Elon Musk // Daniel Oberhaus // Creative Commons

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Elon Musk continues to fuel political violence against his political enemies—this time, transgender people and their doctors.

On Wednesday, the world’s first trillionaire tweeted out a response to a recording of an anti-trans activist’s speech about “gender ideology,” the conspiracy myth born from the Catholic Church which paints LGBTQ people as a nefarious cabal responsible for the world’s social and moral rot. In the video, the activist rails against providers of gender-affirming care (GAC). Elon Musk replied: “Those who mutilate children should receive a death sentence.”

A screenshot from Twitter. James Esses posted a video with the text: “Reclaiming the Hippocratic Oath: The Case for Criminalisation of ‘Sex Reassignment Surgery’. My full speech from this year’s Heterodox Conference.” Elon Musk replied: “Those who mutilate children should receive a death sentence.”

Referring to gender-affirming care—including hormone replacement therapy and puberty blockers—as “mutilation” is a common rhetorical ploy by the anti-trans movement. Musk has been a longtime proponent of such scare tactics, which became even more obsessive after it became widely reported that his daughter, Vivian Wilson, is transgender. (Now an adult, she lives independently of him—and has emphatically renounced his politics.)

That same day, Musk also boosted a post by that same activist of an interview with a United Kingdom news station regarding the resumption of puberty blocker trials for trans kids. Many of the same voices posturing about the need for “more evidence” for providing gender-affirming care have taken to fighting even allowing it in this highly controlled study.

“Terrible,” Musk remarked, in what may have been one of his more restrained posts on the matter.

However, Musk’s posts are not just inflammatory rhetoric. They have real-life consequences. Earlier this summer, Musk stoked a racist pogrom against Black and brown immigrants in Northern Ireland. Vigilantes went door-to-door hunting for migrants. Dozens of people saw their homes burnt down.

This is the same technocrat who has poured $100 million into a last-minute ad blitz to turn trans people into even more of a flashpoint in the 2026 midterms. That vitriol has been potent in ads on both sides of the aisle denouncing “gender ideology” in schools, which does not exist, or “sex change surgeries” for children.

Radicalized anti-trans masses have taken notice. On Musk’s tweet on giving GAC providers the death sentence, one commenter said, “You could literally pay or fund a campaign to multiple senators congress and judges who would implement that.”

“Question is,” the commenter continued, “why don’t you[?]”

The user that started this week’s anti-trans witch hunt is activist James Esses, who is the United Kingdom-based founder of Just Therapy, which peddles what many would describe as palatable-sounding conversion therapy practices for trans kids.

Musk may very well have been using hyperbole in his posts, but violence against gender-affirming care providers is no joke. There have been escalating legal as well as extrajudicial attacks on doctors who offer GAC to youth.

The FTC has launched probes into health care organizations like the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) as well as the Endocrine Society. Dozens of hospitals have also fallen prey to these politicized attacks and subpoenas. In some instances, even when health care institutions would not stop providing care, individual doctors were still harassed and threatened into doing so. Many doctors saw their place of work flooded with an influx of death threats.It is unsurprising, then, to learn that last year, the Williams Institute found that over a quarter of GAC providers said they had received online harassment and nearly a third said their place of work had been threatened. And that’s only in the states without invasive restrictions on gender-affirming care.

Still, doctors said, they opted to become more visible in their work, not less.

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