When James Dawton* sent his daughter to one of the finest private schools in eastern Massachusetts, he thought he was securing her the best education he possibly could, where she would be taught by the best teachers the area could offer. Instead, in October 2021, Dawton found out his 11-year-old daughter had become a victim of the gender ideology craze infecting both public and private schools across the country.
Dawton’s daughter informed him she was identifying as a boy just a few months into the 2021 school year. Dawton told IW Features his suspicion is that a combination of gay-affirming school administrators and increased screen time during the COVID-19 lockdowns put his daughter under the spell of a social contagion which caused her to believe she was born in the wrong body.
As Dawton pondered why his daughter was influenced to adopt a transgender identity, he himself underwent a political odyssey of sorts. Dawton described him and his wife both as liberals, but said they found themselves questioning the Left’s dogma on issues regarding gender and sexuality.
“It can be easy to be supportive of all this stuff from the sidelines because you just think it’s kindness until it hits your living room. And then you reflect on it, and you learn a little bit. Pretty quickly we started learning about it, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, what dopes are we to think that this thing is just another version of gay acceptance?’” he said.
While listening to the “Gender: A Wider Lens” podcast, hosted by Irish psychotherapist Stella O’Malley and Sasha Ayad, a licensed professional counselor based in the United States, Dawton and his wife realized that affirming their daughter’s new “gender identity” was not the best thing for her. But at the time, the most common response he found to his concerns was that it was better for him “to have an alive son than a dead daughter.”
Two years later, in October 2023, Dawton sent an open letter to parents at his daughter’s school opposing some materials used in the school’s Growth Ed Curriculum. The resources were polluted with gender ideology, Dawton said. In a four-page long detailed document, Dawton outlined the years of research he had done over the last couple years, explaining the detrimental pipeline from social transition to puberty blockers to dangerous hormones to surgeries.
“The connection between school-based advocacy of gender ideology-driven sex ed is linked directly to the formation of gender ideology-based beliefs of children and an increased prevalence of gender questioning youth,” the letter reads. “This is driving a legion of girls toward trans medicalization, including the removal of healthy breasts, hysterectomies, and chemical hormone poisoning that has incredibly injurious impacts on young peoples’ bodies and irreversible consequences including sterilization, the loss of sexual function and pleasure, an incredible host of health maladies that can result in an estimated 10+ year reduction in lifespan expectation!” [emphasis his]
Dawton said the letter “led to us getting essentially thrown out of school.”
The family’s public school option wasn’t much better, informing him they would affirm his daughter’s “gender identity” regardless of his wishes or consent. It’s been five years since Dawton’s daughter first adopted a transgender identity, and Dawton and his wife are focused on moving forward. They are skeptical that a lawsuit against their daughter’s private school would go anywhere in a blue state, but he still intends to do everything he can to bring his daughter back from the brink of gender dysphoria before she irreversibly alters her body.
Dawton said his relationship with his now 16-year-old daughter has improved since she first began identifying as a boy. They spend days together sharing their love for the outdoors and mountain bike riding, and she now believes that her parents’ opposition to her transition comes from a place of love for her, Dawton said.
“There’s a silver lining here,” Dawton said. “She is a kid who doesn’t want anything to do with team LGBTQ, weirdo, purple hair people. She wants nothing to do with them. Thank the f***ng Lord for that.”
*Name has been changed to protect storyteller’s identity.
