Elon Musk and his GOP acolytes are using the proliferation of Tesla protests to double down on their transphobia.
As my colleague Sam van Pykeren recently reported, Americans across the country have been showing their dissatisfaction with the unelected billionaire’s dismantling of the federal government by protesting at Tesla dealerships—including one last weekend in Palo Alto, the Silicon Valley city that Musk previously called home. While many of the protesters have been peaceful, there have been some instances of violence and vandalizing Tesla vehicles, including in both Las Vegas and Kansas City earlier this week, where unidentified people lit Teslas on fire, according to law enforcement. In a statement provided to Mother Jones on Thursday, the FBI’s national office said the agency is working with local law enforcement to investigate “a number of incidents in which Tesla charging stations and dealerships were damaged.”
In the meantime, Musk appears to be doing his own investigation into the incidents at Tesla facilities—and by “investigation,” I mean boosting transphobia by blaming trans people for the events and reposting dubious data suggesting they are more violent than cisgender people.
On Thursday morning, Musk reposted a post from an X user who goes by the name Insurrectionist Barbie. “Of course 3 out of 4 of the people who have been arrested for vandalizing Teslas are transgender or nonbinary,” the user wrote, adding an eye roll emoji.
The user appeared to be parroting a story from the right-wing Daily Caller website, which identifies three people who have been arrested—Lucy Grace Nelson, Erin White, and Adam Matthew Lansky—who appear, based on media reports or their social media accounts, to be gender non-conforming. (It’s unclear, though, how Nelson, White, and Lansky self-identify.) According to a DOJ spokesperson, Lansky and Nelson are two of three people—along with Daniel Brendan Kurt Clarke-Pounder—who are facing charges related to allegedly vandalizing Tesla property. The charges carry a minimum of five years and a maximum of 20 years in prison, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Thursday.
Unsurprisingly, Musk ran with the fact that some of the people charged with the Tesla vandalism may be gender non-conforming, suggesting that it pointed to a larger phenomenon of violence perpetrated by trans people. “What are the statistics on trans violence?” Musk asked in his repost of Insurrectionist Barbie’s post. Ever the dilettante, Musk quickly answered his own question—with more of the baseless transphobia he has long spewed on his platform. “The probability of a trans person being violent appears to be vastly higher than non-trans,” Musk falsely claimed. “Hormone injections cause extreme emotional volatility. That is simply a fact.”
Actually, it’s not. Here are some actual facts: Trans people are more than four times as likely as cis people to be victims of violent crime, according to research conducted by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law. The recent efforts of Musk and his right-wing cronies—including Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) and Libs of TikTok—to suggest that there’s an epidemic of violence being perpetrated by trans people are not new; the same assertions circulated after trans people were alleged to have been behind a mass shooting at a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee in 2023 and a shooting at a Houston church last year—but there was no evidence to support those claims then, either, PolitiFact repeatedly reported. And while hormones naturally affect the emotions of trans and cis folks alike, gender-affirming hormone replacement therapy has been found to reduce depression and psychological distress.
As a spokesperson for GLAAD put it: “Promoting false narratives about transgender people, including baselessly characterizing them as violent, has become an all too common tactic in anti-trans fearmongering.”
Musk’s fearmongering did not stop with his repost of Insurrectionist Barbie, though. Just a few minutes after that Thursday morning post, he shared a graphic from a user by the name of Hanjo Girke that purports to show a higher proportion of trans women in British prisons incarcerated due to sex crimes than cis men or women. “Wow, trans violence is EXTREMELY FAR above normal levels!!” Musk wrote in the post, which he promptly pinned to the top of his X account.
What Musk missed, though, is that the data presented in that graphic is deeply skewed. The graphic claims that there are 48,000 trans women in the UK, and that 92 trans women are incarcerated for sex offenses. But the source of the latter figure is unclear, and previous data shared by the Ministry of Justice said the overall figure of trans people incarcerated for sex crimes was lower—about 60 total, which did not distinguish between trans men and trans women. Plus, the U.K. government’s own data shows that there are likely more than 48,000 trans women in the U.K. In the most recent census, which was the first to ask about gender identity, an additional 118,000 people reported that their gender identity is not aligned with their sex assigned at birth, but did not elaborate further; another 30,000 identified as nonbinary; 18,000 wrote in a different gender identity; and 2.9 million people skipped the question entirely. (The UK’s Ministry of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the figures.)
All of which is to say, the proportion of trans women incarcerated due to sex crimes compared is likely far lower than the X post suggests, because the number of trans women in the UK is likely far greater than the number listed. And as a 2020 report from the Bent Bars Project, an organization that supports incarcerated LGBTQ people in England and Northern Ireland, notes, trans people are generally undercounted in the prison system—which the UK government itself has noted—making claims that a higher proportion of trans people are incarcerated for sex offenses than cis people dubious. And as the report notes, marginalized communities are often policed, charged, and convicted for crimes at rates higher than other groups, meaning that the data is inherently skewed—even if a higher proportion of trans people were incarcerated for sex crimes, it wouldn’t tell us that they’re inherently more likely than cis people to commit them.
Trans rights advocates slammed Musk’s latest posts as disinformation designed to distract from his unpopularity and his suffering business interests.
“Rather than cosplaying as a medical professional and spreading misinformation on the internet, perhaps Elon Musk should focus on his rapidly deteriorating business portfolio and the growing American rage at his hostile takeover of government,” Brandon Wolf, national press secretary at Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement provided to Mother Jones.
“Elon Musk is the wealthiest man in the world, but spends his days scapegoating a small, vulnerable community,” Caius Willingham, senior policy analyst at Advocates for Trans Equality, added. “That is because Musk wants Americans to be focused on the one percent of trans people instead of the one percent of the wealthiest people in the world so that he and his unelected cronies can profit from the dismantling of the U.S. Government.”
Musk’s latest transphobic tirade came on the same day that his estranged trans daughter, Vivian Jenna Wilson, was profiled in Teen Vogue—and she’s not giving her dad, or his unhinged X posts, any brain space. “He’s a pathetic man-child,” she told the magazine.
Henry Carnell contributed reporting.
