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Michael Solana vs. transgender people

Michael Solana is an American marketer for venture capitalist Peter Thiel, one of the wealthiest and most powerful Americans. Despite this, Solana self-markets as an edgy “heretic” despite holding mainstream conservative opinions on many major issues, most notably on trans rights activists. Solana calls these activists “the gender goblin left.”

Background

Michael “Mike” Solana was born on July 17, 1986 in Toms River, New Jersey. Solana earned a bachelor’s degree from Boston University in 2007. After teaching in Spain for half a year and a brief internship at publisher Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Solana became an editor at Penguin Group USA. While at Penguin, Solana met Peter Thiel and began volunteering at Thiel’s Seasteading Institute in 2009. In 2011, Solana became chief marketing officer at Thiel’s Founders Fund.

Anti-trans activism

In 2013, Solana wrote a Thought Catalog response to a post titled “19 Things Bad ‘Allies’ Say,” written by transgender activist Parker Molloy. Molloy had already come to epitomize what Solana calls “the gender goblin left,” a specific kind of moralizing prude that emerged from Tumblr and Twitter culture. Solana is one of several conservative gay men who rose in prominence by pushing back against pontificating activists like Molloy.

In 2023, Solana started Pirate Wires, an expansion of earlier attempts to brand mainstream conservatism as edgy and heretical. In a piece attacking trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney, Solana summarized the trans rights movement thus:

On one hand, we have activists attempting to normalize a rare and highly-disadvantageous pathology, with further demands we rearchitect our entire civilization’s relationship with sex and gender on their behalf. On the other hand, we have activists — many of them self-identified as Christian! — ridiculing and dehumanizing a person with a rare mental condition. 

The furthest extremes of the gender goblin left are now demanding chemical castration for adolescents, social “transition” — and even medical transition — without parental consent, violent males confined in prison along with females, and the legally-enforced “proper” use of pronouns (ok, Dylan actually did advocate that one herself). Meanwhile, the furthest extremes of the “trad” right, a sort of trans-masculine performance itself (no offense), are not simply rejecting these crazy positions, they are demanding the full-scale “eradication” of transgenderism from public life. A middle ground between two positions so extreme is obviously impossible, but the drive, from all parties involved, is toward sameness. This tension is breaking the country.   

References

Beam, Christopher (October 2024). The Most Opinionated Man in America. The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/10/mike-solana-pirate-wires/680355/

Selected writing by Solana

Solana, Mike (May 5, 2023). How to Safely Navigate Our Haunted Transsexual Internet. Pirate Wires https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-to-safely-navigate-our-haunted

Solana, Mike (2014). Citizen Sim: Cradle of the Stars. Thought Catalog Books, ISBN 1945796596

Solana, Mike (October 2013). How To Talk To Gay People (A Gentle, Gentle Intro For The Oversensitive Liberal). Thought Catalog https://thoughtcatalog.com/michael-solana/2013/10/how-to-talk-to-gay-people-a-gentle-gentle-intro-for-the-oversensitive-liberal/ updated url: https://thought.is/how-to-talk-to-gay-people-a-gentle-gentle-intro-for-the-oversensitive-liberal/

Media

Chris Williamson (June 15, 2024). Have We Reached The End Of The Woke Debate? – Mike Solana. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiV83SojRz0

Anthony Pompliano (August 4, 2022). Woke People Are Destroying America | Mike Solana | Full Interview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbOwzImwAYc

Joe Lonsdale (February 7, 2024). Ep 77: Mike Solana on Exposing Corruption, Saving San Francisco, and Building a New Media Empire. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek6dHrUDg9o

Bankless (July 8, 2024). What the Hell is Happening to America? – Mike Solana. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcOZIxQyvcE

Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe (June 6, 2024). Can San Francisco be saved? | Mike Solana | Just Asking Questions, Ep. 26, ReasonTV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv36UnkBWzw

Dan Crenshaw (December 2, 2021). Inside Silicon Valley | Mike Solana. We Hold These Truths https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tn644QUFSOs

Ffreethink (September 8, 2022). Embrace the “damned data” everyone is afraid to | Mike Solana for Heretics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMfeCPzTJzo

Meghan Murphy (Apr 25, 2022). Mike Solana on political censorship, social media, and thought crime. The Same Drugs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kxTEpq-uec

Jonathan Kay (February 9, 2020). PODCAST 76: Venture capitalist Michael Solana on the coming corporatization of Mars. Quillette https://quillette.com/2020/02/09/podcast-76-venture-capitalist-michael-solana-on-the-coming-corporatization-of-mars/

Resources

Founders Fund (foundersfund.com)

Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)

X/Twitter (x.com)

LinkedIn (linkedin.com)

Quillette (quillette.com)