A retired Navy sailor, Patrick Kimbell lives in New Mexico on a fixed income and works multiple jobs to afford his expenses, having gone bankrupt years ago after a tumultuous divorce. While serving his country on six overseas deployments, his marriage fell into turmoil, costing him a relationship with his young child.

Kimbell searched for his estranged daughter for 10 years until he finally found her in 2020 on Snapchat. 

Then 18 years old, Kimbell’s daughter was living in Arizona, presenting in goth makeup, and identifying as bisexual. It was a jarring reunion for Kimbell, who had tried to instill a Christian ethos in his daughter until he agreed to forfeit custody on allegedly false pretenses. 

“When I was younger and I was in her life, we went to church,” Kimbell told IW Features. “I taught her traditional values, traditional ethics, I’m a Navy man so I believe in God, family, and country.”

His daughter was three months away from graduating high school and dating a female friend who identified as a man. Though Kimbell was concerned about his daughter’s mental health, he promised to be supportive. He wanted to help her get into college in New Mexico, where he’d moved from Georgia and where she could go to school for free because of his Navy benefits. But he noticed early signs that gender ideology was creeping into his daughter’s psyche. 

“The only way I know how to say this — she had a very militaristic view,” he said. “And this is when I started seeing the indoctrination…where it’s like, ‘Either you accept me for who I am or you don’t accept me at all.’”

Though Kimbell felt he was being as compassionate as his convictions would allow, the gender issue drove a wedge between them. She cut him off for a while, he said. 

But in December 2023, he received a bizarre phone call. It was his daughter, although he didn’t recognize her voice.

“So I said, ‘You don’t sound like my daughter, are you sure?’ And she said, ‘Dad I’ve been taking hormones and I moved to Oregon so I can have a sex change operation,’” Kimbell relayed. 

The news blindsided him. 

“This was like a left hook to my jaw,” he said. “I was like, ‘Wait, what?’”

She wanted money, Kimbell said, but he assured her he could gather some in a few days’ time, as his limited livelihood came from the Department of Veterans Affairs and he had to keep a strict budget. That wasn’t urgent enough for his daughter, who accused him of being a bigot and insisted he give her the money immediately or not at all, according to Kimbell. 

While he tried to talk sense into her, she was adamant that she was born a man, Kimbell said. 

“You can’t tell me that that five and six year old girl that ran around begging me to buy her Disney princess dresses, and I said, ‘You had all of them!,’” Kimbell added. “I said, ‘I had to wrestle you out of your Belle Disney princess dress because you wore it for three days and I had to wrestle you out of it so your mom could get you in the bathtub. And I said, ‘When I sent you off to third grade for the first day, and you begged to put a bow in your hair and be allowed to wear makeup.”

That was the last conversation Kimbell had with his daughter. 

Though Kimbell’s daughter was radicalized while living in the Pacific Northwest, she may very well have faced a similar environment in New Mexico had Kimbell been able to get her to move back with him. That’s because New Mexico, like California, Oregon, and Washington state, has surrendered to gender ideology, Kimbell said. 

Especially in light of recent laws passed in neighboring states Oklahoma and Texas that restrict child sex-change medicalization for kids, New Mexico has become a hotspot for child gender transition tourism. In fact, the state has one of the most extreme laws on gender transition in the country, shielding medical providers from legal ramifications if they perform these invasive experiments on children. 

In 2023, New Mexico’s state government doubled down and passed another law protecting doctors from civil or criminal liability related to child gender transitioning and preventing parental notification for a minor’s transgender procedures. As a result, out-of-state officials, potentially acting on behalf of concerned parents, are barred from accessing information about kids who receive these procedures in New Mexico. 

“You can’t tell what’s a male and what’s a female down in downtown Albuquerque,” Kimbell said. “The mental health awareness here in New Mexico is horrible.”

Kimbell is right. The percentage of New Mexican youth in 2017 experiencing feelings of sadness and hopelessness (35.8%) was significantly higher than that of United States youth (31.5%), according to New Mexico’s Health Indicator Data. 

“It’s all because of the gender identification restructuring,” Kimbell said. “‘You be what you feel like.’ New Mexico has gotten horribly liberal.”

New Mexico’s radical commitment to gender ideology has been especially evident in the state’s education system. In 2023, nonprofit Parents Defending Education discovered that Albuquerque Public Schools had a policy that appeared to encourage school districts to keep the gender identity of students a secret from parents. 

The New Mexico education system’s devolution into political activism is “ruining our children,” Kimbell said. 

“There was a problem with a teacher in New Mexico that hung up the pride flag but took down the American flag,” he added.

It’s similar to the academic neglect that he said happened to his daughter during the pandemic at her high school in Phoenix, Arizona, another progressive bastion in the Southwest. Before the pandemic, Kimbell’s daughter was an A+ student, but she ultimately didn’t graduate.

 “So, somewhere in those three years, the school system failed my daughter,” he said. She was an A-B student and then in 10th grade, she just went downhill from there.” Kimbell still hasn’t spoken to his daughter since his last tense phone call with her, but he believes she underwent a double mastectomy since, he said. 

As in Oregon, where Kimbell’s daughter could have had her surgery paid for by the taxpayer, New Mexico Medicaid covers gender transition hormone therapy and surgeries for minors. 

“I pray everyday that I’ll somehow get my kid back,” he said. “In my mind, she’ll always be my daughter. You can try and chop your [breasts] off and be that all you want, but that does not change the way God made you. And there’s nothing anybody can think, say, or do to make me believe otherwise.”