“My kid makes me uncomfortable.”

A dad in one of my support groups said this the other day and it has stayed with me. I’ve heard variations of that sentiment before, and chalk it up to the difficulty of coming to terms with your child’s new reality.

Many of us assume that our child’s sex assignment at birth aligns with their gender identity. Learning that that assumption is not true can be unsettling. And it asks us to unlearn old beliefs and come to terms with what our child is telling us. That process will be harder for some than others, and I recognize spoken discomfort as part of the journey.

For me, the adjustment centered on language. I used masculine pronouns for more than two years before Hobbes chose a new name, and that period still took adjusting.

For other dads, the struggle was more than just pronouns and names. It showed up as a visceral reaction to the sight of their own child.

One father described feeling sick to his stomach whenever he looked at his child, who had transitioned as an adult. To him, his child was engaging in cosplay, and the image of them in makeup and feminine clothes was deeply disturbing.

Another described seeing his child with short hair and struggling to reconcile the image of the boy standing before him with the daughter he thought he’d been raising all along. Each time he saw them, he felt an uneasiness in the pit of his stomach.

Listening to these men describe their persistent unease and lingering bad feelings about their children, I found myself asking “what kind of society breeds this level of discomfort between parents and children?”

Another father in our group answered without meaning to. He spoke about growing up with an alcoholic father who cared only about his own comfort. He learned to be invisible, which meant adhering strictly to gender norms. Boys belonged with boys, and girls belonged with girls. Boys played with boys toys, and girls played with girls toys. The two were never friends.

Boys who broke the rules weren’t boys. They were sissies, f*gs, gay or any other pejorative that reinforced the rules and kept everyone in line.

So much of what we experience as fathers is a direct result of what we learned. Our fathers, mothers, teachers, friends, peers, and the society around us all taught us. When we hear men say something harmful or offensive about women, children, immigrants, members of the LGBTQ+ community, dismiss it as ‘locker room talk’, and stay silent, we reinforce the lessons many of us unconsciously absorbed as boys.

The visceral response to seeing a trans daughter in makeup and a dress, comes from that place where we were taught to never question the binary. It stems from the rigid walls around gender that we have yet to break out of. Many of us still hold onto what we learned in our youth and have yet to challenge or unpack it.

But what we learned, we can unlearn. I saw that recently in Trenton.

Yesterday, I hosted the Trenton edition of The Dads Foundation’s #LoveStandsStrong impact campaign. The event brought together fathers, family, friends, community members, and allies together for a program designed to help folks learn how to show up for the gender expansive people in their lives. The room included fathers of trans and nonbinary kids, two neighbors of cisgender minors and teens, who were interested in learning how to show up as allies, and two other dads who were new to me.

I ended up at a table with these two.

The facilitator at our table asked the question, “what does a good father look like? And does your parenting reflect that?”

The first father to respond, a dad from PFLAG, described his own father as inaccessible. Their relationship was a formal one, devoid of softness or affection. He recounted the way his father was overly critical of him as a child, and only got close to him as an adult, when his father was in his seventies. For him, a good father was someone who was present, kind, patient, and praiseworthy. The shop teacher at his school was the person who embodied these qualities.

Despite his own father’s shortcomings, the shop teacher provided him with guidance, mentorship, support, and patience, and he eventually modeled his fathering on that example. When his child shared their identity with him, he met the news with empathy and compassion. He gave his child the response his own father could never have offered.

The other father at the table also grew up with a father who fell short of the fatherhood ideal. Instead, his model was his mother. He wanted his parenting to reflect the connection, closeness, and softness that characterized their relationship.

He admitted that it took some convincing for him to attend the event, but showing up for his child was something he was committed to, even though he didn’t initially want to. A good father puts their child before themselves.

Neither man received what he needed from his father. Each went looking for another example which they chose to follow. This is what unpacking looks like. It’s not pretending the lessons we learned from our fathers growing up were never taught. It’s deciding that we won’t be defined by them and being intentional about how we choose to show up instead.

I shared a video the other day in our group chat, of a young father speaking to his infant daughter. She sits in the foreground of the video playing, while he plays along and narrates. The video is clearly staged, as the father reads a long monologue about how he is going to allow her to grow up into whoever she becomes.

He calls her his daughter and acknowledges that she may come to understand herself differently from her sex assigned at birth. When she does, he will keep loving and supporting her.

So to the dad whose kid makes them uncomfortable, I say this: the discomfort is real, but it’s not the truth about your child. It’s only the truth about what you were taught. It’s important that we name and acknowledge that. That knot in your stomach was put there by someone other than you. And you don’t have to carry it alone. Finding fathers who have walked this road, in support groups, at retreats, at a screening, will help you see what’s possible.

As I say to fathers all the time, if you see something, say something. Don’t let the offhand comments about “biological males in female sports” slide. Challenge ‘locker room talk’ when you hear it. Ask whether the speaker would say it in front of their own kid. But more than anything, be present, even when it feels uncomfortable.

People built the walls around gender and we can take them down. Our children are waiting on the other side.

Earlier this month I hosted the first of a series of support meetings for Mindful Mercer Men, a program introduced by Terry West of the Mercer County Office of LGBTQ Affairs, designed to provide a space for fathers and male-identifying caregivers of gender expansive children to learn how to show up for and affirm their children.

This was the first of twelve monthly meetings, and although there were only three fathers in attendance, it was an amazing session. The fathers that attended had different age children, with varying identities and were at different stages of their children’s respective gender journeys.

Two attendees were fathers of young trans boys, and the third the parent of a trans daughter. Two children were minors and the third, a 19 year old. Two of the fathers were married, one divorced and co-parenting.

All three fathers admitted that their children shared their identities with their spouses prior to sharing with them, and we delved into why that was.

At one point I asked them what makes a good dad. Listening. Showing up without judgment. Being empathetic. Being affectionate. Not striking your children. Managing your anger. Those were a few of the answers they offered.

Then we talked about how they parented differently from their own fathers, and this is where the greatest breakthroughs happened.

One father, the divorcee, talked about his father’s alcoholism, and how it shaped his relationship with his father. He remembered his father as distant, and devoid of affection. As a family of firefighters, he recalled how his father told him that he was too weak to follow in his footsteps, and how that criticism stayed with him.

He talked about how despite his vow not to be like his father to his two children, in times of frustration or anger, he found himself being short or aggressive with them.

Although he never raised his hands to them, he saw the parallels to his own upbringing whenever lost his temper. Reflecting on those moments, his discomfort for his previous behavior was evident. He teared up thinking about the impact that those episodes likely had on his children.

The second father shared how he, too, was distant from his own father growing up. He talked about how he desperately wanted to spend time with his father, who like many of our fathers, was the breadearner. Whenever he came home he’d sit alone in the living room with the newspaper and a drink, while his wife prepared his meal. He didn’t spend a lot of time with his children and this father recounted his deep desire to do things with him.

As a result of that longing, he committed to being there for his son. An avid swimmer, their father-son time revolved around taking laps together in the community pool. He wanted to ensure that he was intentional about spending time with his child and creating memories of the time spent together, not only to correct a shortcoming from his own upbringing, but to form a strong bond with his son.

The third father said that his own child, originally assigned male at birth, had always been closer to his wife than to him. He admitted that he wasn’t especially close to his father growing up, echoing sentiments the other fathers had expressed about their own fathers.

The father of fraternal twins, he noted that he tried to stay close to both his children to break the cycle of parental distance that defined his own upbringing, but with his children out of state it was difficult.

I asked the fathers to reflect on how they responded when they learned their children’s gender identities.

The divorced father spoke first. He’d only recently learned of his child’s gender identity and happened to sign up for a Facebook group when this event came across his feed. He originally thought his child was gay and told his child that he loved them regardless. When they shared that they were transgender, he felt that the previous announcement prepared him. But he quickly realized that he knew nothing about trans identities, and didn’t feel quite as grounded or prepared as he had hoped.

The second father told us about a longtime friend who shared that their child had recently transitioned. That experience profoundly impacted him. He was able to digest and process his friend’s news without issue, so when his child subsequently shared their gender identity with him, the news felt familiar. He’d previously worked through something similar (albeit with a child that was not his own).

The third father learned about his daughter’s gender identity from his wife, as their child had shared the news with her prior to sharing the news with him. As a result, he was able to start processing prior to his daughter telling him directly.

In each instance, the fathers took the news in stride. None of them reacted badly, and as a result were able to support their children.

I bring up these fathers because I’ve been reflecting on recent screenings of The Dads at film festivals and community events, where I’ve heard from trans young people on the opposite side of these relationships.

The Dads Foundation partnered with GLAD Law for a series of screenings in Worcester, Massachusetts, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Portland, Maine. After each screening we held a talkback and Q&A, and I was moved by the young men I spoke to afterwards.

The first simply asked for a hug. It was one of the most profound moments I’ve experienced. He described his relationship with his father as one of estrangement. His father stopped speaking to him, kicked him out of the house, and to this day refuses to acknowledge him. Seeing the fathers in the film not only affirm their children, but actively love them, moved him deeply.

The second told me how his father said that he would never be his son. Through tears, he thanked me for the work I’m doing to help fathers recognize how much they matter in their children’s lives. I told him that his father was making an absolute mistake failing to see the gift in front of him. And even if his father didn’t, I saw him and cherished him. Our conversation ended in another hug.

And then there was the conversation that had the deepest impact on me. It happened in Atlanta, at the Morehouse Human Rights Film Festival. A young man approached me as the theater was clearing and we were the last two people in the room.

He told me that he hadn’t expected to be so emotional, but certain scenes caused him to relive moments that he had buried. One section of the film showed Trump’s second election victory, and he described waking up the morning after the election feeling like he’d woken to a nightmare. In the time since, with what he described as literal lynchings of Black men in the South, he felt that he was living inside that nightmare.

The one thing making this waking nightmare bearable was the unwavering support of his father. He was grateful that through everything trans people and Black people are experiencing, he had a father who kept showing up for him.

I often talk about how different life might have been if Chanel hadn’t died before Hobbes shared his truth with me. Would I be like the men I currently counsel? Or like the ones who treat their children like throwaways?

What I know for certain is how much my child has thrived because he is affirmed. I have three other children who are social, possess emotional intelligence, empathy, and who are, for all intents and purposes, doing well. If my trans child weren’t thriving, I would know.

So for me, the value of affirming our children is clear. It shapes how our children turn out. That’s why it matters so much that fathers recognize the difference they make in their children’s lives, and the outcomes that become possible when they choose affirmation.

It was moving to hear fathers talk about the ways their own fathers weren’t close to, weren’t affectionate, weren’t supportive, and the commitment they made to be different. Equally moving and heartbreaking, were the stories from trans young people who weren’t affirmed, and to see how much that absence still weighs on them.

These are two halves of the same story. Every father in that room in Mercer County was once a son waiting for his father to see him. Some of them are still carrying that wait. And every young man who hugged me after a screening is still a son waiting, some for a father who may never come.

The difference between those two stories is a choice. The fathers I sat with chose, in their own imperfect ways, to break a cycle. They looked at the men who raised them and decided. Not my father. Not his silence. Not his distance. Not his temper. Not his conditional love.

That choice is available to every father of a gender expansive child. It doesn’t require having all the answers, knowing the right language, or feeling like you need to be fully prepared. The divorced father in our group admitted that he knew almost nothing. He showed up anyway. That’s the whole assignment. Show up. Keep showing up, and let your child know that regardless of what the world says, their father is on their side.

Because somewhere out there, a young person is sitting in a dark theater, watching fathers on a screen love their children, and wondering why theirs couldn’t. And somewhere else, a young person is walking out of that same theater knowing that their father would never let go. I want every child to have the second story. That’s why I do the work.

In Allies & Assholes we celebrate progressive Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed for attending a “whole ass medical school” and supporting transgender youth’s right to health care. We drag Joseph and Arlene Kutzko for abusing their transgender child and then claiming that the state took them away for not affirming them.

Have you ever stopped to ask why so many of the wealthiest people in the world have made trans people, a population that makes up roughly one percent of this country, their obsession? Seriously. What’s their damage?

Take J.K. Rowling. In 2020, Rowling disclosed that she is a survivor of domestic abuse and sexual assault, and that this history informs her advocacy for single-sex spaces defined by sex assigned at birth rather than gender identity. Her disclosure deserves to be taken seriously, and at face value.

But that doesn’t mean she gets a pass to be a raging transphobe. Making a blanket claim that trans women represent a categorical risk to women’s safety, despite the fact that transgender women are far more likely than cisgender women to be victims of sexual assault, intimate partner violence, and fatal violence, defies logic.

If she’s genuinely concerned about safety, all that money has been spent in the exact opposite direction from where it could have done the most good. Whatever her reasons, the effect of her advocacy has been to make one of the most victimized groups in the country into the public face of a threat it is, statistically, far less likely to pose than to suffer.

And what about Elon Musk?

When his daughter, Vivian Wilson, came out as transgender a few years back, his public response wasn’t grief or confusion. It was fury. He said she “was killed by the woke mind virus,” turning a private family matter into a political crusade. And unfortunately, he has the money to make it everyone else’s problem too.

He’s personally spending upward of $100 million through his PAC to fund ads attacking trans people ahead of the midterms, even against Democratic candidates who have already thrown trans people under the bus to try to win.

Once again, the airwaves are flooded with ads about candidates who “believe there are six genders,” or who are putting “the trans agenda ahead of people’s values,” or supporting “men in women’s sports.” Musk’s ads tell voters that Democratic candidates want “your daughter to share a bathroom with a man.” With his money, his platform, and his outsized influence on social media, Musk is doing everything in his power to make trans people persona non grata in America.

But these two aren’t the only rich people with a hard-on for trans people. There are entire organizations with deep pockets who have made attacking trans people their raison d’être. So what’s behind spending untold sums of money to demonize this tiny group? Why use your personal platform to spew venom at people who, for all intents and purposes, simply want to be left alone?

For someone like Rowling, is it because she was the victim of sexual assault and has indiscriminately channeled her anger at the man who abused her onto anyone who might have been assigned male at birth? To her, it appears there’s no difference between a cisgender man and a transgender woman, and for that reason her brand of feminism tolerates no one who wasn’t strictly assigned female at birth.

She’s going to spend as much money as it takes to make cisgender women feel safe, full stop. It doesn’t matter to her that transgender women suffer sexual assault and violence at greater rates than cisgender women. It doesn’t matter that transgender women face far greater risk of intimate partner violence and domestic abuse. It doesn’t matter that transgender women are far more likely to be victims of fatal violence. As long as cisgender women don’t have to share space with trans women, that’s all that counts.

Elon Musk is another conundrum. The fact that one of his children identifies as trans has sent this multi-billionaire into a tailspin so severe that he’s pumping millions into Republican campaigns to push anti-trans ads. It’s as if it’s the world’s fault that his child identifies differently from her sex assigned at birth, and because of that, we all have to pay.

Could his erratic behavior and fixation on trans people be tied to his Asperger’s? His mental health? Stress? Something else entirely? In the absence of a clinical diagnosis, we will never know. But the willingness to spend gobs and gobs of money painting trans people, and the people who support them, as suffering from some sort of “woke mind virus” (his words, not mine) speaks to someone deeply unserious, deeply unwell, or both.

If Rowling and Musk were the only ones, it would be one thing. But there are whole organizations, well-funded, dark-money, national in scope, engaged in the same work of targeting transgender people.

The Heritage Foundation, Alliance Defending Freedom, Turning Point USA, and Moms for Liberty are just a few of the better-known groups whose rhetoric has fueled hate and harassment of LGBTQ+ people, and who form the machinery behind the culture wars that have dramatically diminished the quality of life for transgender and gender-expansive people in this country.

Fifteen years ago, few people had ever heard the word transgender, much less knew a transgender person or had any concern about how transgender people lived their lives. Today it’s all anyone seems to talk about. But virtually everything people know, or think they know, about transgender people comes filtered through these well-funded, dark-money operations, Rowling and Musk included, all of them with an agenda.

So what should we take away from billionaires and corporations pouring millions into anti-trans ads every election cycle? What should we make of think tanks and PACs spending untold sums lobbying for and authoring anti-trans legislation?

For one, we should recognize this for what it is: the efforts of deeply disturbed people. At a time when most Americans can barely afford to buy groceries, pay their bills, and keep a roof over their heads, we should be deeply suspicious of anyone spending millions to attack the smallest minority in the country, a group that is harming no one.

We also need to be critical about the voices we listen to, and circumspect, at the very least, of people who go out of their way to target and demonize the marginalized. And finally, ask yourself: what do they actually stand to gain from talking about this group, constantly, obsessively, at this scale?

Because here’s the truth.

The people with the problem were never transgender people. It’s the people obsessed with them. So the next time someone hands you a billion-dollar reason to fear a one-percent minority, don’t ask what’s wrong with trans people. Ask what’s wrong with them.

It occupies those spaces where a dad's voice is supposed to be.

I know its shape because I've seen it so many times that it's left an indelible stamp in my mind.

More importantly, it's everywhere I go.

Seven years ago, when I attended my first advocacy event (a convening of PTEC, the Human Rights Campaign's parent-advocacy council, paired with HRC's Time to Thrive conference), there was a stark absence of fathers. 

They were nowhere to be found.

Do you know who was there? Mothers. 

Throngs of them, at keynotes, breakouts, coffee chats, workshops. Session after session, I joined rooms full of moms all seeking to learn how they could be more supportive, more informed, better allies and advocates for their LGBTQ+ children.

I'll never forget the awe I felt listening to them talk about the many ways they were showing up for their kids: at school board meetings, at state houses, as plaintiffs in lawsuits, testifying on Capitol Hill. They were committed to making the world a better place for their children.

It was at Time to Thrive that I first heard the expression "mama bear" used to describe the way mothers of transgender youth fiercely defended their kids. Listening to their stories, I understood at once that it was an apt term for how these mothers had to show up.

The world for LGBTQ+ youth, and trans children especially, was a brutal, violent, unforgiving one. It was a world where mothers found themselves thrust to the fore to protect their children from what were, even then, growing attacks on their safety.

One thing struck me then, as it still does now: the glaring absence of fathers on the front lines of these battles. Time and again, I sat aghast, listening to tales of mothers being berated, criticized, demonized, and condemned for the heinous act of affirming their children.

Beyond the shock of hearing what people were willing to say about children, and about the mothers who absorbed that abuse, was the plain fact that there were no fathers. When I say there were no fathers, I mean there were no fathers. Period.

When one woman told me how someone had literally spat in her direction for standing up for her child, I asked, incredulous, what her husband did when it happened. "He wasn't there," she said.

How the fuck could he not be there? Was he not aware of what happened to her out there? Did he not support their child?

To my dismay, this was not an isolated incident. Mother after mother described some variation of that story: weathering the torrent of hatred alone, unaided by their partner, their spouse, their child's father.

Sometimes it was because the father wasn't supportive; more than one mother described a marriage that collapsed over his refusal to see their child for who they were, and her refusal to stay. 

Sometimes the father was still processing, not in active opposition to his child living authentically, but not yet ready to do more than quietly accept them at home. 

And sometimes he was supportive, but couldn't bring himself to be seen co-signing his child anywhere outside the walls of the house.

It was baffling and dismaying, and something I would come to learn was endemic to the parental advocacy space. Mothers on the front lines, fathers in absentia.

Beyond Time to Thrive, PTEC was replete with mothers from across the country working with the Human Rights Campaign to humanize gender-expansive children through storytelling from a parent's point of view.

It was there that I met the fathers I still consider family all these years later: men like Jose Trujillo, Joe Lemay, David Parr, Sean Bell, and Frank Gonzales. 

I was thankful, and relieved, to know there were men who believed that raising children was a job for two parents, and who were willing to shoulder the burden. 

None of them was the face of his child's advocacy. But even when their wives stood at the forefront, these men were present.

As I learned their stories, I came to understand something about men in advocacy spaces. Men are uncomfortable around gender. They're even more uncomfortable talking about it.

Whether their children were trans, nonbinary, gender non-conforming, agender, or gender fluid, most of the dads I met grappled in one way or another with reconciling who their child was telling them they were against what these men knew of their child's sex assignment at birth, and with how, because of that assignment, they were being called to adjust.

The fathers of transgender daughters had to contend with a blow to their own sense of manhood when a child assigned male at birth rejected that gender for a feminine one. 

What did that say about them? About their masculinity, their "control" over their household? Even the men who were never manly men (chopping wood, hunting) wrestled with what it meant that their child no longer identified with the "man of the house."

How would they face family, neighbors, colleagues who knew they had a son, when their daughter showed up at the next company barbecue? Thanksgiving dinner? The school dance?

Many recounted the arguments at home: debates about being too permissive, pleas to pause and let the phase pass, ultimatums delivered and eventually withdrawn. More often than not, it was the father being dragged, unwillingly, toward affirmation.

Fortunately for me, I met these fathers on the far side of it. They had excised their demons and looked back on their era of obstinance with shame and regret. More than one wished he could go back in time and correct the error of his ways, to undo the damage he'd caused his child.

In PTEC I found a group of fathers willing to be seen, publicly, supporting their children. Men for whom love was greater than shame, or fear, or uncertainty.

When The Dads was first released on Netflix, I found fathers willing to tell their stories again and again, in cities across the country. In venues large and small, these men were examples of vulnerable, affirming fatherhood. And slowly but surely, I found pockets of affirming fathers.

The documentary gave rise to our second fathers' retreat, and our little band of brothers grew from six in 2022 to twelve in 2024, eighteen in 2025, and thirty-one in 2026. Contrary to what I had seen in those first few years, there were fathers who supported their children and were willing to do so on the record.

But despite what I saw at the retreats, that same fervor was missing everywhere else. I would come home reenergized and ready for the fight, only to find myself once again alone, or standing alongside women, when the fight resumed.

When Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White pulled their stunt declaring for the WNBA, the voices insisting that "biological men" don't belong in women's sports were overwhelmingly men. And not just any men. Men with platforms. Joe Rogan. Stephen A. Smith. Even Charles Barkley, who once told the LGBTQ+ community he loved them, now argued that "under no circumstances" should trans women compete.

None of them has anything to say about the rampant misogyny that runs through sports and harms all women, cisgender or not. They have nothing to say about the harm that regularly befalls women, because they don't actually care about it. This was about seizing the spotlight and centering themselves, not about the safety of women.

And in this "debate" (patently laughable, given that there are no transgender women in the WNBA and, by the NCAA president's own testimony to the Senate, fewer than ten transgender athletes in all of college sports), the men who might have spoken up for trans people were once again missing. Where were the fathers with proximity, the men who actually know and love a gender-expansive child?

When I attended the signing of New Jersey's Shield Law in Montclair a few weeks ago, the crowd assembled on North Fullerton looked like the virtually all-female crowd that had gathered in the statehouse months earlier, during the Senate and Assembly committee hearings for the bill that eventually became law.

I remember how many women thanked me afterward for testifying, and how much it meant to them that a father had spoken up. It disturbs me still how low the bar is set for men in advocacy spaces.

This is why The Dads Foundation exists: to help dads find their voices, so that when the moment calls, they're ready. When you come to The Dads Foundation, we take you as you are, without judgment or expectation. My one requirement is that you show up fully.

We are in unprecedented times, when men who do not have gender-expansive children feel emboldened to impose their worldview on the rest of us. When someone with no lived experience, no meaningful proximity to the communities they want to regulate or marginalize, reaches for that power, the only sensible response is to push back. Forcefully. Vociferously.

That means showing up. It means speaking up. It means challenging lies with truth and disinformation with accurate information. It means defending the defenseless. It means acting, rather than waiting for someone else to act.

And do you know why we do it? Not for the spotlight. Not to be seen as noble or righteous. We do it because our kids are watching.

A gender-expansive child who watches their father sit silently while their life is debated, attacked, and legislated learns something about how that father feels about them, no matter how affirmed they are at home.

A father who won't correct a transphobic joke told by a family friend or a comedian on television, who won't push back when arguments for trans kids in sports are twisted, who lets disinformation go unchallenged, is telling his child that he can't be relied on to protect them from the quiet, cumulative toll of those attacks.

The silence speaks volumes. It tells that child more than words of affirmation ever could.

For weeks something has been simmering inside of me about the death of Nolan Wells. The tragedy of losing an eighteen-year-old has been overshadowed by something almost as disturbing, and that is the quickness with which some people have rushed to exonerate the friends he was with, while simultaneously throwing Black people under the bus.

I am speaking specifically of Officer Tatum, the Black conservative commentator, social media personality and former Arizona police officer who has taken to his platforms to defend the friends of Nolan Wells. Wells was a Black teenager from Mississippi who went out on a July 4th boat trip to Horn Island with three white friends and never came home. His body was recovered two days later. Local authorities have been quick to call it a drowning with no foul play, even as his family and their attorney press for a fuller accounting, and even as basic questions about that day remain unanswered.

What makes Officer Tatum’s involvement so harmful is that he has literally nothing to do with the case. He is not an investigator with the state of Mississippi. He is not with the FBI. He is not an attorney retained to represent the young men who were on that boat. He is a private individual who has seen fit to step into the fray and offer a platform to exonerate them, rehabilitating their names in the court of public opinion before the facts have been fully established.

He has not called on them to offer a complete accounting of what happened to Nolan. Instead he has given them room to deny any involvement in his death, despite what appears to be a mountain of inconsistencies surrounding the story of that day. Let me be clear about something, though. This is not about what actually happened on that island. None of us were there, and I am not pretending to know. What I am writing about is the reflex, the speed with which some Black people will step up in defense of white people before they will extend that same grace, that same benefit of the doubt, to one of their own.

Unfortunately, there is a long history of that in the Black community. Brandon Orlando Tatum is not the first and will not be the last to side with white people to the exclusion of his own. History is replete with the archetype. We have called them Uncle Toms, house negroes, coons, sellouts, oreos, and every flavor of pick-me, people who go out of their way to align themselves with their oppressors to the detriment of their own people.

Candace Owens, Stephen A. Smith, Omarosa, Herschel Walker, Tim Scott, Kanye West, Jason Whitlock, Azealia Banks, Clarence Thomas, and Nicki Minaj are just a few of the more prominent names that come to mind when I think about people who have, in one way or another, sold their own community short for proximity to power.

So why do it? Why do members of the Black community stan for the man? And why, for that matter, do any marginalized people align themselves with the very forces that harm them? It is not as though Black folks are the only ones who do it. Think of Latinos for Trump, who cast their ballots for a man and an administration that turned around and targeted their communities with ICE raids and mass deportation. Why would anyone hand power to the person who has done so much to hurt them?

In the case of Black people, the shorthand answer is internalized racism. But if I am being truthful about what sits underneath it, the more accurate word is self-hatred.

Where does that come from? That part is easy to trace. It comes from being fed a continuous diet of negative depictions of yourself. In film, in print, on television and radio, in advertising, in the news, in the very programming that raises us. A show like COPS was a hit not because it stopped crime but because it projected Black people as the criminals and the men and women in blue as the heroes protecting everyone else from our supposed savagery.

Countless movies and shows have done the same work, casting Black people as criminals, prostitutes, dealers, addicts, uneducated and ghetto, while casting white people as law-abiding, hardworking, educated, affluent and sophisticated. In those stories white characters are the heroes of every tale, and they are almost always redeemed even when the tale takes a turn for the worse.

Starting all the way back with Birth of a Nation, Black people have been cast as crazed brutes, and despite the sheer unmitigated propaganda of it all, many Black people came to see themselves as irredeemably damaged goods. By any honest measure that is a lie. Black people are no more criminal, depraved, violent or broken than any other group. If anything, given everything this country has put us through, Black people have shown themselves to be remarkably honest, empathetic, resilient and healed. And yet the lie has done its work anyway.

Within nearly every marginalized group there are pockets of people who have swallowed the harmful stories told about them. When it comes to race, Black people who believe and repeat the ugly things racists say about them are living with internalized racism. Internalized racism is the adoption of those toxic myths and negative depictions about our own culture. It happens when a person unconsciously absorbs the poisonous narrative of their oppressor until it hardens into a profound sense of self-hatred, diminished worth, and a fractured sense of who they are.

It has roots that reach back to slavery, when some of the enslaved sided with the slave catchers rather than with the people in the field beside them. It carried on through the failed promise of Reconstruction and the terror of Jim Crow, when survival so often depended on performing loyalty to the very system that was strangling you, and it persists today in subtler but no less damaging forms.

You may be wondering why I have gone so deep into the history of racism in an essay that began with one young man’s death. I have done it because internalized racism does not fall from the sky. It is the direct and intended result of a systematic effort to paint Black people as less than. The campaign to disparage us has been, and continues to be, so effective that self-hatred took root in the very people it was designed to break.

But Black people are not the only ones who carry this kind of wound. Members of the LGBTQ community, and transgender people most acutely, have endured their own sustained campaigns to paint them as deviant, as dangerous, as other. And those campaigns produce the same feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing, the same quiet surrender in which a person stops fighting the narrative and unconsciously adopts the perspective of the people attacking them. How else can you explain a person repeating the cruel, dehumanizing stereotypes about transgender people that are used to justify stripping away their rights and their safety?

The pattern is old. The early gay rights movement itself often pushed transgender people to the margins, distancing itself from the very people who had helped lead the fight, in the hope that respectability might buy acceptance. Roy Cohn is perhaps the starkest example of what internalized homophobia can do. A closeted gay man who spent his career persecuting others, including gay people, he denied who he was to his dying breath while doing real and lasting harm to the community he refused to claim.

And in our own moment, someone like Caitlyn Jenner, a transgender woman who has used her platform to champion political positions that undercut the rights and dignity of other transgender people, shows how internalized transphobia can turn a person against her own.

Here is what worries me most, though. The tragedy is not simply that a person can be brought to hate a part of themselves. The greater danger is when the parents, the families and the communities around that person fail to recognize it is happening, or fail to do anything to counter it. A child absorbing these messages does not announce it. It shows up as shame, as withdrawal, as a young person shrinking to fit a world that keeps telling them they do not belong in it. And too often the people who love that child most read the silence as a phase, or worse, quietly agree with the world.

So if you are raising, loving, or standing beside a transgender young person, the work of protecting them from this kind of self-hatred is not passive. It begins with pushing back, out loud and without apology, against the harmful narratives about LGBTQ people wherever they appear, so your child never has to wonder whose side you are on. It means being mindful of what you consume and what you allow into your home, because the same steady diet of dehumanizing images that taught generations of Black children to doubt themselves is being served to trans children right now, and children internalize what surrounds them.

It means affirming your child’s worth both implicitly and explicitly, not only in the grand moments but in the ordinary ones, in the way you say their name, in the way you introduce them, in the way you make plain that their existence is not up for debate in your house. It means modeling inclusivity by surrounding your family with a genuinely diverse community, so that belonging is something your child sees and feels rather than something they are merely told about. And it means lifting up the contributions transgender and LGBTQ people have made to art, to science, to movements for justice, to the whole of our society, so that your child grows up understanding they come from a lineage of people worth admiring, not a caricature worth escaping.

I keep coming back to Nolan Wells, and to the reflex that had people rushing to defend everyone but him. The same machinery that trains a person to instinctively side against their own is the machinery that teaches a child to hate the truest part of themselves. It is the same poison, poured into different wounds. We cannot always control the campaigns waged against the people we love. But we can refuse to let those campaigns finish their work inside our own homes. We can be the voice that says, clearly and early and often, you are not the lie they told you. You are ours, and you are loved exactly as you are.

In today’s topics, we talk about studies which reaffirm that trans youth do not regret transitioning, others which debunks the myth that puberty blockers irreversibly harm bone density, and educate folks on upcoming ballot measures targeting trans youth.

In Allies & Assholes we highlight the WNBA, celebrating Cheryl Reeves for her staunch defense of trans athletes, and drag Sophie Cunningham for being an ignorant transphobe.

I’ve been struggling to find the words the past few days to express how I’m feeling.

One of the people I’ve grown especially close to in the years since Hobbes first shared his identity with me just passed away.

He wasn’t sick. In fact, he was living his best life on vacation in Costa Rica. We had spoken just about a week ago at one of our planning meetings. He was excited to be taking a much-needed break, and we talked about all the things we had planned for his return.

All through the week, his Instagram stories let us follow him from poolside to scenic island views, to resorts and the occasional obligatory drink shot.

That was until Monday morning, when I got the call that he had died.

I just stared at the phone when I heard the news, as if not touching it or responding would somehow make what I’d heard go away.

I’ve been in a state of disbelief since. I know it’s true, but I don’t want to accept that he’s gone.

I’ve been going through our chats, wanting to remind myself of him. His spirit. His energy. As I scrolled through our conversation, it was full of graphics he’d designed for the foundation’s social media pages. A post to celebrate International Non-Binary Peoples Day. Another promoting the 9th Annual Philadelphia Trauma Training Conference, where one of our dads was going to be presenting. A QR code graphic to accompany an online resource we shared in response to the SCOTUS ruling on trans athletes in sports.

The last thing he sent me were three simple words that defined our relationship: “I got you.”

Carlos was a constant source of inspiration and ideas about the many ways we could deepen our support for fathers of gender-expansive children. The last time we were all together was a virtual call he convened for us to process the SCOTUS decision. He knew many of the dads with small children were likely struggling to understand what the ruling meant, and he wanted to create a space for them to ask questions, vent, and simply process their feelings.

I’m still in a fog.

I’ve been trying for the last few days to write something down, to put words to what I’m feeling. But each time I start, I end up here. Struggling. On the precipice of breaking down in tears.

And then a dad checks in and asks how I’m doing. And then another. And for a moment, I’m pulled from my malaise.

As sad as I am, I realize the dad checking in on me is struggling too. In that moment, I’m not thinking about my loss and the hole I’m trying to process. Instead, I’m reaching out to another father to see how he’s doing. This steady rhythm of being checked on and checking in on others has become its own form of healing.

The night we learned of Carlos’s passing, more than thirty of us jumped on an impromptu Zoom call to process the news and, more importantly, to celebrate the brother we’d just lost.

Although the call started as a chance to figure out what happened, one of the dads reminded us that it wouldn’t help to ruminate over the circumstances of his death. Our time would be better spent on why we were gathering in the first place: to celebrate Carlos. That call became a catalyst, inspiring the dads to share photos and videos of themselves with Carlos, stories of experiences they’d shared with him, and small pieces of advice he’d given each of us along the way.

Carlos’s death revealed something I already knew about the dads but hadn’t seen this clearly until now: we really do have each other’s backs. As dads began sharing their Carlos stories that Monday night, I realized just how much he had touched all of our lives, not just mine.

There was the trans dad Carlos called to ask how best to support his own trans son. What should he be looking out for? What should they be thinking about as Jayden got older? What resources were out there for trans men? And there was one of our newest dads, who felt seen in a room full of strangers by the one guy who truly “got him,” and how refreshing it was not only to feel seen, but to know it in your bones.

Selfishly, I’m going to miss Carlos because, beyond being an amazing person willing to lend an ear to anyone, he was incredibly gifted in brand and visual design, graphics, storytelling, communications, and development. With a nonprofit background at the Boy Scouts of America and the Human Rights Campaign, working at every level of both organizations, he brought a wealth of knowledge and experience to our fledgling foundation.

Whenever I had an idea and shared it with Carlos, within minutes he’d whip up a mock-up, a graphic, an outline, something that took my rambling and turned it into something we could act on. Our logo, brand colors, font, design aesthetic: virtually every visual element of The Dads can trace its origin to Carlos.

Beyond that, as our Director of Brand & Storytelling, Carlos was single-handedly responsible for The Dads’ social media presence. Every post, reel, and story was created, designed, and published by him. In the short time since our page went up, we’ve seen incredible engagement and growth, in no small part because of Carlos. Our post honoring International Non-Binary People’s Day was a perfect example of how connected he was to our mission. He had a gift for normalizing and acknowledging people of all stripes and walks of life.

Carlos’s spirit was always one of service to others. As sad as I’ve been, I remind myself of his indomitable spirit, his relentlessly generous nature, and his deep commitment to the value and importance of community.

I got you, Carlos. We got you.

On the Fourth of July, he went out to Horn Island with three friends. They came back. He didn’t. His body was found two days later at the northwestern tip of the island.

His mother, Christine Wonsley, spent that first night on Facebook, begging anyone who would listen to pray her son was found alive. She had his phone. She went out to the island herself to look for him.

Sit in that for a second before you form an opinion about anything else.

Because what happened next is the part I can’t get past. Not his death. The response to it.

Within days, the family was told there was no evidence of foul play. Within days, the online conversation had already turned — not to what happened to him, but to what did he do. He chose to stay behind. He must have. The sheriff said it sounded that way.

And so a mother who had just lost her child had to hire Ben Crump, stand beside Al Sharpton, and beg the country, publicly and in tears, for someone to simply find out what happened to her son.

“We just want to know what happened and why our baby didn’t come home.”

That is the bare minimum. And she had to ask for it.

She is now paying for an independent autopsy — funded by Colin Kaepernick, performed in Washington by a doctor with no ties to Mississippi — because she does not trust the state to tell her the truth about her own child.

I know this machinery. I know it from somewhere else. I know it from the work I do every day.

When a Black child dies, the child is adultified. Stripped of innocence. Recast, inside a single news cycle, from a boy into a man, from a victim into a participant in his own death. Nolan was eighteen. A college kid. He was somebody’s baby. And the internet went to work on him before his mother had a body to bury.

The sympathy, meanwhile, flows the other way. Toward the ones who came back. We are invited to imagine how frightened they must have been, how confusing it all was, how unfair the scrutiny is. Compassion in this country has a current to it, and it runs uphill.

When a trans child dies, the same machinery turns on. They are deadnamed in the coverage. Misgendered in the police report. Discussed as ideology instead of as kids. Their identity is treated not as who they were but as the cause — as though being themselves was the provocation.

Brianna Ghey, 16. Ariyanna Mitchell, 17. Ally Lee Steinfeld, 17. Pauly Likens, 14. Nex Benedict, 16.

Fourteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. These are children.

And their parents — parents who loved them, who fought for them, who were doing the hard, unglamorous, daily work of keeping a kid alive in a country that has made a political project out of them — were not allowed to simply mourn. They had to defend. They had to correct the record on their own child’s name while planning a funeral.

Suspicion instead of sympathy. 

Criticism instead of condolence. 

Condemnation instead of compassion.

Here is what makes it unbearable. Here is the part I need you to actually hear.

This country knows how to grieve a child.

The day before Nolan went out on that boat, a storm tore across Geneva Lake in Wisconsin. A downburst — winds near a hundred miles an hour, trees and power lines down across Walworth County. A boat with ten people aboard took on water, rolled, and sank.

Three children drowned. Kathryn Schmidt, ten, called Kate by everyone who knew her. Abigail Oswald, seven. Caleb Oswald, six. Cousins. Every one of them in a properly fitted life jacket. Their father wrote that Caleb and Abigail weren’t just brother and sister, they were best friends, and that they filled the house with laughter and music and hugs.

And the country responded the way it should have. Strangers gave. The fundraisers filled. The family publicly thanked the divers and the deputies and the medics who went into that water for their kids.

Nobody asked what the children had done. Nobody suggested they’d chosen it. Nobody went looking for the angle that would make it their fault.

That is what grief is supposed to look like. Those families deserved every dollar and every prayer. I would not take a cent of it back.

The compassion is right there. It exists. It is abundant. It is fully operational.

It’s just conditional.

That’s the whole argument. The capacity is not the problem — the distribution is. And when you can predict, reliably, before you know a single fact, which grieving mother gets the vigil and which one gets the interrogation, you are not looking at a failure of feeling. You are looking at a hierarchy of who counts.

I want to tell you something I’m not proud of.

Earlier this year my son asked me to cover his portion of a trip to the Outer Banks with his frat brothers. An ordinary ask. Not without precedent. I’d sent his older sister and her roommates to Puerto Rico. I’d sent his older brother and his roommates to Ocean City.

I hesitated on this one. And I have made myself be honest about why.

My son is Black. My son is trans. And when he asked me for money for a beach trip, I did not think about money. I ran the arithmetic that parents like me run — two sets of it, simultaneously, the way we always do. 

Who is he going with? What do they know? What might they find out? What happens to him if they do? What happens to him on a road, in a car, on a beach, at night, far from me?

Matthew Shepard is never far from my mind. Dennis and Judy had no reason to imagine that the men who offered their son a ride home were not, in fact, offering him a ride home. That is the thing about the word friend. It does all its work in advance, and it offers no guarantees.

I talked to my partner about it. I talked to the fathers in my support group — grown men, sitting in a circle, trying to determine whether it was reasonable or paranoid to be afraid of a spring break trip.

And then Nolan Wells got on a boat with his friends and didn’t come back. And his mother is now paying out of pocket to find out why.

So, no. It wasn’t paranoid.

I don’t know whether the parents of white cisgender kids run these calculations. I suspect, mostly, they don’t have to. That is not an accusation. It’s just the shape of the thing.

But it’s why I’m writing this. To put the private torment on the record. To say out loud what it is to raise a Black gender-expansive child in this country — to carry both fears at once, every day, forever, and to have the world respond to that vigilance as though somehow you’re being dramatic.

And to say plainly: our children are being treated as throwaway. Not by everyone. But by enough of the public, enough of the press, and enough of the systems that are supposed to protect them, that a mother has to go on national television and ask the country to please just find out why her baby didn’t come home.

So here’s what I’m asking. It isn’t complicated.

When you learn that a Black child has died — grieve first. When you learn that a trans child has died — grieve first.

Not what did they do. 

Not what were they into. 

Not well, we don’t have the whole story yet.

Grieve. First. The way you did for Kate and Abigail and Caleb. The way you would if the child looked like yours.

Children are children. Treating some of their deaths as tragedies and others as puzzles to be solved at the family’s expense is inhumane, and I am done pretending it’s anything less than that.

We are all capable of doing better. We’ve proven it.

We just keep choosing who gets it.

I’m sitting with mixed emotions right now. New Jersey passed its shield law and the Supreme Court voted to let states discriminate against trans girls in sports, in Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., on the very same day.

On one hand, I’m relieved. New Jersey was the last blue state to pass this kind of law, and it protects both patients and providers of reproductive health care and gender-affirming care, shielding them from out-of-state subpoenas, warrants, and investigations aimed at punishing people for care that’s legal here. On the other hand, I’m devastated. The court’s decision effectively bans transgender girls and women from competing in girls’ and women’s school sports across the country.

While many commentators are focused on the more nuanced reading of these opinions, the broader takeaway is simpler and uglier: the government has effectively said that the needs and concerns of transgender student athletes don’t matter.

The justices could barely bring themselves to use the words “transgender girls” to describe the plaintiffs, referring to them instead as “transgender athletes” or “transgender students,” never once honoring their identity as girls. In one passage, they were called “biological men” so often that a reader could be forgiven for forgetting these were high school students.

What was especially disturbing to me was watching the justices seemingly make things up as they went along. Applying the wrong standard. Citing case law that didn’t apply. Usurping the role of the lower courts to act as fact-finders. Issuing a decision that went far beyond the case in front of them.

The vote was 6–3, split along predictable ideological lines on the constitutional question, but what struck me was that all nine justices, liberal and conservative alike, agreed the laws didn’t violate Title IX, they just couldn’t agree on why. That kind of unanimity reached by entirely different paths doesn’t happen on solid legal ground. It happens when a court is straining toward a preferred outcome and reasoning backward to justify it.

A few days after the decisions came down, one of the dads in my support group whose child plays sports convened an emergency meeting to help unpack what the ruling did and didn’t mean for other parents. Many of us still have minor children in school, kids involved in swimming, dance, and other school-sponsored or intramural sports. Some parents were concerned that even though they live in blue states without sports bans on the books, organizations would proactively cut trans kids from teams anyway, the same way many providers preemptively stopped offering care after the executive orders on healthcare came down.

That’s what a ruling like this actually does off the page: it doesn’t just close doors in states with active bans, it hands permission to everyone else. Athletic associations, camp directors, dance studios, and Little League commissioners who were previously willing to look the other way now have Supreme Court cover to reconsider. Parents in our group are having conversations most families never have to have: whether to tell a coach, whether to even let a child try out, whether the risk of public exposure outweighs the joy of being on a team. Kids are quietly disappearing from rosters, not because a law forced them off, but because their parents ran the numbers on humiliation and decided it wasn’t worth the fight this season. That’s the part no ruling measures and none ever will: the quiet withdrawal of children who just wanted to play.

In the days following the decision, I was interviewed on Office Hours, Marc Lamont Hill’s podcast, alongside Keisha Bell, founder of Rainbow In Black, about what this meant for families. Much like the Skrmetti decision last year, in which the Court found that Tennessee’s law restricting gender-affirming care fell within the state’s purview, the Court here found that banning trans girls from youth sports was a legitimate exercise of a state’s power to maintain sex-segregated spaces.

Sports bans, bathroom bans, gender-affirming care bans, they’re all the same thing: discrimination. They’ll tell you it’s about fairness, but never fairness for trans people. They’ll say it’s about safety, but never the safety of trans people. They’ll claim it’s for protection, but it’s never about protecting trans people.

It’s strange. Framed that way, most people can understand how barring a child from the bathroom that matches their gender is discriminatory. Targeting a minority’s access to public space is one of the oldest plays in the book. Think “Whites Only” signs. Most people can understand the harm of telling a child they can’t access medical care. If your own kid needed care and couldn’t get it, you’d be outraged. But for some reason, empathy runs out the moment sports enter the picture, as if the discrimination calculus suddenly becomes too hard to follow.

That’s how effective the right has been at packaging its arguments. The one thing you hear from nearly everyone when this comes up is: “it’s just common sense.” Invariably, the same “logical” argument follows: boys and men are naturally stronger, that’s why sports are sex-segregated in the first place, case closed. But that’s not logic. That’s marketing.

The right has spent decades on a deliberate campaign to win elections, focused on whatever issue would engage, or enrage, its base enough to get them to the polls. Before trans people, it was gay people: gay panic, the AIDS epidemic, the “sanctity of marriage,” all reliable ways to manufacture outrage and turn out votes. Before that it was other minorities entirely.

The right has always needed a threat vivid enough to mobilize people and safely distant enough that comfortable people didn’t have to feel cruel for going along with it. Polling, message testing, and focus groups told them exactly where the average American would have the fewest qualms of conscience, and there were always more than enough politicians willing to repeat the talking points, especially after hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign spending and years of lobbying had already primed the ground.

Once marriage equality was decided in 2015, that particular well ran dry. Gay rights, at least on marriage, was a settled question for most of the country, and the emotional urgency that had fueled a generation of campaigning faded with it. What replaced it, not organically but by design, was the fight over trans people specifically: a smaller, far less understood, and more vulnerable population that could be reintroduced to the public not as a minority in need of protection but as a manufactured threat.

Bathroom bills came first, North Carolina’s HB2 among the earliest and loudest. Then, in 2020, Idaho passed the first explicit ban on transgender girls in school sports, years before most Americans had given the subject a second thought. Then came a wave of gender-affirming care bans sweeping statehouses one after another, model legislation traceable almost word for word to the same handful of organizations. Alliance Defending Freedom didn’t just file friend-of-the-court briefs, it helped write the legislation, recruit the plaintiffs, and shape the media strategy.

The Heritage Foundation didn’t just publish position papers, it helped build the pipeline of judges who would eventually decide these cases. And most Americans, including plenty who now confidently repeat “it’s just common sense,” have no idea any of this happened. They believe this conversation emerged organically out of concern for girls’ sports. It didn’t. It was tested, funded, and executed with the discipline of a national ad campaign, and by the time it reached the Supreme Court, what had been a fringe position looked, to an uninformed public, like consensus.

Very few people connect the dots between the lobbying of politicians, the stacking of the Supreme Court, and the countless state laws targeting transgender people, and the coordinated efforts of organizations like Alliance Defending Freedom and the Heritage Foundation. But it doesn’t take much to see that the steady year-over-year rise in anti-trans legislation, the escalating rhetoric, the loss of access to care, and the erosion of public support are all downstream of the same campaign of misinformation and disinformation, a campaign that has now culminated in the Supreme Court co-signing states’ power to ban trans girls from playing sports.

And yet. On the same day the Court took something away, New Jersey gave something back. It’s the last blue state to get there, but it protects not just abortion providers and patients but the doctors, therapists, and families involved in gender-affirming care, and it does something the sports ruling can’t touch: it tells trans people and the people who love them that here, at least, the government will not hand them over. It won’t cooperate with an out-of-state subpoena. It won’t let another state’s investigators reach across a border to punish a parent for loving their kid correctly.

New Jersey joins a growing patchwork of states, California, New York, Illinois, Colorado, Washington, Massachusetts, and others, building something like a network of refuge in a country that increasingly doesn’t want trans people to exist in public at all. It isn’t everything. It doesn’t put a trans girl back on the swim team in Idaho or West Virginia. But it means something to families weighing whether they can stay in the state they call home, and it means something to families who can’t stay elsewhere and need somewhere to go.

Hope, these days, looks less like one sweeping federal protection and more like a state government simply refusing to participate in your erasure. I’ll take it. I have to. Because the alternative is despair, and despair doesn’t get anyone’s kid back on the team, back into the doctor’s office, or back into their own life. So I’ll sit with the mixed emotions, the relief and the devastation both, and keep doing the work in front of me: showing up for the dads in that support group, telling the truth about where this campaign came from, and holding the door open in whatever state still lets me.

I met a family recently after a screening of The Dads at Frameline in California, and they were simply the sweetest people I’ve encountered in a long time. Genuine, open, curious, and kind, they laughed easily, didn’t take themselves too seriously, and were empathetic to a fault.

I first noticed them talking to Wayne Maines outside the theater where the film had just screened. The wife introduced me as the director, which I quickly corrected, explaining that I was the producer and that the director credit belonged to Luchina.

She was immediately apologetic, even though it was an honest mistake. Most films are typically represented by their director, but Luchina and I had decided to split up the festival circuit to manage the conflicting demands of multiple screenings happening at once. She had taken Arkansas, while I covered California.

We got past the mix-up quickly, and she introduced me to her husband. Soon the three of us were deep in conversation about the movie and the importance of films like this in the current climate.

As is the case with most of these screenings, I was soon surrounded by people who wanted to talk. I found myself speaking with a set of grandparents whose grandchild had transitioned at thirty to nonbinary.

They were a gay couple, married for thirty-two years, who had only ever known this person as their granddaughter, and they were grappling with the shift to “they/them” pronouns.

I told them it would be difficult, but not impossible, and that what mattered most was the effort. It didn’t matter that they didn’t fully understand it. What mattered was that they kept trying and gave themselves grace when they slipped up.

Their grandchild had spent years coming to terms with who they were before feeling ready to share it with the world, I reminded them. They were only just learning this information, and they deserved the same time to acclimate to it.

After that, I spoke with a few more people before the festival organizers ushered us out to seat the next screening. I decided to head over to registration to pick up my festival credentials.

Ever since the first Dads screening at SXSW in 2023, I’ve collected the lanyard from every event I’ve attended in connection with my advocacy—small keepsakes that mark the journey.

Wayne Maines, along with Stephen Leidy—another father in the film—and his family, accompanied me, and we planned to grab dinner afterward.

Registration was set up at the festival lounge inside the historic Hamburger Mary’s, a few blocks from the Castro, where the screening had taken place. Wayne, Leidy, and I were taking selfies in front of the step and repeat when I noticed the couple from our screening grinning at us from a distance.

They had been so taken with us that they’d decided to follow along to Hamburger Mary’s to see what we were getting into. When we mentioned we were heading out for a bite to eat, they invited themselves along.

As we waited for our table at the pizza parlor a few doors down, the wife asked if it would be alright for their daughter to join us. Since we hadn’t been seated yet, we bumped our headcount from nine to ten, and the restaurant was able to accommodate us.

When we first sat down, the daughter wasn’t with them, and I assumed she might have changed her mind. But by the time the waiter had taken our drink and appetizer orders, the couple returned.

As it turned out, they’d been arranging a ride for her, and it was proving a little challenging. I found it curious that both of them were so involved in coordinating the logistics, but I chalked it up to them being a true partnership.

About halfway through dinner, their daughter finally arrived. They introduced her first to Wayne, with whom she took a picture, and then to the rest of us gathered around the table.

Their daughter was tall and thin, with several tattoos—which made her especially cool in my book—and for the most part she stayed quiet through the meal.

An hour or so into dinner, I realized I needed to head back to the hotel, grab my bags, and get to the airport for my redeye to Philly. Wayne offered to drive me, since he was also leaving—facing a three-hour drive of his own back home.

As we drove, he talked about how great it was that his friend’s daughter had joined us. He told me about the difficulties she’d faced, and how her parents were still doing everything they could to support her.

And then it hit me. The reason her parents had been so enamored with us had nothing to do with any star status.

They had followed us because we were the community they’d been needing—people who could help keep their spirits buoyed while their daughter worked through her challenges. We were possibility models.

We represented a future in which their daughter was thriving and they were no longer navigating it alone.

That is the beauty of this film. It creates opportunities to carry our message of affirmation and support across the country, and to build pockets of community wherever families need them.

Stories like Ivy’s, and like those of every father in The Dads, do more than inform—they show people what’s possible. They turn strangers in a theater lobby into companions at a dinner table.

And in a moment when so many families feel isolated and afraid, that may be the most powerful thing storytelling can do: remind us that none of us has to do this alone.

The holiday honors fathers and celebrates fatherhood, paternal bonds, and the influence of fathers in society.

It was first proposed by Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane, Washington, in 1910, in honor of her father, a Civil War veteran who raised six children on his own. More than a century later, much of that original spirit has been lost to commercialization.

But there are still pockets in our society where celebrating men for showing up for their children and families remains the whole point.

The Congressional Dads Caucus is one such space.

Formed in 2023, the caucus is the brainchild of Rep. Jimmy Gomez, D-Calif., who described it as “rooted in a simple idea: Dads need to do our part advancing policies that will make a difference in the lives of so many working families across the country.”

Its mission is grounded in a fundamental belief—that fathers need to do more, both at home and in the halls of Congress, advocating for policies that uplift parents and children.

Last week, I got to see that belief in action.

The caucus hosted its annual Father’s Day Week of Action in Washington, D.C., alongside Equimundo: Center for Masculinities and Social Justice—an organization that has worked here and internationally since 2011 to engage men and boys as allies in gender equality, to promote healthy manhood, and to prevent violence.

On Tuesday night, Equimundo and the caucus hosted the Fourth Annual Dad Ambassador Awards, recognizing leaders advancing policies and initiatives that support fathers, caregivers, children, and working families.

The evening brought together advocates, policymakers, business leaders, and community partners to celebrate the work of building a more equitable future for families. This year’s honorees included actor and advocate Bradley Whitford; actor and producer Tim Daly; Songs for Littles co-creator Aron Accurso; physician and public health advocate Dr. Ilan Shapiro; digital creator and cancer awareness advocate Sidney Raskind; immigrant advocate Darlin Adonay Peña; the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers; and filmmaker Luchina Fisher and me, on behalf of The Dads Foundation.

The following day, the caucus joined Equimundo at the Library of Congress for a Congressional Briefing centered on a simple, stubborn reality: raising a family has become harder, even as parents keep doing everything they can to care for their children.

Speakers explored how fatherhood changes people—and the role public policy can play in helping parents succeed. Rep. Joaquin Castro spoke to the caucus’s commitment to making life easier for working families.

I joined a discussion moderated by Jerome Hunter, alongside Equimundo President and CEO Gary Barker and ParentsTogether’s Adam Ukman, where we shared perspectives on fatherhood, the value of care, and what it will take to ensure families aren’t left to shoulder these challenges alone.

We also heard findings from Equimundo’s latest research, which showed that caring for family remains one of the most meaningful parts of people’s lives—even as so many parents struggle to find the time and support they need.

Over those two days, I couldn’t shake one juxtaposition.

Inside those halls, men were leaning into caregiving—making space to listen, to sit with difficult subjects, to name their own vulnerabilities.

But just down the road, a cage was being erected on the White House lawn to stage a blood sport, an overt performance of “masculinity.”

The contrast couldn’t have been starker. One group gathered quietly, trading fanfare for intimate conversations about hard things. The other wrapped itself in spectacle, touting cage matches as the ultimate proof of manhood—theatrics masquerading as substance.

And it wasn’t lost on me that, days later, one of the men associated with that spectacle would go on to claim that our former First Lady, Michelle Obama, is a man.

No one in attendance—not the reporter conducting the interview, not the president or vice president, not the Secretary of State or the Speaker of the House, all men—saw fit to condemn, challenge, or even correct the deliberate misgendering of a former First Lady.

That silence is the whole problem.

One of the last questions posed to me at the congressional briefing was what men could do to help change things in society.

My answer came from billboards and signs that papered the New York subway years ago: if you see something, say something.

Too many people witness the discrimination or harassment of women, of LGBTQ people, of members of marginalized communities—and do nothing.

Too many act as though the suffering they observe has nothing to do with them, as though intervention wouldn’t make a difference. And so they stay quiet.

But one word, a kind gesture, a measured response can dramatically alter the trajectory of a situation.

Even when the outcome doesn’t change, you never know how your standing up might change the way others see it—or change them.

Someone who watches another person speak up for someone else may be moved to do the same down the line. That’s how courage spreads.

This is the work The Dads Foundation was built for. We exist to highlight the life-saving role fathers play in the lives of their gender-expansive children.

Our partnership with the Ali Forney Center reinforces that truth by showing, plainly, where children rejected by their families too often end up.

So this Father’s Day, let’s celebrate the fathers who show up for their children—cisgender and gender-expansive alike. Especially the ones who model vulnerability and empathy, who give of themselves on behalf of others. Those are the men worth honoring.

Let’s remember why William Jackson Smart was celebrated by his daughter in the first place.

It’s Pride Month, and for thirty days businesses, brands, and people make a big deal of showing their pride — their love and support of all things LGBTQ. From rainbow flags to themed merchandise to floats in Pride parades in cities across the nation, it seems that everyone, for one month, is an ally of the LGBTQ community.

And yet I can’t help but think: where were all these people when Persia Amarra Conway’s body was found last week in Houston? Who showed up for Erika Caldwell when she was murdered by her boyfriend? Why was there no outpouring of support for the family of Juniper Blessing? If we have so much pride and support for the community in June, where is that support the rest of the year?

That’s the tension I keep running into — the gap between the performance and the reality. It’s been increasingly hard to stomach the commercialization of Pride at a moment when nearly everything reflected back to us in society reinforces the opposite: that people do not, in fact, care about queer and gender-expansive people.

The rainbow logos go up in June and come down on July 1st, and somewhere in between, the actual lives of the people being celebrated continue to be treated as disposable.

The hypocrisy isn’t limited to corporations. This past weekend, I walked in the Pride march in Asbury Park alongside elected officials of all political stripes. I couldn’t help thinking about all the politicians who use Pride Month and its marches to shore up their LGBTQ bona fides.

People like Seth Moulton, who march as supposed allies one day and throw trans people under the bus the next. The flag in the parade and the betrayal in the policy too often belong to the same person.

Worse still are the efforts to sever Pride from its very meaning and origins. Take Tennessee, where lawmakers have designated June as “Nuclear Family Month” — a symbolic counter to the nationally recognized observance that honors the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, a pivotal moment for the Gay Liberation Movement in the United States.

It’s a regressive gesture, designed to reinforce a narrow definition of family and to quietly write the rest of us out of the picture.

So it’s worth remembering what the original Pride actually was. It was a protest against police brutality at the Stonewall Inn in New York City, where so-called “cross-dressing” laws gave police license to arrest transgender and gender-nonconforming people simply for existing.

On June 28, 1969, just after midnight, police raided the inn as they had so many times before — but this time, the patrons fought back. What followed was several days of protests and riots in the surrounding area, and a profound shift in the push for equality. Pride did not begin as a party. It began as resistance.

That history is why it stings so much to hear people suggest that Pride is unnecessary, or worse, some form of indoctrination. It’s a sign of how far we’ve drifted that the original purpose has been lost on so many. Too many people don’t appreciate what Pride is, why it’s celebrated, and why the visibility of LGBTQ people — if only for one month — matters so deeply.

They don’t know the significance of trans women of color in securing rights for all queer and gender-expansive people. They don’t see the intersection, the through-line that connects that night in 1969 to the fights still being waged today.

As the parent of a trans son, none of this is lost on me. But if I’m being honest, before Hobbes, I never thought about Pride at all. For me it was simply an excuse for gay people to party — something I didn’t have a problem with, but didn’t think much about either.

I knew nothing about Stonewall, nothing about the raids on queer establishments that gave rise to the protests, nothing about the history of that first Pride March.

Once I started on this journey of understanding, though, it became urgent to me — to celebrate Pride, to uplift LGBTQ people and their stories. And that feels far more true today than it did a decade ago, when my son first shared his truth with me. Ten years ago, things were hard for the LGBTQ community, but they weren’t this.

They weren’t relentless attacks by the federal government, constant attempts to erase queer and trans people from public life and the historical record, to restrict their movement, limit their access to care, and criminalize their very existence.

Which is exactly why Pride is just as necessary now as it was in 1969 — and probably even more so.

I know that sounds dramatic. Bear with me, because a little context is in order.

Four years ago, I attended my first dads retreat. There were six of us, led by Dennis Shepard — father of Matthew Shepard, the college student found beaten nearly to death, tied to a fence in Laramie, Wyoming, whose murder became a rallying cry for LGBTQ+ rights around the world. Joining Dennis were Wayne Maines, Frank Gonzales, Peter Betz, Jose Trujillo, and me.

We were different ages, different races and ethnicities, from different cultural backgrounds and educational experiences, each at a different point in our children’s gender journeys. But over that long weekend in Broken Bow, Oklahoma, we bonded over the shared experience of raising children the world wouldn’t — or couldn’t — fully love. We loved them fiercely. And over the course of that weekend, we found ways to support, comfort, energize, and empower one another.

I left Broken Bow transformed in ways I’m still processing, all these years later. But it was only the beginning.

Two years and a Netflix short later, Wayne and I were planning the second retreat. This time we headed to a remote island on Jo Mary Lake in Maine. Only three of the original six dads could make it, but we were joined by nine new ones — Aaron, AC, Alex, Carlos, Christoph, David, Derek, Ed, and JR.

Once again, we spent three days together fishing, hiking, swimming, and talking. During meals, huddled around tables, walking side by side on trails, sitting around the campfire late into the evening, we talked about our shared joys and our shared fears. We found comfort in the simple, profound fact that we were not alone in our struggles. That other men knew this path we were walking, and were there — stride for stride.

It was during that trip to Buckhorn Camps, a secluded hunting lodge turned retreat center, that we learned the documentary short produced from our first retreat had won a Daytime Emmy. The news, and Luchina’s inspiring acceptance speech, lit a fire in each of us. If Broken Bow had been transformative, Jo Mary Lake was transcendent.

When we left Maine, we knew this was far from over. Wayne’s idea of bringing fathers of gender expansive children together on fishing trips had proven to be inspired, and we immediately began planning our third retreat.

Alex — one of the new dads — and I took on the logistics. We’d doubled our numbers from six to twelve, and knew we’d need a space that could hold the growing community of dads who wanted to come. We settled on a meditation center in Janesville, Minnesota, where seven returning dads were joined by eleven new ones: Andy, Bill, Casey, Chris, Don, Justin, Mike, Ross, Ryan, Stephen, and Steve.

Janesville marked a turning point in more ways than one. The loose, organic conversations we’d had around the dinner table at Buckhorn — questions tossed out between bites, stories that spilled into the night — had grown into something more intentional. Real sessions, with real facilitators. The kind of structure that tells you a movement is maturing.

We were also joined by a full production crew, there to capture the weekend on film and pick up the thread of the story they’d started telling the year before. There were moments when cameras and schedules bumped up against the natural rhythm of the weekend, as you’d expect.

But that’s the thing about this group — you can’t manufacture what happens when these dads get together. The crew could film it, but they couldn’t create it. Despite the occasional disruption, we did what we always do: we bonded, we built, and we held each other up.

We left Janesville with our cups full, looking forward to next year, when we could meet again.

This year’s retreat was organized by three of those alumni — Chris, Casey, and Don — who found the beautiful Bethel Horizons retreat center in Dodgeville: a sprawling oasis of trees, trails, and scenic views, spacious enough to hold the thirty-one dads who made the trip. Fifteen returning dads were joined by sixteen new ones: Adam, Bryan, Chris, Clarence, Daniel, Dave, Jason, Jeremy, Joe, Josh, Justin, Ken, Matt, Paul, Steve, and Tristan.

Standing there on the first morning, looking out at thirty other dads, I had to take a moment. What had started as an intimate gathering of six men commiserating around a campfire had grown into something much larger — an in-demand event drawing fathers from across the country, all coming to find one another and learn how to better support their kids.

The numbers had changed, but the makeup of the group had not. There were dads brand new to the journey — one had only learned his daughter was trans six weeks before. Another had recently moved his daughter out of Texas, driven by fear for her safety. Another was wrestling with a deep, overwhelming sense of hopelessness about what the future held for his children. And then there were the veterans — dads who had been walking this road for years and had come back, again and again, because they knew what this space offered.

As our numbers grew, so did our programming. The wide, unstructured stretches of time for fishing and hiking were now bookended with formal sessions, led and facilitated by the dads themselves. There were discussions around coming out stories. Sessions on gender affirming care. Conversations about media and activism. A focus group dedicated to building a resource guide for new dads. There was yoga, meditation, mindfulness. The weekend was full — not in a hectic way, but in the way that matters, when every hour feels like it counts.

Through all of it, one thing became unmistakably clear: this gathering was a necessary salve, no matter where you were on your journey.

That truth came into sharp focus on the very first day. During one session, fathers were invited to share their children’s coming out stories — how they first learned about their child’s identity and how they responded. One father said quietly that he had never told that story to anyone outside his immediate family. He shared how deeply he feared for his trans daughter, who had been an adult when she came out to him.

Something about the way he held his fear — the careful, practiced way he carried it — struck something deep in me.

I realized, sitting in that room surrounded by thirty other dads, that I was scared too. My son is a trans man. He’s nineteen, almost twenty, in college, living in a blue state, with his care intact. By any measure, we are in a relatively safe place. And yet. The fear never fully goes away. The fear that his hospital could stop providing care. That his existence could be criminalized. That the government’s assault on trans people could intensify and reach him in ways I can’t yet anticipate or prevent.

That realization broke something open in me. I remember sobbing, almost involuntarily: “Why can’t they just leave our kids alone?” Over and over. I wasn’t the only one.

There were many moments like that over the course of the weekend. Fathers permitting themselves to feel what they had been carrying — grief, fear, anger, love — knowing that whatever came out would be held without judgment by the men in that room. That kind of safety is rare. It doesn’t happen by accident.

That is the gift of these retreats.

There are plenty of spaces in the world that will tell fathers of trans and gender expansive kids what to think, what to fear, what to fight. But there are precious few places that simply ask: How are you doing? And what do you need? Places where the answer can be honest, and messy, and real.

What Wayne started with six guys on a fishing trip in Oklahoma has grown into something I don’t think any of us fully anticipated — a community of fathers bound not by ideology or agenda, but by love for our children and a commitment to showing up for one another. Every retreat, we add new brothers to that family. Every retreat, someone arrives carrying something they’ve never said out loud, and leaves a little lighter for having said it.

Thirty-one dads walked into the woods in Dodgeville, Wisconsin. Every single one of us walked out changed. That’s not an accident. That’s the work. And we’re just getting started.