The New York Times Tries To Hate Dads But Doesn’t Know What One Is

According to the New York Times, the apotheosis of fatherhood is getting your tits chopped off.

On Sunday, while the majority of the Western world paused to honor the men who provide, protect, and show up, the Times was busy lionizing women who underwent double mastectomies, injected themselves with testosterone, and are now passing themselves off as dads to impressionable young children.

The piece, titled “To My Daughter, My Gender Was Never Complicated,” was written by Zach Ellams — born Clair Ellams — a London-based editor and motion designer, and a biological woman performing the role of father for an audience that eats it up.

The whole thing was a three-pronged disaster: a belittlement of actual fathers, a disturbing window into child confusion manufactured by adults, and a stark exposé of the New York Times’ true priorities.

The essay’s illustrations were unintentionally the most honest part of the piece. The first, captioned “you need a thick skin to be a parent,” showed Ellams’ daughter, Elliot, shouting back: “You’re slow because you’re old.” A thick-skin moment, apparently.

Bless her. It only gets harder from here. Real thick skin between mothers and daughters is earned through war; fights over boys, curfew violations, outfit standoffs at the front door. That’s tough love, and it’s coming. Getting teased about your pace on a jog is just another Tuesday.

The illustrations also fixated, obsessively, on body hair. Ellams’ beard appeared in every frame: spotty, coarse, and uneven, with the leg hair cutting off at the knees in some panels and disappearing entirely in others. It reads less like confident self-expression and more like a woman overcompensating in ink what biology refused to provide.

As a female, I can confirm: when I don’t shave, I look like Figure A. When I do, Figure B.

You can change the body of a woman, but you can’t take the woman out of the body.

Novelist Lionel Shriver once remarked that “masculinity as an ideal is pretty ridiculous” — a sentiment the Times appears to have taken as editorial policy. They didn’t just celebrate a woman pretending to be a father; they did it on Father’s Day, with full illustrations, treating the demolition of fatherhood as a gift to their readership.

The Gray Lady’s Weapon of Mass Emasculation, engaged.

The hair became a problem beyond the page. On the playground, little Elliot told her friends she wanted a beard when she grew up. Her classmate, in the blunt, unimpeachable logic of childhood, replied: “You can’t grow a beard, you’re a girl.” Elliot’s answer: “My dad did, and he was a girl.” The illustration showed surrounding parents shooting glares at ‘Zach’. Not at the child — at the adult who manufactured that confusion and sent it to school with her.

Earlier in the piece, Elliot asked her biological mother, “How did you grow a mustache if you were a lady?” Good question, sweetheart.

Children are not confused about biology. They are made confused by adults projecting their confusion or mental illness. Even in their earliest years, kids understand what their eyes tell them. The rewiring requires repetition; tell them again and again that what they see isn’t what’s real, that the rules of nature are negotiable, that it’s not only okay to defy common sense but courageous.

As Mr. Rogers famously and plainly sang, “Boys are boys from the beginning. Girls are girls right from the start.” Children know this. The project of confusing them is deliberate.

And this carries documented costs. Trans-identifying adults carry psychiatric burdens at rates that dwarf the general population: depression in up to 76% versus 29%, anxiety disorders in 62% versus 20%, autism spectrum traits around 11% versus 1%, and suicidality four to 13 times higher. These burdens are transmitted through genetics, through modeling, through the daily ambient chaos of a household built on an identity crisis to the children within them.

When Elliot tells her classmates her dad “was a girl,” she isn’t just confused about biology. She’s absorbing the full emotional weight of her parent’s pathology and carrying it onto the playground.

The New York Times didn’t run this piece just to mock the 74 million fathers in this country. They ran it because they hardly think about those fathers at all. What they do think about, deeply and devotedly, is the extreme minority of some 130,000 biological females cosplaying as dads.

And they think those women deserve a Sunday spread. Because to them, fatherhood isn’t sacred. It’s a problem to be solved.

They have genuine contempt for fathers and want the institution dismantled. When the father is minimized or replaced by a simulacrum, it’s easier to usher in perverse ideology and capture young minds. Children without anchors are easier to redirect, and for the progressive Left, the grooming and sexual mutilation of your children is the end that justifies every means. That same calculus allowed more than a quarter-million British girls to be raped, groomed, tortured, and abused in the Rotherham and Rochdale scandals, while progressive leaders looked away for years and let the rot spread.

This is the ideology being taught in schools today: children can explain stolen land theory but can’t pass algebra, why birth rates are collapsing, marriages are cratering, pornography is mainstreamed, and the family is quietly dismantled.

And it’s why the Times featured four Father’s Day pieces written by six people — three women, a trans “man,” and two childless men — with not a single fathering father among them. The themes were: “My father’s death was the start of my life.” “My father was an addict who failed me.” “The pain of caring for a parent who abused you.”

That’s what they think fatherhood is. A wound.

I feel sorry for the dads.

Because fatherhood is so much more than whatever grievance theater the Times is packaging for its perpetually aggrieved readers.

My father is everything to me. He is the reason my sisters and I are who we are. He is a sounding board, an equalizer, the calm in our chaotic female storm. He sends Bible verses and spontaneous motivational texts, always followed by “I love you.” When I come to him with a car question, a finance question, a “how do I do this” — he responds in seconds, putting down his own work without a second thought. In return for my thanks that can never adequately be expressed, he shoots back the simple thumbs-up emoji. Because his unending support isn’t a favor. It’s just part of the job.

He taught us patience. He taught us kindness. He once told me his whole philosophy was to just “smile at people — makes them feel good.” He is most content after a day tending to his chickens and his yard, gathered around the dinner table with all his girls.

He is our everything. He is needed and he is wanted. And I will never — not for one solitary minute — allow a loveless, liberal newspaper to belittle his glory.

Thank you, dads. We love you.