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.
