Hello, World. I'm the Dad of a Trans Kid
Hello, world. I'm the dad of a trans kid.
I first voiced those words about a decade ago. They would have seemed completely foreign to my younger self, but life has a way of reminding us that this beautiful, maddening, largely unpredictable world still has plenty of surprises in store for us.
To this very point, I could never have anticipated the journey my family would be on when our young son made it painfully clear there was something very wrong with his assigned gender. I would spend the last decade and a half dismantling my old worldview and constructing a new one that actually matched with reality. I also watched as enormous political energy and resources were poured into a campaign to dehumanize that child and falsely portray him and the trans community as a threat to God and country.
This podcast series is based on a soon-to-be-published book of the same title. But it is not just about my trans son, although his existence is the reason I'm speaking. It is about a country that has become increasingly addicted to certainty. Certainty about who counts as a real American. About what a real family looks like. About whose children have the right to exist and whose don't. About what God wants and what God forbids and which laws should be written to enforce the answers.
What we could use now, more than ever, is a superpower. Luckily, we already have one. Every one of us. It has just gone largely unrecognized and under-utilized.
Consider for a moment the uniquely human capacities for curiosity and critical thinking—traits that are powerful, transformative, and too often under-appreciated. Traits that in combination, produce the closest thing we have to a superpower. The ability to make informed decisions based on facts and evidence. The ability to see the world as it truly is, while also imagining the possibilities of creating a better world.
This is the superpower we must urgently embrace today if we are to prevent the rise of authoritarian regimes. Regimes that sow fear and rage in an effort to divide us, and that thrive on disinformation and an uninformed public.
Scientific Rebellion is a movement dedicated to restoring critical thinking as a foundational principle of American democracy. To reviving the spirit of curiosity and critical inquiry, that when embraced, has resulted in extraordinary achievements — and that when suppressed, has led to some of the darkest periods in our history. It is a movement unafraid to confront the manufactured certainty currently being weaponized against transgender kids, teachers of honest history, climate experts, and doctors who follow the evidence.
Are you ready?
This is Peter Tchoryk. Welcome, to the rebellion.
Hello, World. I'm the Dad of a Trans Kid
Latest Episodes
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Hello, world. I'm the dad of a trans kid.I first voiced those words about a decade ago. They would have seemed completely foreign to my younger self, but life has a way of reminding us that this beautiful, maddening, largely unpredictabl...
Episode 1: A Superpower Hiding in Plain Sight
Our family's journey began on Easter Sunday more than a decade ago. We had recently joined the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor, and that morning was worse than the usual fire drill. Frankly, we were just hoping to make it before the en...
Episode 2: What I Didn't Know
My son was not quite three when he first started telling us he was a boy. He had been assigned female at birth. At first my wife and I chalked it up to one of those “kids say the darndest things” comments. When he kept asserting it, we thought ...
Episode 3: Beginnings
In this episode I want to start at the very beginning. Not the beginning of my story. The beginning of the human nervous system, which is where the trouble starts.In the 1940s, the psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed what is now one of ...
Episode 4: Critical Thinking and the Scientific Method
In this episode I want to tell you about the toolkit. Not the romantic version of the scientific method you may remember from a high school poster — “observe, hypothesize, experiment, conclude” — but the actual, lived, hard-won tool...
