Culture

‘The Telegraph’ Slammed For Publishing Biphobic Father’s Letter About “Snowflake Gen Z” Daughter

"Imagine thinking bisexuality is fake because a girl likes boys. That is *kind* of an important part of it."

by Michelle Rennex  28 July 2021
telegraph biphobic dad daughter woke robert pattinson

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In news that is a shock to absolutely no one, a British publication, once again, is under fire for a supremely terrible take.

While it’s normally the Daily Mail responsible for giving horrendous people a platform — as we’ve seen time and time again with giant sook, Piers Morgan, and his regular column — it was actually the British Telegraph that responsible for the UK’s latest grim op-ed.

In their new ‘Parenting Confessions’ column, which allows parents to write about “family secrets they would never talk about in public”, The Telegraph decided to commission an anonymous father to write about his experience of starting to “dislike” his “woke daughter” because she followed the “trend” of coming out as bisexual.

In the article titled ‘My woke daughter is a shadow of her former fun-loving self – and I’m starting to dislike her‘, the anonymous father detailed the reasons why he just “can’t converse” with his “snowflake Gen Z” daughter.

“I can’t converse with my woke 18-year-old daughter without getting angry. ‘I like girls and boys,’ she announced recently. She meant it in a romantic sense,” the father started the Telegraph piece. “I sighed inwardly. Here we go again, I thought.”

Upset that his daughter “decided” to come out as bisexual despite her bedroom walls previously being “covered in posters of Robert Pattinson” and the fact that she had a “boyfriend for several years” as a young teen, the father spends most of the article slamming his daughter for “jumping on another woke bandwagon” of gender-ambiguity.

“She has now decided that she is attracted to both sexes. This would never be a problem for me; my children can be whatever they want to be, and I will love them equally,” the noble dad wrote.

“No, the issue here, and the reason for my exasperation, is because my daughter doesn’t like girls and boys; she likes boys. But she says she is attracted to both to jump on another woke bandwagon, because for snowflake Gen Z, it’s trendy to be gender-ambiguous.”

The father then spent the rest of the article attacking the other totally normal things his 18-year-old daughter finds important, like “trans rights, patriarchy, plastics in the ocean” and “climate change”.

While he says he “agrees with a lot of it”, the anonymous writer finds issue with his daughter “seeing it as her job” to make him “see the error of my ways and atone for her lost future”.

Unsurprisingly, the father — who claims in the article that he is a “lifelong advocate of equality” — is also annoyed that his child supports Black Lives Matter “along with her middle-class white friends”. He also despises that his daughter thinks that Meghan Markle is the “victim of a racist, colonial system” instead of sharing his view that she’s a “spoilt hypocrite playing the Hollywood PR game to a tee”.

“Now, most discussions end in disagreement… she has opinions about everything and they are all rigidly held,” the father ends his piece, failing to realise he wrote a whole article in a national newspaper to share his own fixed views while shitting all over his child. “It is exhausting.”

“I used to love talking to my daughter, but often now it is like wading through verbal treacle. I just wish she could lighten up a little and stop being so preachy.”

Now beyond being an unbelievably horrible way to think and speak about your own child on a public platform, a lot of what this anonymous parent said makes little sense.

Firstly, gender ambiguity and bisexuality aren’t the same thing despite what the author thinks. Secondly, even though the parent says that bisexuality would “never be a problem” for them, the entire article is full of blatant bi-erasure.

Just because a woman dates a man for “several years” doesn’t make her any less bisexual than the next person. In fact, dating men is quite famously half of what it means to be bisexual. Similarly, to claim that bisexuality is just a “trendy” thing that “snowflake Gen Z” like to claim reaffirms the damaging idea that being bisexual is just a “phase” while people settle into the categories of either gay or straight only.

“Grim reading from The Telegraph with the biphobic trope that it’s a phase or something done for attention, with the paternalistic drivel that a father has a better sense of their (adult) daughter’s sexuality than their daughter does?” UK Labour MP Charlotte Nichols perfectly explained.

“Some girls do like girls and boys. Get over it.”

But the most confusing part of this anonymously penned story isn’t that the author has no fucking clue how bisexuality works or what it means to be gender-ambiguous.

Instead, it’s easily the anonymous father thinking that a bunch of Twilight-era Robert Pattinson posters from 10 years ago meant that his daughter had to straight for the rest of her life. If anything, the overwhelming presence of R.Patz in the home should’ve tipped the author off to his daughter’s bisexuality early on.

Ah, who would’ve thought that Edward Cullen would be the gatekeeper of queerness all along? I mean, probably most people.