As his trans daughter struggles, a father pushes past his prejudice. ‘It was like a wake-up.’ - eviltoast

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.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      7 months ago

      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.

      • Omgpwnies@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        7 months ago

        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