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.
“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.”
I’m really happy for his daughter to have the support of her father like this, but it disgusts me that people like him don’t understand bigotry until it happens to someone they care about. And there are so many millions like him who will never encounter it happening to anyone they care about.
A little further down the article goes into more detail about his turn around.
They bumped heads and argued, their relationship strained. In desperation, he turned to God, poring through the Bible, questioning teachings that he once took at face value that being transgender was an abomination. He prayed on it, too, replaying her childhood in his mind, seeing feminine qualities now that he had missed.
Then it hit him. “She’s a girl.”
“I got peace from God. Like, ‘This is how your daughter was born. I don’t make mistakes as God. So she was made this way. There’s a reason for it.’”
Regardless of how he got there, I am glad he did. His daughter’s words say it best.
“There was this electricity in me that was just, it felt like pure joy. Just seeing someone I thought would never support me, just being one of my biggest supporters,”
So the key is to convince the person was born this way. Then acceptance follows from “God does not make mistakes.” 🧠
I was raised Catholic and was even sent to Catholic school, which of course means that I inevitably grew up to be a hardcore atheist with a dislike of organized religion. Personally, I don’t care what mental gymnastics a raging bigot has to make in order to learn care and compassion for those different from him, as long as they stick the landing.
as long as they stick the landing.
It sounds to me like his daughter needs to hope he doesn’t interpret God’s Word a third way one morning or she’ll be right back where she started.
They interpret their religion and their religious texts to ultimately support whatever opinion they want to be able to justify. He wanted to be able to accept and support his daughter so he found a way for his religion to let him do that.
That’s the crux of the problem. Want to subjugate a group, no problem. want genital mutilation no worries. want to discriminate against a segment of the population, cool cool; I can make my god confirm every shitty thing I have in my heart. Luckily sometimes it works the other way.
A critical lack of empathy.
Pulling people out of old harmful beliefs is important. Growth is important. Sure he doesn’t get a free pass for things hes said or done but after reading the whole article it seems like he is the last person you’d have to say that to. Im sure he knows. No ones immune to propaganda, that’s not an excuse but it is true.
