Over the course of filming two documentaries about the fathers of transgender and nonbinary children, Luchina Fisher has watched these families’ rights rapidly erode.
“In [2023], we thought things were bad: we were having conversations around safety for our children,” she told the Texas Observer. “This is another level that we haven’t ever seen before.”
Fisher’s latest documentary, The Dads, which premiered in Austin at this year’s SXSW film festival, follows over a dozen fathers on a series of camping trips together where they bond over their shared hopes and fears for their gender-diverse children. It’s a feature-length expansion of her previous, Emmy-winning short film of the same name, which premiered at SXSW in 2023 before being picked up by Netflix. The new film follows the titular dads across camping trips from 2023 and, two years later, in 2025. By the time of the latter gathering, several of the families had decided to leave their home states or even move out of the country in order to protect their kids’ access to healthcare and basic human rights.
It’s clear that Fisher isn’t merely an impassive, neutral documentarian when it comes to the plight of her film’s subjects. After all, when she speaks about the dads’ offspring, she refers to them as if they’re “her” children, too. And she doesn’t hold back her anger at what these families have faced, either.
“We needed to capture this moment in history,” she told us. “It was really important to document it [so that] no one can say this didn’t happen … and really just for people to understand the human toll that these state laws and now the federal government is having on these families, that they have become political refugees in their own country.”
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Despite the darkness looming over the film’s subjects, much of The Dads feels heartwarming, even cozy, as we see how deeply devoted these fathers are to their kids. In between hikes and other outdoor adventures, the men gather to talk about their children and how to protect them from the culture wars, but also about how proud they are.
Outside of the camping trips, we accompany Stephen Chukumba, who is also one of the film’s producers, on a journey with his transgender son Hobbes to help him move into a dorm for his first year in college. Chukumba exudes anxiety as he worries about how Hobbes will be received by cisgender residents. But, on his return trip to pick him up for vacation, we learn that Hobbes has joined a fraternity where his brothers seem utterly blasé about Hobbes’ gender identity. Later Chukumba, a widower, grows tearful as he recounts how Hobbes selected his name as a way to remind himself of his late mother and their shared love for Calvin & Hobbes comics.
Despite her closeness, Fisher’s presence is only lightly felt, if at all, during the film, as she lets the subjects speak for themselves. One unexpected side effect of this approach, and the emotionally-charged nature of what these families face, is that The Dads becomes a portrait in male vulnerability as these fathers cry together and hug, in the process building a lasting community.
“Men don’t want to cry; it’s just one of those things,” Chukumba told the Observer. “But in these spaces, we feel okay … and now we are all proudly claiming our tears, because for so long, we’ve denied ourselves the ability to be soft, to be vulnerable.”
Although neither strident nor demanding, the film constitutes a quiet but insistent call to action through showing us both the unconditional love the dads have for their kids and the fear they have in a nation that seems increasingly aligned against them. One recent study by the Movement Advancement Project suggested that as many as 400,000 transgender people relocated in the wake of Donald Trump’s second election, which would represent a massive internal displacement. The documentary puts a human face on these numbers, as we share in both the suffering and the resilience of these families in their determination to survive.
Among the dads making difficult decisions is San Antonio’s Ed Diaz, whose 13-year-old daughter Charli moves to Canada with her stepmother during the film, after Texas banned access to gender-affirming care for minors in 2023.
“We want to live our lives and be happy,” Diaz told the San Antonio Current. “I don’t want to have to deal with all the laws about using the wrong bathroom and the undercurrent of violence toward trans people.”
Chukumba expressed similar sentiments to the Observer when asked what he wanted viewers to take away from the film. “I just want everybody to leave us the fuck alone; that’s all I want.”
He elaborated: “We just want what everyone else has, which is just regular, mundane lives, and so what I want everyone to do is to stop allowing the people that have made the lives of gender-expansive people miserable … to have the power that they have over us.”
Chukumba also warned that attacks on bodily autonomy won’t stop with trans people. “The rights that are being taken away from trans and nonbinary people and their families … are the canary in the coal mine.”
Five of the other fathers have formed a nonprofit, The Dads Foundation, which supports both recurring camping trips as well as advocacy for their families’ rights. Although The Dads hasn’t yet been picked up for theatrical or streaming distribution, you can contact the foundation to arrange a screening in your area.
The post ‘Proudly Claiming Our Tears’: Fathers Stand Together for Their Trans and Nonbinary Kids appeared first on The Texas Observer.
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