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.

  • octopus_inkEnglish
    423·
    9 months ago

    I’m really proud of him that when something actually impacted him directly he found something resembling empathy to turn around his years of bigotry.

    It’s really heartwarming that having his daughter suffer through suspension, bullying, and suicide attempts was finally enough to do what having an open mind, not closing yourself off from facts that challenge your worldview, and basic human empathy could have done if he were capable of any of those things.

    I wonder if he gives a shit even today about the people his former views harmed, or if his concern goes only as far as ensuring his daughter is OK.

    Must be fun having all his friends call him a groomer now instead of him joining them in calling other parents of trans kids groomers.

    “Given the way I was raised, a conservative fire and brimstone Baptist, LGBTQ is a sin, you’re going to hell. And these were things, unfortunately, that I said to my daughter,” Farr says. “I’m kind of ashamed to say that.”

    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.’”

    So it was really just “God says you will burn in hell” flipped somehow to “God says you are OK because He made you like this.”

    Fuck, I guess a little progress is good no matter how fucked up the reasoning is. (Edit: She should hope that God doesn’t flip flop again and tell him something different tomorrow.)