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.

  • TheDemonBuer@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    I think this whole bathroom thing is just stupid. While I don’t really care who is shitting in the stall next to me, apparently some people do, but I think there’s a pretty simple solution: replace stalls with water closets. I mean, nobody likes the stalls. No one prefers them, and the total lack of privacy they provide is why bathrooms are gendered in the first place. Replace stalls with water closets, everyone gets their privacy, bathrooms don’t have to be gendered anymore, problem solved.

    • cmbabul@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      This is a logical compromise that seemingly stopped the issue at its source, I would be fine with this change personally. But i guarantee it will not shut them up, because at the end of the day it not about privacy it’s about keeping things the same because “things worked just fine before all this trans stuff started happening” and any change is therefore a loss for their side

      • gmtom@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        But i guarantee it will not shut them up,

        You are correct. This has been a thing in the UK where self contained toilets are quite common and the transphobes just make up some shit about how if they let men in use the same ones as women, then they can sneak hidden cameras in there. So they have tried to force places that have always used these toilets, for practical reasons, not even inclusively reasons, to designate seperate male and female toilets.

      • whereisk@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Since conservatism has run out of governing ideas all they have are wedges - anything to get the workers to fight each other instead of focusing their anger on the rich.

    • ABCDE@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      If it’s not toilets they’ll think of something else, like stopping transpeople (and eventually women) from teaching in schools. Iran already blocks people of certain religions doing so, so this is not unimaginable.

    • Son_of_dad@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I took my parents to this restaurant that has all gender bathrooms. They were weirded out till they saw it was literally a hallway with doors to private, individual bathroom stalls with a toilet and sink. It’s been drilled into them that all gender bathrooms are just a big open piss room where everyone whips out their bits in front of each other

    • Wahots
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      8 months ago

      This. Stalls are cramped and not great anyways. I really don’t care who has been in the stall as long as it’s clean and I have privacy.