On this Father’s Day, The New York Times could have celebrated the quiet strength of real fathers, those real men who coached our ball teams, showed up day after day, learned to express emotions more openly than their own dads, and passed down hard-earned wisdom across generations. Those are the stories that honor what fatherhood has meant for so many of us daughters who grew up loving and admiring the men who raised us.
Instead, they chose to publish a guest essay in comic form titled “To My Daughter, My Gender Was Never Complicated.” Written by Zach Ellams (a woman who identifies as a trans man) and illustrated by Hannah Jacobs, the piece frames “fatherhood” as some personal journey that supposedly helped Ellams overcome her shame around transitioning.
For decades, media portrayals of fathers have already drifted away from those strong, steady ideals toward bumbling, incompetent sitcom dads, mocked as clueless or childish for laughs—despite real fathers becoming far more involved in daily caregiving and emotional lives than generations past. This New York Times article takes that offense even further on the very day meant to honor them: by centering a biological woman’s “trans dad” story as a vehicle for gender identity exploration, it doesn’t just diminish traditional fatherhood, it redefines the role itself as fluid performance rather than the biological, social, and emotional reality my own dad lived so fully as protector, provider, and guide.
Personally, I find this kind of identity politics not just misguided, but deeply offensive and in profoundly bad taste, especially on a day meant to honor fathers. Fatherhood isn’t a costume or a feeling one can opt into after deciding to live as a man. It is a biological, social, and emotional reality rooted in what men bring to raising children: the distinct role of a father that my own dad embodied so fully. Reducing it to gender performance erases the very men whose contributions to society and families as protectors, providers, and guides, made them men who don’t need ideological redefinition to matter.
This isn’t progress or inclusion. It’s the commodification of fatherhood for niche politics, served up in cutesy comic panels on the one day that we should simply be thanking the dads who were there as men. My father deserved better than this. So do all the real fathers out there. A heartfelt Happy Fathers Day to those dads reading this, and those thinking about their dads today.
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English (US) · 