Tesla CEO Elon Musk is under fire for helping propagate disinformation about trans people.
Musk recently engaged with a tweet full of fallacies about trangender healthcare from the cleverly named American Accountability Foundation, a Republican dark-money operation that masquerades as a non-profit dedicated to holding the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden "accountable."
The AAF's tweet attempted to spark outrage by pointing out children as young as four have visited a transgender health clinic at a South Carolina medical school, insinuating the medical school was trying to influence children into becoming trans.
Musk, in a reply to the tweet, did AAF's dirty work for it by asking if four year olds were receiving gender-affirming hormone treatments—a thing that does not happen and is not mentioned anywhere in the document the AAF's tweet cites.
The AAF's tweet cites a report from the Medical University of South Carolina about the increasing rate of children seeking transgender healthcare at its pediatric endocrinology clinic.
The AAF highlighted a statistic in the report which said the average age of the first visit to its pediatric transgender clinic over the past 10 years was 13.6 years, with the age of all patients ranging from 4 to 18.
The report goes on to state:
"In the future, hopefully more patients and at younger ages will be referred to affirming providers so that medical options such as pubertal suppression and mental health support can be discussed with patients and families."
This is pretty innocuous stuff.
The stated statistics are about the first visit to the clinic—likely a consultation meeting to discuss potential healthcare options, not an appointment for hormone treatments.
And the clinic hopes "more patients and at younger ages" will come to its clinic for guidance to avoid adverse health outcomes.
But of course, the AAF's goal was to insinuate something untoward has been going on at the Medical University of South Carolina. They didn't come right out and say four-year-olds are receiving hormone treatments though.
Musk said that for them.
In response to Musk's question "Is it really true that four-year-olds are receiving hormone treatment?"
No, it isn't true, because four year olds don't even have active puberty hormones, as we all should have learned in school. And nothing in AAF's tweet even suggested such treatments were happening.
But now many of Musk's legions of acolytes who parrot his every word think so.
And in a time when a horrifying spate of far-right attacks on children's hospitals all over the country have resulted in incidents like Boston Children's Hospital receiving bomb threats for providing transgender healthcare, that's the definition of dangerous.
You'd think the richest man in the world would be smarter than this, or at least able to Google it, especially a man like Musk who himself has an 18-year-old transgender daughter.
You'd apparently be wrong.
Musk's tweet immediately had the impact it was likely intended to have—whipping right-wingers into a tizzy about preschoolers being given hormone replacement therapy, a thing which, to reiterate, isn't done.
And it left many more informed people furious.
Musk has made many transphobic comments in the past.
He is apparently so dedicated to his transphobic views he's willing to sacrifice his relationship with his own child over it. His trans daughter petitioned the Los Angeles County Superior Court in June for a new name and birth certificate because she no longer wants to be associated with her father in any way.
