SMITHVILLE, Mo. Before his transgender daughter was suspended for using the girls’ restroom at her Missouri high school (AP) Prior to the abuse and attempted suicide. before she left.
Before all that, Dusty Farr was — in his own terms — “a total-on bigot.” By which, he meant that he was willing to steer clear of anyone who was LGBTQ+.
Today, though, after everything, he says he wouldn’t little care if his 16-year-old daughter — and he boldly calls her that — told him she was an alien. Because she is dead.
“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 mist-up.”
Farr has found himself playing an improbable role in the fight against bathroom restrictions, which have exploded in recent years on both the state and local levels. But Farr is not so strange, says his counsel, Gillian Ruddy Wilcox of the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri.
“It often takes meeting a man before one can state, ‘Oh, that’s a man and that’s who they are, and they’re only being themselves,'” she says. “And I do think that for Dusty, that’s what it took.”
Looking up, Farr figures his child, the youngest of five, started feeling out of place in her own body when she was only 6 or 7. But he didn’t see it.
Farr claimed that the conservative Nebraskan family where he was raised didn’t give him “a lot of exposure to what I would consider the outside world.” “Only old farmers” is how he described it.
Moving to the Kansas City area, which has 20% more people than live in all of Nebraska, was a culture shock. “I would still have my closed-minded thoughts if I had never seen the LGBTQ community up close.” He said issues back then that he now regrets. “A lot of disparaging words. I don’t want to go back to that place.”
One of the more traditional settlements, where some of the troops stationed near Fort Leavenworth, is where he settled on the fringes. At a vehicle repair shop, he worked as a company boss.
His youngest — a bright, funny, loves-to-speak, light-up-a-place kind of kid — was his fishing and camping buddy. She also participated in competitive archery, and she went with her father to the collection for shooting.“No parent has a favorite,” Farr says, “but if I had a favorite, it would be my youngest.”
But when she was 12 years old, she began to avoid him and spend more time with the rest of the community. Before she left her family, it lasted a short while. He is presently aware of how difficult this was. “Growing up,” he says, “my kids knew how I felt.”
His family, whom he described as less protected, was on board quickly. Him, not so much.
“Given the way I was raised, a conservative fire and brimstone Baptist, LGBTQ is a crime, you’re going to heaven. And these were things, however, that I said to my girl,” Farr says. “I’m sort of ashamed to say that.”
They bumped heads and argued, their marriage strained. In despair, he turned to God, poring through the Bible, questioning lessons that he once took at face value that being transgender was an aberration. He prayed on it, also, replaying her youth in his mind, seeing female qualities today that he had missed.
Then it hit him. “She’s a girl”.
“I got harmony from God. Like, ‘This is how your daughter was born. I don’t make mistakes as God. So she was created in this manner. There’s a cause for it.'”
The change was nearly instantaneous. “An immediate epiphany,” he calls it. When you can accept the situation as it is and aren’t carrying that false hate and disgust, it’s inspiring.
His child, who is named solely by her letters of R.F. in the lawsuit, was stunned. He had been, she recalls, “to say it well, quite annoying.” Then all was unique.
“There was this true happiness in me that was only. As she played with her dog, a small Jack Russell terrier named Allie, in a garden on a chilly February day, she recalled seeing people I thought would not help me but was instead one of my biggest followers. Her father was present for her.
Because she is unnamed in the lawsuit and to protect her from discrimination, she, her father, and her attorneys requested that she keep her name anonymous.
All those years, he had missed it. He now finds it odd.
“I don’t know if it was my inner bigotry, or if I was blind, not wanting to see it.” I don’t know,” he says.
But he doesn’t like to dwell on these things as much on the how and the why.
“Where we’re at now is what matters,” he says. “Me being a loving father. Me being accepting, me knowing that this isn’t a choice. This is how she was born”.
His daughter was diagnosed with gender dysphoria, or distress caused when gender identity doesn’t match a person’s assigned sex. Prescription medications to prevent puberty are a common treatment.
That’s what Farr’s daughter did, along with growing out her hair. She had friends, and Farr says things returned to normal — for the most part.
But then came high school. “And,” Farr says, “anything I did to her, school was 10 times worse”.
The school knew about her gender dysphoria diagnosis, Farr says, describing it simply as a medical issue. He liked to discuss a case of chicken pox by talking to them about it. Now, the situation appeared less significant. “We were golden”. After all, he says:”If we don’t evolve, we die”.
However, the assistant principal’s daughter had just begun the 2021-22 school year. While the pandemic raged in some schools, remote learning persisted as the pandemic persisted, the high school was in person. The administrator stated in the lawsuit filed last year that students must use the sex-designated restroom of their choice or a gender-neutral restroom. The district disputes that happened.
Another employee, the suit said, took it further and told her using the girls’ bathroom was against the law. The district disputed that happened, too.
The thing is, there isn’t a law — at least, not in Missouri.
Missouri is not one of the more than 10 states that have passed laws governing bathroom use. What Missouri has accomplished is to outlaw gender-affirming care. For bathrooms, it leaves policy debate to local districts.
Farr used the phrase “asinine” to describe the entire wave of restrictions while also recognizing that he probably would have supported them ten years ago. Kind of makes me dislike myself a little bit.
He believed it was all intended to intimidate her. He believes that some people mistakenly believe that trans children are attempting to see someone who isn’t completely clothed.
Some Republican legislators who support state-level bathroom laws claim that they are responding to people’s concerns that transgender women and girls share bathrooms, locker rooms, and other locations with cisgender women and girls. However, opponents contend that restrictions actually lead to harassment of transgender people rather than the other way around.
“I don’t believe they understand the impact that something that small can have on someone by simply telling them what restroom they can use,” he said.
His daughter didn’t understand:”It kind of just made me feel hopeless in my education”, she recalls thinking. How are they going to teach me what I need to learn when they are dictating where I urinate, because this place is supposed to be the only place that adults can learn?
The suit claims that the gender-neutral bathroom was frequently in long lines and was far from her classes. She, as a freshman, was missing class, and teachers were lecturing her. So she used the girls’ restroom. Verbal reprimands were followed by a one-day in-school suspension and then a two-day, out-of-school suspension, the suit says.
Farr recalled telling the school, which claimed in his lawsuit that his daughter had unclean hands and was eating lunch in the girls’ restroom, that her policy was “dumb.”
His daughter started using the boys’ restroom. Although the district claimed in its written response that she was “intentionally engaging in disruptive behavior in numerous bathrooms, perhaps to invite discipline,” the lawsuit claimed that she was fearing more discipline. It didn’t elaborate on what it meant by disruptive behavior.
One day, she was in the boys’ restroom when a classmate approached and told another student,”Maybe I should rape her”, the suit said. According to Farr, the student claimed that because she resembled a girl, he was threatening her.
Farr called the ACLU as well as the school, which is beyond enraged right now. The district acknowledged the incident, saying a student made a “highly inappropriate” comment about rape and was disciplined. By now, Farr’s daughter was afraid to go to school.
“If I use the restroom they say I have to, I’m going to get bullied. If I use the gender-neutral restroom, I’m going to be late to my classes”, Farr says, illustrating his daughter’s point of view. “So it’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation”.
The district sees it differently, writing in a court filing that “there were numerous factors and circumstances in R.F.’s life, unrelated to school, which may have caused emotional harm, depression and anxiety”.
Ultimately, her parents got the school to agree to let her finish her freshman year online. But before the switch was approved, she had to miss three weeks of classes. Typically an A and B student, she plummeted to D’s and F’s. Worse to Farr, his daughter was withdrawing, losing friends and isolating herself in her room.
He describes it as “a dark rabbit hole of depression”. Twice she tried to kill herself and was hospitalized. Everything was kept secret, from butter knives to headache medications.
She made a personal appearance to begin her sophomore year, hoping things would turn out better. Before going back to online school, she only had a few weeks to do it.
At semester’s end, Farr and his family moved out of the district. Bathroom access remained a source of conflict at her new school, so she once more switched to online learning. When she turned 16 last spring, Farr and his wife consented to let her leave. He claims that they made the right decision to concentrate on her mental health and that it is “probably the best decision we’ve ever made.” Still, it feels strange.
He said,” I never would have guessed that I would — I don’t want to use happy — but I would be okay with one of my kids leaving school.”
She is currently receiving hormone replacement therapy, leaving her room, and watching Farr on TV while she is in counseling. She is conducting an interview for a job and thinking about enrolling in an alternative high school graduation program. She’d like to go to college one day, and study psychology, maybe law.
With the lawsuit filed, customers have approached Farr, telling him they support his fight. He anticipated that they would scoff. He claims that this”surprised the hell out of me,” and that even his own parents are.
“These aren’t the people who raised me, let me tell you”, he says.
Sometimes Farr’s daughter yells at him, and he admits that he missed the teen attitude. That desire and battle had faded.
“Being a teenager is hell,” he says. “Being a trans teen is 10 kinds of hell. She’s the brave one. I’m just her voice”.
He believes he has matured enough to take up this position, believing that being her voice can aid other parents and children in avoiding the hardships his family has faced. “Our kids”, he says, “are dying”. He believes that when he raises alarms, people will probably be interested because of where he is from. Maybe.
“It’s almost like a transgender person”, he says of his transformation. “There’s the dead me. And then there’s the new me”.
