Grimes Says She Asked Elon Musk Why He's So Obsessed With Trans People

"I was like, 'I want to dissect why you’re so stressed about this.'"

Matters of the Heart

Electronic music artist, generative AI enthusiast and on-off Elon Musk partner Claire "Grimes" Boucher seems to want to build bridges between the tech billionaire and the trans community he's alienated so relentlesslly.

In a wide-ranging new interview with Wired, Boucher mentioned that she'd had a "big, long conversation" with her kids' dad about "the trans thing," and came to a similar conclusion as she made when publicly replying to one of his transphobic tweets: that bigotry isn't in his "heart."

"I was like, 'I want to dissect why you’re so stressed about this,'" the artist, who also goes by the letter c, told the magazine. "Getting to the heart of what Elon says helps me get to the heart of what other people’s issues are, because it’s this über guy situation."

As a side note: the "über guy" in question didn't appear to begin being regularly hateful towards and about trans people online until news broke that Boucher was dating Chelsea Manning, the transfeminine surveillance whistleblower-turned-DJ . A few months later, one of his many children came out as trans and cut ties with him.

Fertile Ground

Grimes said that the conversation eventually revealed that Musk believes, somewhat erroneously, that "every way that you transition can cause fertility issues" — an unsurprising sticking point for the billionaire, who has fathered at least 10 children and is reportedly obsessed with fertility.

In fact, Boucher was able to play on Musk's fertility thing to make her argument against his bigoted commentary.

"I was like, OK, you don’t hate trans people, you hate woke culture. I get that it can be annoying, and you have concerns about the fertility thing," she explained. "So let’s figure it out, because there’s a lot of fertility tech that could be innovated that would help trans people have kids, which would be great and would solve a lot of problems."

Joke Mind Virus

Fertility tech is, of course, another of Musk's special interests. At least five of his 10 kids were conceived via in-vitro fertilization, including Exa Dark Sideræl, his second child with Grimes who was born to a surrogate.

"He’s just on Twitter, and he’s unhappy with woke people, and the arguments happened," the Canadian-born singer told Wired.

Describing Musk as being "just on Twitter" is kind of like describing Robert Oppenheimer as just having been "just" in the New Mexico desert during the Trinity Test, and he seems to be more than a little "unhappy" with wokeness. But those are, of course, semantic arguments not unlike the ones Musk seems to keep getting into.

When the interviewer asked Grimes whether she's a "woke person," she replied that she probably isn't, but also doesn't "know what the term means."

The entire exchange is fascinating. And, like with most things Grimes, Musk is just a weird sidequest in the strange journey that is her life and career. It's certainly worth a read — but the Musk detour, as in her life, is one of the cringeiest parts.

More on Grimes: Grimes Calls First Official Song Made by AI-Cloning Her Voice a "Masterpiece"