As his trans daughter struggles, a father pushes past his prejudice. ‘It was like a wake-up.’
As his trans daughter struggles, a father pushes past his prejudice. ‘It was like a wake-up.’
Dusty Farr is fighting for his transgender daughter's right to use the girls' bathroom at her Missouri high school.
Dusty Farr is fighting for his transgender daughter's right to use the girls' bathroom at her Missouri high school.
Before his transgender daughter was suspended after using the girls’ bathroom at her Missouri high school. Before the bullying and the suicide attempts. Before she dropped out.
Before all that, Dusty Farr was — in his own words — “a full-on bigot.” By which he meant that he was eager to steer clear of anyone LGBTQ+.
Now, though, after everything, he says he wouldn’t much care if his 16-year-old daughter — and he proudly calls her that — told him she was an alien. Because she is alive.
“When it was my child, it just flipped a switch,” says Farr, who is suing the Platte County School District on Kansas City’s outskirts. “And it was like a wake-up.”
Farr has found himself in an unlikely role: fighting bathroom bans that have proliferated at the state and local level in recent years. But Farr is not so unusual, says his attorney, Gillian Ruddy Wilcox of the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri.
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This is not a feel-good story. Stop clapping when evil stops being evil. It has now accomplished the bare minimum, and sort of for incorrect reasons.
Rewarding good behavior by telling them they should have been good sooner or to begin with, is dumb and counterproductive. If you want change, you need to support recent converts. Help them, don't chastise them.
If you read the article you'll see that although he credits god for his change of heart, he also began to question a lot of things he read in the bible. Credit where credit is due. This man chose to open his eyes even as it shook the foundations of his core.
Regardless of how or why he got there, I am just glad he did.
The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is today.
I might agree we should be measured in our praise, but people are people and this is often what progress looks like.
I will commend him for diving into the debate in a very public way. Many people in his situation would stop after "un-hating" their own child. This hints at an actual expansion of his circle of empathy.
The three As of apologies So many people forget the last one, but IMO it's the most important one. Yes, you should take responsibility and apologize, but without corrective action, it's all just words.
Yeah one of the things I’m glad about growing up catholic for is that we were taught that without penance there is no reconciliation. In fact for a long time both were treated as synonymous in the context of Catholicism.
I was also raised catholic, and am now atheist mostly because the church itself can't even seem to manage one of the three, let alone all of them. Even on a personal level, penance is just mouthing some prayers in an empty church, there's no real requirement after confession to go make it right