Smithville, Missouri—

Before his transgender daughter was suspended from a Missouri high school after using the girls’ bathroom. Before the bullying and suicide attempt. Before she dropped out of school. Before that, Dusty Farr was, in his own words, “a total paranoid.” What he means is his desire to avoid anyone who is LGBTQ+.

But now, after everything he’s been through, he says he doesn’t take it too seriously when his 16-year-old daughter – as he proudly calls her – tells him she’s an alien. Because she is still alive.

“When it was my child, it just flipped a switch. It was like a wake-up call,” said Farr, who is suing the Platte County School District in suburban Kansas City.

Looking back, Farr believes his daughter, the youngest of five children, began to feel physically out of place when she was six or seven. But he doesn’t see this, even when they fish and camp together.

Then, when she was 12, she began to stay away from him and spend more time with her family. This went on for several months before she came out. He knew now how hard it was. “Growing up,” he said, “my kids knew how I felt.”

His wife (who he described as less sheltered) immediately got on board. Him, not so much.

“Given the way I was raised, a conservative fire-and-brimstone Baptist, being LGBTQ is a sin and you’re going to hell. Unfortunately, those are the things I say to my daughter,” Farr said. “I’m a little ashamed to say that.”

They bump into each other and things get tense. In despair, he turned to God and suddenly he realized: “She’s a girl.”

“Pure joy”

His daughter, named in the lawsuit only by her initials RF, was stunned. He was “to put it nicely, extremely annoying,” she recalled. Everything is different now.

“I had an electric current inside me and it felt like pure joy,” she recalled while playing with her dog in the park in February. Her father is with her.

She, her father and her attorney asked that she remain anonymous because she is not named in the lawsuit and they want to protect her from discrimination.

She was diagnosed with gender dysphoria, or the distress caused when gender identity does not match a person’s assigned sex. She grew her hair and started taking drugs to delay puberty, a common treatment.

Farr said things are mostly back to normal. But then came high school. “And,” Farr said, “no matter what I did to her, the school was going to be ten times worse.”

The 2021-22 school year had just begun when the vice principal pulled his daughter aside. According to a lawsuit filed last year, administrators said students must use the restroom of their assigned sex at birth or a gender-neutral restroom. regional disputes that occurred.

Another employee went a step further and told her it was illegal to use the women’s restroom, the lawsuit says. The district also disputes what happened.

The problem is, there’s no law – at least not in Missouri.

While more than 10 states have laws regarding bathroom use, Missouri is not one of them. What Missouri has done is ban gender-affirming care. For bathrooms, it leaves the policy debate to local districts.

Feeling of “desperation”

Farr described the entire wave of restrictions as “stupid,” while acknowledging that he might have supported them a decade ago. “It makes me dislike myself a little bit.”

He thought it was just a way to intimidate her. His daughter didn’t understand: “It made me despair about my education,” she recalls.

The lawsuit says the gender-neutral restrooms were far from her class and often had long lines. When she was absent from class during her freshman year, the teacher gave her lectures. So she used the women’s room. The verbal reprimand was followed by a one-day in-school suspension and then a two-day out-of-school suspension, the lawsuit states.

“Your policy is stupid,” Farr recalled telling the school, which argued in its response to his lawsuit that his daughter was eating lunch in the girls’ bathroom.

His daughter started using the men’s room. One day, a classmate approached and told another student, “Maybe I should rape her,” the lawsuit states.

In addition to being outraged, Farr is now calling not only the school, but also the American Civil Liberties Union. The district acknowledged the incident, saying a student made “grossly inappropriate” comments about rape and was disciplined. So far, Farr’s daughter is afraid to go to school.

He describes it as 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 non-school-related factors and circumstances in RF’s life that may have caused emotional harm, depression and anxiety.”

Eventually, her parents got the school to let her finish her freshman year online. But she missed three weeks of classes before the transfer was approved. Her grades were originally A and B, but her grades plummeted to D and F. Worse for Farr, his daughter began to withdraw.

He describes it as “the dark rabbit hole of depression.” She attempted suicide twice and was taken to hospital. Everything from butter knives to headache medicine is locked away.

She came back in person to start her sophomore year, hoping things would be better. She was back in online school within a few weeks.

family leaves

At the end of the semester, Farr and his family moved out of the area. Going to the bathroom was still a source of friction at her new school, so she turned to online school again. Last spring, when she turned 16, Farr and his wife agreed to withdraw her from school.

She is now undergoing counseling, undergoing hormone replacement therapy and considering alternative high school completion plans. She hopes to one day go to college and study psychology and maybe law.

Sometimes Farr’s daughter yells at him, and he admits he misses the teenage attitude. That spirit and fighting spirit is gone.

“The teenage years were hell,” he said. “There are ten hells of being a trans teen. She’s brave. I’m just her voice.”

He feels he’s made enough of a difference to fill the role – and that being her voice can help other parents and children avoid what his family went through. He thought that because of where he came from, maybe people would listen when he sounded the alarm. perhaps.

“It’s almost like being transgender,” he said of his transition. “This is the dead me. And then there’s the new me.”