Where to Find my Heart

I recently became aware of a U.S. band known as “Whistle” formed expressly for the purpose of calling out the rising tide of authoritarianism that we all recognize as gender ideology. Their first EP “Sounding the Alarm” was released in June 2023, followed by “Did You Know?” Apparently, the songwriter, who also goes by the name Whistle, is not an ROGD father, but jeez, how he really understood the trajectory of this ideology and the feelings of a father! Based on my personal experience, the only people who understand what we as parents experience are parents going through the same thing.  This situation is ground-breaking to me, because it tells me that maybe – just maybe – there are folks out there who see what is really going on and have put themselves in our shoes.  It’s no easy stretch because it requires striding outside of one’s comfort zone to dig deep – really deep – to truly understand how we feel.  I commend Whistle for diving down into the abyss.

I listened to all the songs on the album and, while they are all timely and firmly grounded in truth, one really stood out for me as the mother of a gender confused daughter whose foray into the insanity began during Pride month in 2019.  What struck me is that the lyrics of the song, “Where to Find My Heart” are sung from the perspective of a grief-stricken, bewildered father of a daughter who announced out of the blue that she was a boy. The song conveys a powerful range of raw emotions tracking what is so awfully familiar to so many of us parents and speaks volumes of the deep love and the special bond that exists between fathers and daughters. It drives home the confidence that a loving father has in his love for his daughter and his knowledge that she absolutely knows where to find his heart – and conversely how to break it:

She finally came home late last night She’s got her own key, turned on the light She knows where to find my heart But she walked down the hall ‘cause she and I don’t ever talk

When lockdown happened they closed her school
She had to stay home, we were such fools
She went down some rabbit holes
We never saw it coming, she was just thirteen years old

She changed her name at school, we didn’t know
By the time she told us it blew a hole
Right through our family that day
She told us she’s a boy and she’s always felt that way

Tell me that I’m dreaming
Take me from this place of solitude
Release me from my grieving
but what’s a loving parent supposed to do?

She took the family name we chose with care
Called it a ‘deadname,’ she made us swear
We won’t use that name again
Then tell me who this person is, who is this stranger that’s moved in?

You say we never knew you
You’re telling us your life’s been one big lie
The shrinks are worse than useless
They tell us if we don’t agree you’ll die

She wears a binder and cuts her hair
Her clothes are baggy, we try not to stare
She wants to cut off her breasts
We told her she’s too young, we only want for her what’s best

She wants testosterone, we told her ‘no’
She said she’d kill herself, wouldn’t that go to show
Can’t break, how far must I bend
There’s no one we can turn to, not even family or friends

‘Cause I’ve been called a bigot
By people who have known me all my life
Her teachers, they don’t trust us I always thought that they’d be 
on our side

We act as if it’s normal
I see it on my TV every day
It came without a warning
But since it came it stole my girl away

She finally came home late last night
She’s got her own key, turned on the light
She knows where to find my heart
‘Cause I will always love her, I’ve loved her from the very start

The song starts with the sense of estrangement we parents feel even when the child lives at home The lyrics return to the onset of the siege, a story so eerily familiar to us, beginning with the COVID lockdown, which caught so many parents completely off guard. It tracks the stealthy progression when schools, complicit in the fraud, reopened and, unbeknownst to parents, children changed their names. It speaks of the “coming out” with the usual script of the child “always” having felt that way and the hole it blows through the family – the collateral damage of this diabolical cult that seeks to destroy families and does so with surgical precision.

The father is in free fall - wondering if he is dreaming, at the same time begging to be released from the grip his grief has on him and questioning what, as a loving father, he is supposed to do? Haven’t we all had that question nagging us? It forces the extraordinary and painful internal conflict of love for our child and pure hatred for the evil that possesses her.  We are gaslit into thinking we are the bad guys when we know we are the good guys.

And the father has to deal with the next phase of rejection of the “dead name” – a kick in the teeth for sure – and the realization that his daughter is not there anymore. A stranger inhabits her beautiful body and tells her that she needs to mutilate and chemically destroy it.  It feeds her the narrative that completely revises her childhood. Sensing that she needs help, the father faces the cruelty of therapists emotionally blackmailing parents with the dead daughter-living son trope. And then to make matters worse, the father is confronted by the betrayal of family and friends who label him a bigot for wanting to save his daughter from what he truly knows is destruction. We’ve all been there.  The gender ideology has successfully foisted upon the father disenfranchised grief which prolongs the raw emotional pain: Death of the name chosen with care and loss of the beautiful, loving child – now a changeling.

And the father returns to the moment where he sees her in the home, turning on the light and he holds on to the hope that she knows where to find his heart.  Or is it despair? As she turns on the light, will the veil of deception lift? Regardless, the father confidently clings to the knowledge that he will always love her and always did.  

And that’s all we as parents have, right?  But the song leaves me wondering if that knowledge will ever enough to get us through this nightmare.

Although many PITT stories are written by mothers about their daughters, and there are some by fathers too, seeing and hearing this in a song by a loving father really touched me. I hope it touches others too and inspires more fathers to share how they feel.

You can learn more about singer/songwriter Whistle and why he was inspired to write songs critical of gender ideology.