gender, I don’t feel anything about it, and when you dig into it, the whole gender thing is a social construct…

The arguments would then become more heated and, to be honest, more violent. She would get upset about things. There were times when she would throw me out or become physically aggressive. At one point she practically forced me to go to a conference of Woman’s Place UK (a group that campaigns (excluding transgender women from women’s restrooms, locker rooms, and other single-sex spaces). She came away like, “Wow, that was pretty crazy. It wasn’t the ‘I’m just looking for an honest debate’ I thought it was.”

Then we went into lockdown and the tension of living in the house together became quite high. I started making plans to move, and once I moved, I was going to come out… in 2021, I wrote a letter to my parents, explaining that I was coming out, what it meant, and what I wanted to be called. I also wrote it by hand. I don’t usually have great handwriting, but I made a special effort.

It’s hard to say exactly how much my coming out directly impacted her political life. It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. But her mental health seemed to be deteriorating. I would try to make an effort to see her and talk to her, and we would argue. She would be very hot and cold, and a bit of a stalker. She would come to my town randomly, or act really weird when I was home. And I heard from my family that she had been attending gender-critical events. It wasn’t new, but it seemed to be escalating. Before, she would generally try to respect pronouns when she talked about me or my sister’s (trans) friends, and that started to change.

It all came to a head when my grandmother passed away. I went to the funeral with my (trans) boyfriend. I was going to stay with my dad and we had decided that my mom wasn’t going to be there. And then she came along… she started misgendering my boyfriend, misgendering me. At first she stopped me from leaving. Eventually I stormed out.

For a while, I completely cut her off. Then I started hearing from my dad that she was part of Posie Parker’s entourage (aka Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, a British anti-trans activist who often accused of courting the far right). She had been traveling in Scotland and Ireland when Parker was doing various things (there)… Last I heard, she had a falling out with that crowd.

It was a classic “my trans kid won’t talk to me, so now I’m going deeper down the rabbit hole” kind of situation. Before that, it was an intellectual exercise. She was definitely going down that path, but I doubt she would have been touring the country with Posie Parker if I hadn’t come out, had we had a fight, and had we stopped talking.

Of course, there were a lot of personal issues outside of my gender identity, but that was the last straw. It opened my eyes to the fact that there were a lot of other things wrong with our relationship. But I think she felt like it was all about gender. That I had become “trans,” and that I had stopped loving my mother.