as a father to a daughter

As a father to a daughter, I loathe the phrase "as a father to a daughter."

The construct does something its speaker didn't notice.

It announces growth, which is great, while simultaneously revealing an ugly precondition for the growth. The second hidden announcement betrays a lack of empathy while performing the very act of attempting it. The bow of understanding is genuine. What's underneath it is authentic too. The speaker tied a bow without noticing what they wrapped it around; admission that the issue required connection to a daughter to become a problem. That she had to exist first. That the circle of moral concern expanded through proximity to ones own ego rather than through anything that could have happened in a quiet room alone.

Not entirely a character flaw. A structural fault line, which is almost more interesting. The circle expands through contact rather than through deliberation or imagination, someone you love enters a category you'd previously held at arm's length, and the category moves. Proximity-dependent empathy, probably the dominant mode for most people most of the time. Also how you get "I'm not racist, I have a friend who is Black" as a sentence that someone used to not know better than to utter aloud. With confidence, as evidence of something. Same mechanism. Different axis. That friend had to cross the street first. The daughter had to get born first. Before that, the question apparently wasn't accessible in any form they could work with.

I don't begrudge anyone their path. Saul needed the road to Damascus. Fine. But Saul knew he'd been knocked off his horse.

What produces the recoil, for me, is not the limited empathy. Ordinary and human, and I'm not throwing stones from any particular glass house. It's the unawareness. The bow of understanding is perched atop an admission the speaker has not even noticed they made, which means it goes unexamined, which means the whole revelation rests on the continued presence of daughter or of friend from a demographic.

Remove the precursor and you have removed the access point. No version of the understanding that survives abstraction, the understanding of a kind that might extend to a stranger's situation. It was never abstracted. The empathy was personal, and it stayed intimate, and the construct names the failure in the act of performing the penance for it.

Real, though. She exists, the circle expanded, the behavior changed. A win is a win.