Father arrested and jailed for calling his biologically female daughter "she": this week in the strange death of Canada

[Toni]

On this thread, a number of hypotheticals are being used and then we are being asked "would that be okay? Would that be abuse"?

The "illustrations" highlight words that are intended to be harmful and abusive and equate them to the abuse of calling a female child 'she'.

Have you stopped to think about this?

Again: the child is male in every way that matters to him. The child is no more mixed up about his identity than you are about your sexual preferences.

I did not call the child 'mixed up'. I called the child female.

You are the one who is mixed up.

The child is in a much better position to understand who they are than either of us.

 

[Toni]

Woah. TomC is a Brony.

It's the eye of the pony...

I'll assume that you're both insulting me because you'd rather avoid my posts.

I don't know what else to do. I don't know what a brony is or the eye of the pony.

I also do not always know what a term or figure of speech means or means in a particular context. Google is perfect for that. I'm pretty sure I'm older than you are so I think you are well up to the task. Or, if you still aren't sure, you can simply ask.

 

[Metaphor]

No: whether the father intended it as bullying or not, it did bully the child. It is difficult to believe that the father continued to refer to his child with female pronouns because he was struggling to overcome the way he spoke to and about his child and less about trying to reinforce his own view of who his child is, in contradiction to what the child has repeatedly stated. THAT makes it bullying and possibly abuse.

There could be several reasons why the father persisted after being ordered by the State to stop. But I'm glad to see that people have given up on their unevidenced claim that the father did it specifically to bully the child.

I think the father did not do it because he is a sadist but because he refuses to accept his child for who the child actually is. This is not a sudden revelation but has been something that has been discussed and professionally evaluated and counseled about for several years now. That's a big chunk of this kid's life. If the father truly cares about his child, then he should make good faith efforts to honor his child's preferences, even if he thinks the child is confused. The child is surely in ongoing counseling and surely the father has the opportunity to meet with his child's therapists, doctors, etc. to better understand his child.

Again, your own lack of imagination and lack of human empathy betrays you.

You do not know what somebody who 'truly cares' would do in this situation, because you don't know what the father's reasoning is.

 

[ZiprHead]

Maybe I'm just too old to even understand the insults on your forum.

You don't understand it but you think it's an insult. How does that work?

Ever been told off in a language you don't know, ZiprHead?

You think that's an apt analogy?

 

[laughing dog]

What is my evidence of what? That there's no evidence the father was using pronouns in order to bully his child?

The people on the thread who claim the father was using pronouns in order to bully his child need to furnish the evidence, not me.

That's a pretty tall order to think a sitting court judge would impose such an order for such a trivial reason. It doesn't pass the smell test. You're coming to your conclusion with no evidence. Just like you're charging others of doing.

I did not say the judge did it for no reason.

Everyone on the thread agrees the father kept calling his female child 'she' after ordered to stop by the judge.

Then came the following, unevidenced claims:

That the father continued because he wanted to bully his child
The father went out of his way to find opportunities to call the child 'she'
The father knew he was causing harm but is a sadist who kept doing it for no reason at all.

Nobody has introduced evidence for the above claims, and I do not accept people's lack of imagination as to how it could be otherwise as evidence.

I don't think it is possible to provide evidence for claims one has not made. No one called this father a sadist. I do not recall anyone claiming the father wanted to bully his child or that the father had no reason for causing harm to his child. Until you provide evidence to support your claims, your entire post is an example of a double standard.

Furthermore, as a number of posters have pointed out, the harm to the child is independent of the father's intent or beliefs. Contrary to your unimaginative views, harassment, abuse and bullying do not require intent.

 

[TomC]

Maybe I'm just too old to even understand the insults on your forum.

You don't understand it but you think it's an insult. How does that work?

Easy.

I'm old but I'm not stupid.

I didn't know what "brony" meant until you explained it.
But now you have.

Was I wrong in assuming it was unflattering?
Or was I right?

 

[Ford]

I did not say the judge did it for no reason.

Everyone on the thread agrees the father kept calling his female child 'she' after ordered to stop by the judge.

Ergo, the father was arrested not for calling his child "she," but arrested for defying a court order. The crime is contempt of court, and he was not jailed for anything else.

Yet (again) your thread title, the title of the article you linked, and the entire thrust of the article was that his "real" crime was wanting his child to be a girl instead of a boy, that he's somehow the real victim here, and it is an issue of free speech.

It's not.

Is it bullying? We don't know, and that includes you, yet you have repeatedly made the case that there simply was no bullying involved whatsoever. There's no evidence presented, therefore it didn't happen. Yet (again) the only "evidence" provided thus far is a hopelessly biased article which only tells the one side.

It isn't a stretch to infer that there was something other than simply a father's love at work in the judge's decision.

 

[Metaphor]

As others have noted, family court is not always generous about sharing intimate details of a case.

And that lack of evidence was enough for multiple people to accuse the father of deliberately and sadistically bullying his child.

<snipped irrelevant details about source of story>

It bears repeating that the article doesn't share any information from the mother, the child, or the court's reasoning in the lead up to the imposition of the gag order and subsequent arrest for contempt. It merely tells the story of a poor, put-upon dad just trying to lovingly raise his daughter so that someday she can grow up and be all girly like he dreamed.

His daughter is already a girl, though she probably isn't 'girly'. I note you are now imagining that the father wants not only a female child, but also wants her to be 'girly'. What evidence do you have of that?

There is clearly something else going on in this family dynamic, and clearly something else going on in the case. Do we have evidence of what is actually going on?

Are we doing the opposite skits from 'You Can't Do That on Television'? I was the one who said people's claims about the father's motives and mind-states were unevidenced.

The title of your post - and of the article you linked - say otherwise. You claimed that the father was arrested and jailed for calling his transitioning child "she." He was not,

Yes, he was. He called his child 'she' when the judge forbid it, and he was arrested and jailed for it.

and now you've admitted that. You also threw in the "strange death of Canada" hyperbole because...?

Because it wouldn't be a proper thread without somebody kvetching about a dramatic linguistic flourish in the title.

That didn't happen. The L, the B, and the G have gotten out of their metaphorical closets and society didn't collapse. Yet now, faced with a decreasing ability to discriminate against or minimalize the LGB community, the "family values" crowd says "wait...what about the T?" and has turned their guns on the trans community.

LGB people never demanded that straight people call them straight.

What, may I ask, do you think constitutes 'turning their guns'? Is it asking not to jailed by the State for using pronouns conforming to a person's sex? Is it asking if women have the right to single-sex intimate spaces? Is it asking why biological males are allowed to compete with females in sport?

I asked a trans person on this board, probably about a year ago, what made a trans person trans. They said 'my sex conflicts with my gender identity'.

Now the board has become so radicalised (Toni for example) that that answer would be regarded as transphobic. Toni believes transmen are not only men, they're biologically male.

Trans activism has become so radicalised that the language used by the radicals is literally incoherent.

 

[TomC]

Ergo, the father was arrested not for calling his child "she," but arrested for defying a court order. The crime is contempt of court, and he was not jailed for anything else.

If you go back through the nearly 300 posts in this thread you'll find differently.
Plenty of posters have asserted that the father was jailed for abusing his child.

 

[laughing dog]

Ergo, the father was arrested not for calling his child "she," but arrested for defying a court order. The crime is contempt of court, and he was not jailed for anything else.

If you go back through the nearly 300 posts in this thread you'll find differently.
Plenty of posters have asserted that the father was jailed for abusing his child.

You ought to be able to actual quote someone on that in context.

 

[Metaphor]

I did not say the judge did it for no reason.

Neither did I.

Everyone on the thread agrees the father kept calling his female child 'she' after ordered to stop by the judge.

Then came the following, unevidenced claims:

That the father continued because he wanted to bully his child
The father went out of his way to find opportunities to call the child 'she'
The father knew he was causing harm but is a sadist who kept doing it for no reason at all.

Nobody has introduced evidence for the above claims, and I do not accept people's lack of imagination as to how it could be otherwise as evidence.

So you cannot imagine other reasons for the judges order and everyone else has the lack of imagination. How does that work?

People have a lack of imagination because they cannot comprehend why somebody would keep using 'she' pronouns for a female child after being told to stop by a judge, other than to be abusive.

I can think of reasons why somebody would keep using 'she' pronouns for his female child, even after being told to stop by a judge, including reasons that do not require that person to be doing it merely to bully. I've explained some of those possible reasons more than once.

 

[Ford]

Ergo, the father was arrested not for calling his child "she," but arrested for defying a court order. The crime is contempt of court, and he was not jailed for anything else.

If you go back through the nearly 300 posts in this thread you'll find differently.
Plenty of posters have asserted that the father was jailed for abusing his child.

I'm fairly certain that the court's decision had nothing to do with the posts in this thread. He was jailed for defying a court order. From a legal standpoint, that's the issue, and it seems pretty clear cut, no?

A court orders you to stop doing something. You keep doing that something. You wind up in jail.

That much we know. Beyond that, we don't know much. We can infer that the court had good reason to issue the order, but we can't know for sure, since we don't have all the necessary information. We can also infer (as Metaphor and the authors of the linked article have) that the judge is visiting a travesty of injustice upon this poor, put-upon father who is just trying to raise a girl (despite what the kid wants) and he's the victim of a heartless system dead set on destroying gender roles, but we can't know for sure since we don't have all the necessary information.

Does anyone in this thread have the mother's side of things? The child's side of things? I don't. Metaphor doesn't. You don't.

So we're all just making guesses. Some educated, some less so. Clearly there is more to the story than the OP article is letting on.

 

[Jarhyn]

I did not say the judge did it for no reason.

Everyone on the thread agrees the father kept calling his female child 'she' after ordered to stop by the judge.

Ergo, the father was arrested not for calling his child "she," but arrested for defying a court order. The crime is contempt of court, and he was not jailed for anything else.

Yet (again) your thread title, the title of the article you linked, and the entire thrust of the article was that his "real" crime was wanting his child to be a girl instead of a boy, that he's somehow the real victim here, and it is an issue of free speech.

It's not.

Is it bullying? We don't know, and that includes you, yet you have repeatedly made the case that there simply was no bullying involved whatsoever. There's no evidence presented, therefore it didn't happen. Yet (again) the only "evidence" provided thus far is a hopelessly biased article which only tells the one side.

It isn't a stretch to infer that there was something other than simply a father's love at work in the judge's decision.

This wasn't anything more than a father's love... For himself, his views, and his own false image of who his son ought be.

That he mistakes his love for himself as love for someone else is the problem here.

It is similar to if someone makes a call for empathy, by explaining something bad that has happened, and getting a response from everyone else present of a story about that happening to them, and then getting annoyed everyone else is making it about them.

Of course, they are trying to empathize but they are doing such a bad job of it that they really would have been better off saying nothing at all.

It doesn't matter what they were trying to do (provide empathy). It matters what they did. When people inform them that their efforts are misdirected, it is they who have the responsibility to be better going forward, "within reason".

Of course the caveat to what is "within reason" is a function of effort and cost. Refraining from talking about yourself when attempting to comfort someone else costs nothing, and takes no external effort -- just discipline. Similarly, not calling someone a girl/female/woman costs absolutely nothing and takes no external effort, and so is generally going to be "within reason".

 

[Toni]

No: whether the father intended it as bullying or not, it did bully the child. It is difficult to believe that the father continued to refer to his child with female pronouns because he was struggling to overcome the way he spoke to and about his child and less about trying to reinforce his own view of who his child is, in contradiction to what the child has repeatedly stated. THAT makes it bullying and possibly abuse.

There could be several reasons why the father persisted after being ordered by the State to stop. But I'm glad to see that people have given up on their unevidenced claim that the father did it specifically to bully the child.

I think the father did not do it because he is a sadist but because he refuses to accept his child for who the child actually is. This is not a sudden revelation but has been something that has been discussed and professionally evaluated and counseled about for several years now. That's a big chunk of this kid's life. If the father truly cares about his child, then he should make good faith efforts to honor his child's preferences, even if he thinks the child is confused. The child is surely in ongoing counseling and surely the father has the opportunity to meet with his child's therapists, doctors, etc. to better understand his child.

Again, your own lack of imagination and lack of human empathy betrays you.

You do not know what somebody who 'truly cares' would do in this situation, because you don't know what the father's reasoning is.

Your lack of reading comprehension and basic lack of honesty betray you.

My empathy is with the child. I understand that this is difficult for the father. It is much, much more difficult for the child and the father is making it harder, whether or not that is his intention.

 

[TomC]

Ergo, the father was arrested not for calling his child "she," but arrested for defying a court order. The crime is contempt of court, and he was not jailed for anything else.

If you go back through the nearly 300 posts in this thread you'll find differently.
Plenty of posters have asserted that the father was jailed for abusing his child.

You ought to be able to actual quote someone on that in context.

I could if I cared enough.

 

[Metaphor]

Ergo, the father was arrested not for calling his child "she,"

Yes, he was. That's what he was arrested and jailed for. That is the action that caused him to be in contempt of court.

Yet (again) your thread title, the title of the article you linked, and the entire thrust of the article was that his "real" crime was wanting his child to be a girl instead of a boy, that he's somehow the real victim here, and it is an issue of free speech.

His child is a girl.

Is it bullying? We don't know, and that includes you, yet you have repeatedly made the case that there simply was no bullying involved whatsoever.

I said, repeatedly, that I could imagine reasons that explain his behaviour that are not the father wanting to bully his child. Other posters appear to have an extraordinary lack of imagination - or at least, they lack it for generating possible benign reasons for the father doing what he did.

There's no evidence presented, therefore it didn't happen. Yet (again) the only "evidence" provided thus far is a hopelessly biased article which only tells the one side.

I said there was no evidence presented. I did not say 'therefore it didn't happen'. I said there was no evidence presented.

The father could be a sadist and opportunist, who hates his daughter and wife and deliberately called his female child 'she' so that he could bully her and then get martyr street cred for being arrested and jailed.

It isn't a stretch to infer that there was something other than simply a father's love at work in the judge's decision.

And neither is it a 'stretch' to provide other narratives for his behaviour.

 

[Metaphor]

There could be several reasons why the father persisted after being ordered by the State to stop. But I'm glad to see that people have given up on their unevidenced claim that the father did it specifically to bully the child.



Again, your own lack of imagination and lack of human empathy betrays you.

You do not know what somebody who 'truly cares' would do in this situation, because you don't know what the father's reasoning is.

Your lack of reading comprehension and basic lack of honesty betray you.

My empathy is with the child. I understand that this is difficult for the father. It is much, much more difficult for the child and the father is making it harder, whether or not that is his intention.

Your empathy extends to those in your tribe and that is all.

 

[Jarhyn]

There could be several reasons why the father persisted after being ordered by the State to stop. But I'm glad to see that people have given up on their unevidenced claim that the father did it specifically to bully the child.



Again, your own lack of imagination and lack of human empathy betrays you.

You do not know what somebody who 'truly cares' would do in this situation, because you don't know what the father's reasoning is.

Your lack of reading comprehension and basic lack of honesty betray you.

My empathy is with the child. I understand that this is difficult for the father. It is much, much more difficult for the child and the father is making it harder, whether or not that is his intention.

Man, all this reminds me of when I first came out to my own parents. I'm honestly not going to pretend that it is easy to build up this idea of who someone is, and expectations of who they will become, and all the dreams people have of some particular future for their children. The thing is, handling such events with grace is part of what it means to be a good parent.

Because while parents can't not form such expectations, dreams, hopes for their children, it's not actually within their rights to foist that upon their child. Rather it is their responsibility to accept all that pain and disappointment with a smile and a nod and a hug and an "I love you."

 

[Ford]

I did not say the judge did it for no reason.

Everyone on the thread agrees the father kept calling his female child 'she' after ordered to stop by the judge.

Ergo, the father was arrested not for calling his child "she," but arrested for defying a court order. The crime is contempt of court, and he was not jailed for anything else.

Yet (again) your thread title, the title of the article you linked, and the entire thrust of the article was that his "real" crime was wanting his child to be a girl instead of a boy, that he's somehow the real victim here, and it is an issue of free speech.

It's not.

Is it bullying? We don't know, and that includes you, yet you have repeatedly made the case that there simply was no bullying involved whatsoever. There's no evidence presented, therefore it didn't happen. Yet (again) the only "evidence" provided thus far is a hopelessly biased article which only tells the one side.

It isn't a stretch to infer that there was something other than simply a father's love at work in the judge's decision.

This wasn't anything more than a father's love... For himself, his views, and his own false image of who his son ought be.

For some reason, three words popped into my head just now.

1. Gay.

2. Conversion.

3. Therapy.


Parents who insist their son or daughter cannot possibly be gay, and when simply telling them they're not gay doesn't work, they turn to a religious outfit to lock the poor kid into some place until they come out "right."

 

[Metaphor]

When I was four, I changed my own name to Sunshine. My mother played along. She didn't try to force a four year old to adhere to the fact. She didn't say, "tHaT's nOt yEr nAmE, gOdDaMmiT. sToP sAyIng tHaT," while waving my birth certificate at me as proof that she was right and I was wrong.

If your mother had refused to call you Sunshine and had kept using the name given to you at birth, no sane person would say your mother was abusing you.

I guess the radio silence from Angry Floof indicates that, indeed, if AF's parents had refused to call her 'Sunshine', it would not amount to child abuse.