Adam Coleman Wants To Make Fathers Great Again (#37)
11 September 2025
With Adam Coleman
Global
Adam Coleman, author and founder of Wrong Speak Publishing, argues that fatherlessness underpins a cascade of male dysfunction — from emotional dysregulation and offending to susceptibility to gender-identity ideology. His account aligns with Cass Review findings that many young people arriving at gender clinics carry complex prior mental health difficulties and adverse psychosocial histories, and that thorough assessment of a young person's whole background should precede any clinical pathway.
Adam Coleman grew up without a father, navigating homelessness, depression and suicidal ideation before understanding the formative role paternal absence had played in his development. He is the author of two books — one on victimhood culture, one on family separation in Western societies — and the founder of Wrong Speak Publishing. In this conversation with Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman he argues that a father's absence is not merely a private loss but a public health problem with measurable consequences for boys and men. His starting point is the earliest weeks of life: fathers who do not hold their newborns in those first months, he contends, fail to develop the bond that sustains long-term emotional investment in their children. The downstream cost, Coleman argues, is a generation of boys who have no internal model for emotional regulation — unable to process frustration, lurching from calm to aggression over minor provocations. He connects that dysregulation directly to the dramatic rise in young people identifying as transgender, arguing that adolescents who lack an internal sense of worth are especially susceptible to ideologies that offer a ready-made identity and a sense of belonging. This chimes with findings from the Cass Review, which noted that many young people presenting at gender clinics carried significant prior mental health difficulties and complex psychosocial histories, and which called for thorough assessment of a young person's full background before any clinical pathway is pursued. Coleman is himself a critic of figures such as Andrew Tate, which makes his account of the manosphere's appeal unusually clear-sighted. When boys grow up without a model of earned, internal male worth, he argues, they reach for the nearest available substitute. The manosphere offers brotherhood, status and the performance of strength as replacements for the confidence that should have been built at home. His critique runs in two directions at once: against a culture that has progressively marginalised fathers, and against the counter-culture that profits from exploiting the wound that marginalisation leaves. In the United Kingdom, lone-parent families — the great majority headed by mothers — account for a substantial share of all families with dependent children, among the highest proportions in Europe. NHS data and peer-reviewed research consistently associate father absence with elevated rates of emotional difficulties, educational underachievement and involvement in the criminal justice system among boys. The Cass Review's insistence that clinicians attend carefully to a young person's whole psychosocial history before prescribing any medical intervention implies precisely the kind of family-context assessment that Coleman argues is too rarely made. The episode is a reminder that concerns about the medicalisation of distressed young people cannot be separated from broader questions about child development and family structure. A boy whose emotional life has never been scaffolded by a present father may be especially vulnerable to ideological capture — and especially poorly served by a clinical pathway that moves towards affirmation before understanding what is driving his distress. Coleman's combination of personal testimony, cultural criticism and critical distance from both progressive and manosphere orthodoxies makes this a genuinely unusual contribution to a debate that the evidence demands we take seriously.
