South Africa-born Elon Musk, a news fixture in the U.S. because of his wealth and his closeness to President Trump, has publicly shared information about his numerous children with different mothers, often brought into the world through in vitro fertilization (IVF) and/or surrogacy.[1][2] One of those children, Vivian Jenna Wilson, now 21, gained a modest public profile of her own advocating for trans rights and denouncing Musk’s parenting and character, while Musk too has spoken of her in derogatory terms.[3] In 2025, Ms. Wilson wrote that her parents used sex-selective IVF, intending for her to be a boy:
“My assigned sex at birth was a commodity that was bought and paid for. So when I was feminine as a child and then turned out to be transgender, I was going against the product that was sold. That expectation of masculinity that I had to rebel against all my life was a monetary transaction. A monetary transaction. A MONETARY TRANSACTION.”[4]
I propose that we read this troubling family story as a moral “case.”[5] We do not have to verify all of Wilson’s claims to reflect on the ways her account highlights limitations and opportunities in cultural and Catholic understandings of anthropology, creation, and gender.[6]
The Catholic magisterium teaches that both IVF, fertility technologies that unite sperm and egg outside the human body, and transgender identity, experiencing one’s gender as different than one’s sex assigned at birth, are wrong. Amoris Laetitia even links the two as “ideologies that attempt to sunder what are inseparable aspects of reality” (AL 56). But Wilson’s story reveals discrepancies in the magisterial positions that cannot be dismissed as both Musk and Wilson being wrong for different reasons. Current magisterial teaching on gender shares an ideological basis with Musk’s view that gender can be a thing to be “bought and paid for.” This undermines the anthropology infusing Catholic views on both gender and IVF, which insists that humans are precious selves, not objects, and that personhood is a divine gift. But Catholic anthropology holds the seeds of a perspective that could acknowledge the reality of transgender experience and the human dignity of trans people, while retaining the most theologically and anthropologically rich aspects of current teaching on gender.
For magisterial teaching, gender correlates with the sexed body so predictably and thoroughly that experiencing a misalignment between gender and sex assigned at birth must be the result of an “ideology” rather than an encounter with “reality” (AL 56). Being biologically determined, one’s gender is “a gift from God” to be “accepted with gratitude.” The alternative, “desiring a personal self-determination … amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God” (Dignitas Infinita 57). Gender is a question of simple inputs and outputs: “a person’s sex is a structural determinant of male or female identity.”[7] So far, magisterial teaching reasons similarly to the way Musk reasoned (on Wilson’s account) when he saw her feminine behavior and identity as aberrant coming from someone known to have grown from an XY embryo.
Magisterial teaching opposes IVF because it separates the creation of new life from sex acts within marriage; often destroys embryonic human life; and unacceptably introduces human control into the generation of life, which is God’s alone to give (Donum Vitae II, B.4-5, I.5). Consistent with magisterial teaching that sex discrimination is contrary to God’s intent, the tradition denounces the use of fertility technology to select a child’s sex as “contrary to the personal dignity of the human being and his or her integrity and identity” (Donum Vitae I.6). Technologies that insert human control into the process of generating new life run the risk of reducing the child to an object, even treating them as property:
“The one conceived …. cannot be desired or conceived as the product of an intervention of medical or biological techniques…. No one may subject the coming of a child into the world to conditions of technical efficiency which are to be evaluated according to standards of control and dominion …. The child is not an object to which one has a right, nor can he [sic] be considered as an object of ownership” (Donum Vitae 4c, 2.8).
A parent who uses sex-selective IVF to attempt to control their child’s gender may fairly be described as subjecting the child to standards of control and dominion which treat the child as an object, not as a person. On Musk’s account (according to Wilson), gender aligns with sex and can be controlled with complete certainty by the action of medical technicians. It can be “bought and paid for.” On the Catholic account, gender aligns with sex and should be received as a gift from God. Just as Catholic teaching on IVF reminds us that human persons cannot be treated as objects, something so foundational to the human person as our gender is God’s gift and must not be seen as under our control.
Unfortunately, the Catholic account’s power to rebut the “bought and paid for” perspective is undermined by the fact that both views rest on the premise that “gender = gametes.” It is unnecessarily difficult to sustain the Catholic insistence that gender is a gift from God, not of human determination, when our tradition locates gender’s entire genesis in physical, genetic characteristics that scientists can now easily manipulate. By tying gender inevitably to physical sex, current Catholic teaching not only limits divine creativity by foreclosing the possibility of God gifting us gender in other ways, but inadvertently ratifies the perspective that gender is a sort of “thing” that can be “bought and paid for.” After all, scientists can predetermine a child’s gametes, even if the Catholic tradition urges them not to. By listening to the experience of trans people, the Catholic tradition can retain many of the most theologically and anthropologically valuable aspects of its current view of gender, including the insistence that gender is a divine gift and not under human control, while moving away from the “gender = gametes” view that makes it possible to see gender as a commodity.
Magisterial teaching on trans experience creates an adversary known as “gender ideology,” which is frequently claimed to “cancel out human difference” (e.g. Laudato Si’, 155). In contrast with this straw opponent, Catholic teaching sees gender as an opportunity to encounter our human difference as a gift and experience the truth of our embodiment, our bodies and spirits making up one whole self.[8] These rich affordances of the magisterial understanding of gender are views many trans people share.[9] Indeed, the lived experience of many trans people presumes these perspectives. It would be difficult not to see gender as a source of rich human difference when one occupies a gender group that represents less than one percent of the population. Physical transition, a common but not universal aspect of trans experience, itself presumes both gender difference and embodiment. If one did not feel that maleness and femaleness were different, and situated in the body, there would be no felt need to pursue physical transition when one’s gender and one’s body do not align. Maxwell Kuzma, for example, describes his physical transition this way: “I experienced a profound embodiment. I felt as if I had “come home” to my human body.”[10] Furthermore, many trans people experience their gender profoundly as “given,” not at all self-initiated, like Magdalene Visaggio, who says “At no point did I ask for this. I fought it with every ounce of strength I have.”[11] The Catholic insights that we receive our gender as a gift from God and do not create it ourselves; that gender is a matter of embodiment; and that gender orients us in relationship toward others who are the same and different from us, are certainly capacious enough to recognize transgender experience as authentic.
Catholics venerate many saints whose sense of the meaning of their own sexed body diverged from family or cultural expectation. Joan of Arc and Joseph of Schönau were called to open defiance of the gender roles assigned to their bodies. The choice for celibacy in the face of parental or cultural pressure toward marriage, common to many saints who otherwise followed expected gender roles, is itself a determination of the meaning of their own sexed bodies against patriarchal “assignment.” When Catholics recognize the celibacy of Casimir or Catherine of Siena as discernment of vocation, rather than willful self-creation, we already have the groundwork for seeing that the meaning of our sexed bodies can be both a gift from God and something we discern in ways that are not always what those around us expect. When we recognize that those who regard gender as a thing to be “bought and paid for” are wrong, we can see those who would compel meaning on the sexed bodies of others as the ones who err by “making themselves God.” We can understand that God in full divine freedom may gift us with our gender in more ways than one, where gametes are part, but not the end, of the story.
Works Cited
Barringer, Sarah. “Christianity Has Long Revered Saints Who Would Be Called ‘Transgender’ Today.” The Conversation, May 27, 2025. http://theconversation.com/christianity-has-long-revered-saints-who-would-be-called-transgender-today-254769.
Caruso, Skyler, and Rebecca Aizin. “Elon Musk’s 14 Children: All About the Tesla CEO’s Sons and Daughters (and the 4 Women He Shares Them With).” People.Com, June 6, 2025. https://people.com/all-about-elon-musk-children-11678749.
Clemmer, Don. “Transgender Catholics Criticize Retiring Archbishop’s Letter on ‘Gender Ideology.’” National Catholic Reporter, August 26, 2020. https://www.ncronline.org/news/transgender-catholics-criticize-retiring-archbishops-letter-gender-ideology.
Congregation for Catholic Education. “Male and Female He Created Them: Toward a Path of Dialogue on the Question of Gender Theory in Education.” Vatican.va, 2019. https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccatheduc/documents/rc_con_ccatheduc_doc_20190202_maschio-e-femmina_en.pdf.
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. “Donum Vitae: Instruction on Respect for Human Life.” Vatican.va, February 22, 1987. https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19870222_respect-for-human-life_en.html.
DeBernardo, Francis. “To Whom Was the Pope Referring in Encylical’s Remarks About Body & Gender?” New Ways Ministry (blog), June 20, 2015. https://www.newwaysministry.org/2015/06/20/to-whom-was-the-pope-referring-in-encylicals-remarks-about-body-gender/.
Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. “Declaration ‘Dignitas Infinita’ on Human Dignity.” Vatican.va, August 4, 2024. https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2024/04/08/240408c.html.
Francis. “Amoris Laetitia: On Love in the Family.” Vatican Press, March 19, 2016. http://w2.vatican.va/content/dam/francesco/pdf/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20160319_amoris-laetitia_en.pdf.
—. “Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home,” May 24, 2015. http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html.
Kuzma, Maxwell. “As a Transgender Catholic, I Don’t See Gender Diversity as a Threat to Our Faith.” Outreach (blog), April 10, 2024. https://outreach.faith/2024/04/as-a-transgender-catholic-i-dont-see-gender-diversity-as-a-threat-to-our-faith/.
O.F.M, Daniel P. Horan. “In ‘Dignitas Infinita,’ the Vatican Quarrels with a Theory of Its Own Making.” Outreach (blog), April 23, 2024. https://outreach.faith/2024/04/in-dignitas-infinita-the-vatican-quarrels-with-a-theory-of-its-own-making/.
Padmore, William. “‘Ask Me What I Actually Believe’: Transgender Kentucky Monk Speaks out about Misconceptions.” Louisville Public Media, June 7, 2024. https://www.lpm.org/news/2024-06-07/ask-me-what-i-actually-believe-transgender-kentucky-monk-speaks-out-about-misconceptions.
Radclyffe, Oliver. Frighten the Horses: A Memoir. Grove Atlantic, 2024. https://groveatlantic.com/book/frighten-the-horses/.
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[1] I am grateful to Cleopatra Treceau for assistance with research and formative feedback on a draft of this essay. All positions and any errors are my own.
[2] Caruso, Skyler, and Rebecca Aizin. “Elon Musk’s 14 Children: All About the Tesla CEO’s Sons and Daughters (and the 4 Women He Shares Them With).” People.Com, June 6, 2025. https://people.com/all-about-elon-musk-children-11678749.
[3] James Factora, “Vivian Jenna Wilson, Elon Musk’s Estranged Trans Daughter, Says Her Assigned Sex at Birth Was ‘Bought and Paid For,’” Them, March 10, 2025, https://www.them.us/story/vivian-jenna-wilson-elon-musk-sex-selective-ivf-grimes-blue-sky-implied.
[4] Factora.
[5] Like the pedagogical story of Mrs. Bergmeier; see James F. Keenan, “Proposing Cardinal Virtues,” Theological Studies 56, no. 4 (1995): 709–29, 709-710.
[6] I will refer to her story as “Wilson’s account” since neither parent has confirmed the facts shared in the post referenced above. Neither parent has denied her account, and it is also true that the U.S. is rare among wealthy nations in permitting sex-selective IVF.
[7] Congregation for Catholic Education, “Male and Female He Created Them: Toward a Path of Dialogue on the Question of Gender Theory in Education,” 2019, para. 25, https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccatheduc/documents/rc_con_ccatheduc_doc_20190202_maschio-e-femmina_en.pdf.
[8] On the affordances and limitations of the Catholic account of gender as well as the framing of “assigning meaning to sexed bodies,” this essay benefitted greatly from Brianne Bell Jacobs, Holy Body: Gender and Sexual Difference in Theological Anthropology and Ecclesiology (Lexington, 2024), https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781666971248/Holy-Body-Gender-and-Sexual-Difference-in-Theological-Anthropology-and-Ecclesiology.
[9] Certainly, all trans people do not share the same set of experiences or hold the same views about gender, and space does not permit more than a brief gesture at resonances between trans experience and Catholic teaching on gender. Still, I believe the perspectives I present here are, at least, more representative of the experiences of trans people than those reflected in magisterial teaching. As Brother Christian Matson says, “I know of no trans person who transitions because they believe in gender ideology.” William Padmore, “‘Ask Me What I Actually Believe’: Transgender Kentucky Monk Speaks out about Misconceptions,” Louisville Public Media, June 7, 2024, https://www.lpm.org/news/2024-06-07/ask-me-what-i-actually-believe-transgender-kentucky-monk-speaks-out-about-misconceptions.
[10] Maxwell Kuzma, “As a Transgender Catholic, I Don’t See Gender Diversity as a Threat to Our Faith,” Outreach (blog), April 10, 2024, https://outreach.faith/2024/04/as-a-transgender-catholic-i-dont-see-gender-diversity-as-a-threat-to-our-faith/.
[11] Don Clemmer, “Transgender Catholics Criticize Retiring Archbishop’s Letter on ‘Gender Ideology,’” Text, National Catholic Reporter (National Catholic Reporter), accessed June 20, 2025, https://www.ncronline.org/news/transgender-catholics-criticize-retiring-archbishops-letter-gender-ideology.