A Father’s Perspective

I’m a father with a trans identified daughter and I have stories to tell.

Recently I launched a Substack to tell these stories: dentonyogacarter.substack.com

My goal is to give an honest account of my experiences, from a father’s perspective, many of the parent stories out there in the ether are from the perspective of mothers. I hope that my contributions help to prompt more fathers to make their voices heard too. We might be more reluctant to speak out, but us fathers care about our children, and it’s time for us to join the fight.

For me, it was my second child that got caught up in the gender madness. My daughter came to my wife and I, threatening to take testosterone and to voluntarily undergo a double mastectomy. She was willing to sacrifice her own fertility, and demanded that everyone around her accept and affirm her new identity without question. She didn’t want to talk about it, or explain herself, and when I attempted to get her to do so, she told me I wasn’t “being supportive”.

The central question facing all parents in my situation is the same: "What do I do?

What we did is to look for help. All we found was “Be Kind” propaganda, threats of suicide ideation, social silencing, and terrible consequences for “not immediately affirming”. In common parlance, that makes us as parents guilty of Conversion Therapy—simply asking her to think carefully about things, or questioning some of the assertions she was making, in those few conversations we once had, while she was still in a state of deep rumination.

The timing was lousy; she was leaving home for university just as she was ready to rebirth into her new identity. Several trans activists and groomers had already got to her (unbeknown to us at the time) and the cementing of her “wrong body” conviction was cheered and celebrated by friends and allies, (a few) wider family, academic faculty, her partner’s family, support groups, a trans “mentor”—and ALL of it underpinned by internet contagion and online hive-mind communities.

She ran away, straight into the arms of her Glitter Family, away from home. We never even stood a chance. We have had to live with the aftermath and injury every single day; in Limbo, like an unending state of grief and disbelief at what has happened.

The path of her transition was a steep and rapid trajectory from curiosity and interest, to immersion and rumination, via influencing, to indoctrination, and finally to full-on radicalization.

We’ve been estranged for 4 years now. Our hearts are broken.

Young people in particular are sitting targets for the gender ideology that surrounds them. It costs them nothing to gain entry into the community upon arrival at a college campus. There is no gate keeping, no hard questions, no medical assessment. It’s just “I validate you if you validate me!” It’s like trading identity tokens: “You’re non-binary, Cool!” “Hey, and I’m Gender-queer, hi-five!”

Unlike those woke, blue-haired, childless students on campus, it costs US parents everything – our reality, our experience, our memories, our loving bond. It’s all been queered away. As parents we lived for 20 years with the experience and knowledge of bringing this tiny human baby girl into the world, only to have that older female child demand we deny that beautiful being ever existed. My daughter was never gender nonconforming. She experienced no early distress at stereotypically sexist expectations or behaviors. Now her history, along with ours, has been completely rewritten in service to a delusion. We are the ones who are erased, whose existence is denied, simply because we “didn’t immediately affirm”. Well, we were never given the chance, the groomers had got there already.

The effects of this 4-year estrangement have been catastrophic, and psychically very damaging to my wife and family. And there really is no road map for this, no model or societal template that exists for navigating through this bizarre situation. I’ve been looking for answers for 4 years, discussing and debating with an incredibly diverse range of people and professions, in order to “educate myself” and to “do better”, while all the time reaching out to my daughter to try and find some means of connection again. But the cheering squad that protects their trans champion also excels at encouraging newbies to ditch those“unsupportive” parents, despite all of my efforts. I wanted to be a better father, to understand her better, to find articulate views and voices that echoed her own; she found it so hard to communicate.

I’m writing this for parents who might be new to all the trans propaganda, and may wonder how some of the forces that drive the “movement” actually knit together. I’m keen to reach men, both straight and gay or bisexual, and also fathers, in particular. Where are their voices? What makes a parent want to “affirm” our children’s identities? At what cost? How can we continue to point out forcefully, the dangers of Sex Denialism, to a population gaslit by queer theory and gender propaganda? I’ll be writing about cults too, and how (no matter how glib it sounds) the transing of our young people so obviously is, a Cult.

I’ve lost friendships, and work, through speaking out, and trying to tell our story. I’ve spent an afternoon pouring my heart out to a once-dear friend, telling him the truth about our trans-identified daughter, recounting my experience, only to have the abuse we’ve suffered disbelieved and denied. It’s just too much for some people - too hot to handle. They double-down, aware of their own frail critical thinking or virtue-signaling biases, and our trauma is compounded by the disbelief shown by others reactions. That’s why I had to write this. I don’t know which is worse anymore—disbelief or indifference. I’ve lost trust. If I didn’t have to be anonymous for all of our protections, believe me, I’d be like Billboard Chris!

I hope you visit my Substack and join in with any comments, questions or feedback. I’ll be writing articles and making some free pdf downloads as posters, memes, and artworks created as resources – a kind of antidote to all those damaging Gingerbread/Gender Unicorn school posters. Eventual paid subscriptions will fund the time I’ll take to create these.

Above all else, I’m writing and compiling this for the daughter we continue to love, to miss, to wish desperately for her happiness, mental health and wellbeing that has been so abused by other people. I understand how these forces entered her life at a particular time, when she was vulnerable and predisposed. My wish is always the same; to expose the ideology that turns kind, sensitive, intelligent young people away from their families and into validation-seekers demanding pronouns and trans rights while being given elevated platforms and the privilege of being a brave and stunning champion.

I’ll do whatever I can to change the landscape, to shine a light on what others are also doing to expose these dangerous and damaging beliefs that harm so many of our young people. I won’t be quiet anymore, there are hundreds of thousands of us, and multi-millions more who understand that sex is binary and immutable but are too afraid to say so. Silence as they say, is complicity.