Elon Musk's Wicked Parental Rejection

Should my writing ever become famous, as unlikely as that sounds, future literature students will study a selection of my essays that deal with queer and gay issues and ask, “Was he gay?” Then other students and maybe teachers will reply, “Well, no. He was a womanizer (due to my unusually complete list of female companions), and he never really got it about feminism.” To prove my point, let me do the same about another writer and a public figure.

If you take Tennessee Williams's work as a whole, a theme you see in nearly everything he wrote reflects a lost desire for familial reconciliation. The issue of parental rejection and the desire for parental approval is in every play at some level. It’s never more evident than in “The Glass Menagerie” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” The struggle between Brick, Big Daddy, and Maggie Cat is the work of Tennessee Williams, boiled down to its essence.

I generally try not to out people who didn’t out themselves. Sexuality is a very complex thing, and I believe nobody can classify a person correctly but themselves. With Williams, that becomes tricky. Even after Stonewall, Williams never said, “I am gay.” He did, however, write essays about how his advanced age (a year younger than I am now) made him no longer attractive to young men, and that loss of attractiveness made him less virile. William’s concern about his age tortured him.

Even as the issues of sexuality he struggled with his entire life were exploding on the social scene in the post-Gore Vidal, Post James Baldwin, and Stonewall Riots world, Williams no longer felt like he belonged in either camp.

In his will, he left money to his sister, Rose, who was his inspiration for the character of Laura Wingfield in “The Glass Menagerie,” a young lover, a veteran of the Vietnam Conflict, and an aspiring writer who never really wrote much. Whatever issues Williams had about sexuality and family connections, he never resolved them.

Few life conditions include and imply a risk of familial rejection, and in particular, parental abandonment, and yet, among people in the LGBTQ+ community, it’s common.

I’ve seen and written about conditions where it happened and conditions where it didn’t. By far, the outcomes are better when it doesn’t happen. A strong person can survive familial rejection and parental abandonment, but they have to be strong—otherwise, it can cause severe problems.

Issues of self-image and self-evaluation seem so ephemeral and impossible to measure that they almost seem like something you should ignore. “Shake it off, son. You got a ball game to play.” And yet, it’s so important. Just last year, four thirteen-year-old girls on the Mississippi Gulf Coast bullied one of their classmates until she hung herself. Now, the entire community is embroiled in lawsuits and criminal proceedings, all because the gauge on someone’s child’s self-worth fell to zero.

Earlier this year, Elon Musk gave a series of interviews where he said his “son” was dead because “he” petitioned the court to change “his” name and gender legally. Like a Batman villain, Musk swore revenge on the “Woke Mind Virus” that stole his child and said he purchased Twitter as part of the campaign to destroy wokeness.

That sounds like I’m exaggerating and using hyperbole to try and attract readers. I almost wish it were so. The video of him saying these things and worse is available all over the internet.

I try not to comment on anyone’s actions without trying to put myself in their position. With Elon Musk, it’s not a huge stretch. A white man born in Mississippi in the sixties has some pretty clear parallels with a white man born in South Africa in the seventies.

If I were Elon Musk, I would have handled the same situation this way instead of what he said.

“My Estranged wife tells me that my son, who was raised in her custody, wishes to legally change his name to Vivian, remove Musk from his name, and legally change his gender to female.

I’m fifty-three years old. I have degrees in physics and economics, and nothing in my life has come close to preparing me for this revelation. I don’t know what it means to be transgender. I don’t know why one person becomes transgender and another doesn’t.

Everyone has dreams for their children. Whatever dreams I had for my son are dead because my son is now my daughter, and I have to adjust my thinking about what their life will be based on the reality of their situation.

I would never choose to transition from one gender to another, but this is my child’s life, not mine. I may feel like my son died, but in Vivian’s eyes, I never really had a son at all.

My duty as a parent is to love and support my child in their life’s journey, even if they travel down paths I don’t approve of or even understand.

My life is not my child’s life. I am a public person. My child, Vivian, is not. I would ask that the press allow my family some privacy as we process this development in Vivian’s life.”

I intentionally left some things in my imaginary statement that a transgender person might take exception to. That’s my point. As a parent, you’re not going to get this right. Not in 2024. All of these are things that were kept secret for most of man’s history. We don’t yet know how to handle it, and for a guy born in South Africa in the seventies, this is gonna be confusing as hell.

Any form of parenting is confusing as hell. About the best you can do is confirm you love your children as often as you can and hope like hell you help make them strong enough to recover from whatever ways you screw them up.

No one ever becomes LGBTQ+ to punish a parent they’re mad at, although it might feel like that sometimes. I mean, there were times when you were mad at your folks. Would you have done it? Was there ever a teacher or book that had so much sway over your life that you were willing to change your sexuality?

Elon Musk’s daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, has taken to Threads, a platform competing with Musk’s Twitter, to give her side of the story. Now, this whole painful family drama is laid out like a dissected frog for the entire world to see and for jerks like me to opine about.

I can’t pretend like I’m not angry with Musk about how he’s handled this. I’ve dealt with too many people who suffered parental abandonment over their sexuality. I’ve seen them struggle, become strong, and overcome it. I’ve seen them struggle, grow weak, and have it overcome them. I’ve seen them die. I’ve seen them live.

The only path forward for Vivian Jenna Wilson is to overcome her father and his burgeoning minions, who will hate her just because he does. Millions of broken people will say she’s broken and unworthy because her troubled father says so. I can’t prevent that.

What I can do is say that I love Vivian. I’m not her father, but I can love her like one. Parental reconciliation sometimes doesn’t happen as you think it should, but other avenues will open if you embrace them. Musk and his internet incel mob might work to make this more painful, but there are millions of more worthy people willing to love and accept Vivian for what she is.