The Twitter owner has defended state bans on the surgeries and medications for minors
Billionaire Twitter owner Elon Musk has defended state bans on sex-change surgeries and medications for minors by arguing that people who provide such treatment should be sent to prison.
“Any parent or doctor who sterilizes a child before they are a consenting adult should go to prison for life,” Musk tweeted on Friday. He made his comment in response to an MSNBC columnist’s claim that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was destroying his state with “intolerant and authoritarian-minded” policies. Florida last month imposed a ban on sex-change surgeries, hormone therapies and puberty blockers for minors.
Musk is no stranger to controversy, having stirred the culture-war pot on issues ranging from pronouns to vaccine mandates to anti-white racism. He also knows how to strike a nerve. His tweet about sex-change procedures for minors garnered around 9 million views in seven hours.
Florida is among more than a dozen Republican-controlled states that have imposed restrictions on sex-change procedures for children. Critics of such legislation have decried the bans as attacks on transgender youth. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre lamented last week that more than 50% of US transgender children in the US live in states where their access to “gender-affirming health care” has been lost or is under threat.
“This is a dangerous, a dangerous attack on the rights of parents to make the best health care decisions for their own kids,” Jean-Pierre told reporters in a press briefing. She added, “LGBTQI+ kids are resilient. They are fierce, they fight back, they’re not going anywhere. And we have their back. This administration has their back.”
Musk has previously spoken out against sex-change procedures for minors, saying children are often “fed propaganda by adults” and should not be given such treatments. “Every child goes through an identity crisis before their personality/identity crystallizes. Therefore, we shouldn’t allow severe, irreversible surgery or sterilizing drugs that they may regret until at least age 18.”
