A father comes of age as he accepts his transgender daughter’s struggles
Before his transgender daughter was suspended after using the girls’ bathroom at her Missouri high school. Before the bullying and the suicide attempts. Before all that, Dusty Farr was — in his own words — “a fullon bigot.” By which he meant that he was eager to steer clear of anyone LGBTQ+. Now, though, after everything, he says he would not much care if his 16yearold daughter told him she was an alien. Because she is alive.
“When it was my child, it just flipped a switch,” said Mr. Farr, who is suing the Platte County School District on Kansas City’s outskirts.
Mr. Farr has found himself in an unlikely role: fighting bathroom bans that have proliferated at the State and local levels in recent years. But Mr. Farr is not so unusual, says his attorney, Gillian Ruddy Wilcox of the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri. “It sometimes takes meeting a person before someone can say, ‘Oh, that’s a person and they are just being themselves,’” she says.
Looking back, Mr. Farr figures his daughter, the youngest of five, started feeling out of place in her own body when she was just six or seven.
Mr. Farr said he did not have “exposure to what I would consider the outside world” in the conservative Nebraska community where he was raised. “I had never seen the LGBTQ community up close, and I would still have my closedminded thoughts.” He said things then that he now regrets.
“No parent has a favourite,” Mr. Farr says, “but if I had a favourite, it would be my youngest.” But when she was 12, she started to steer away from him. It lasted for a few months before she came out to her family. He knows now how hard this was.
His wife, whom he described as less sheltered, was on board immediately. Him, not so much. “Given the way I was raised, LGBTQ is a sin. And these were things, unfortunately, that I said to my daughter.” They bumped heads and argued, their relationship strained. In desperation, he turned to God, questioning teachings that he once took at face value that being transgender was an abomination. Then it hit him. “She is 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 is a reason for it.’”
The switch was almost instantaneous.
His daughter, who is named only by her initials of R.F. in the lawsuit, was stunned. He had been, she recalls, “to say it nicely, very annoying.” Now everything was different. “Just seeing someone I thought would never support me, just being one of my biggest supporters,” she recalled as she played with her dog at a park.
His daughter was diagnosed with gender dysphoria, or distress caused when gender identity does not match a person’s assigned sex. She had friends, and Mr. Farr says things returned to normal. But then came high school. “And,” he says, “anything I did to her, school was 10 times worse.”
The school knew about her gender dysphoria diagnosis. But the 202122 school year had just started when the assistant principal pulled his daughter aside. While remote learning persisted as the pandemic lingered, the high school was in person. According to the suit filed last year, the administrator said students must use the restroom of their sex designated at birth or a single genderneutral bathroom. The district disputes that happened .
The thing is, there is not a law — at least, not in Missouri.
The genderneutral bathroom was far from her classes and often had long lines, the suit says. She was missing class, and teachers were lecturing her. So she used the girls’ restroom. Verbal reprimands were followed by a oneday inschool suspension and then a twoday, outofschool suspension, it says.
Then, his daughter started using the boys’ restroom. One day, a classmate approached and told another student, “Maybe I should rape her,” the suit said. Beyond angry now, Mr. Farr called not just the school but the ACLU. By now, Mr. Farr’s daughter was afraid to go to school.
He says, “Twice she tried to kill herself and was hospitalised”.
At semester’s end, Mr. Farr and his family moved out of the district. Bathroom access remained a source of friction in her new school, so again she switched to online school. When she turned 16 last spring, Mr. Farr agreed to let her drop out.
She is in counselling now, taking hormone replacement therapy, leaving her room and watching TV with Mr. Farr. She is interviewing for a job and considering an alternative high school completion program.