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
Episode 1: A Superpower Hiding in Plain Sight
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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 end of service.
In the middle of the chaos, my two-and-a-half-year-old was determined not to put on a dress, and by determined, I mean he had channeled Jackie Chan, with kicks that landed cleanly and contortions worthy of a Cirque du Soleil performance.
The dress, by the way, was the same one he and his sister wore only a couple months earlier for a school picture. His sister was only too happy to comply. Our son, on the other hand, was not. He claimed that the dress, in spite of the pictorial evidence, was not his. In fact, he refused to wear any clothes that looked "girly," which of course presented quite the problem, since our working assumption prior to that point was that we had another girl.
Since our motivation was purely to avoid social shaming from being late, our knee-jerk reaction quickly gave way to compromise. We found an outfit that was passably gender neutral and ran with it.
My son is seventeen now. But in my mind's eye, I can still see him as that little boy unabashedly making his way down the aisle in the middle of Easter Service. His awkwardly authentic stride. The passably-gender-neutral ensemble of faded t-shirt, sweatpants, and sneakers making him look like he'd just escaped from a poorly funded orphanage. Oliver Twist, with swagger.
This, in contrast to his sister half-skipping, half-dancing her way down the aisle. Lacey spring dress, bright white shoes, pony-tailed hair bouncing with every step. Not exactly how we scripted it, but they were both happy. Us, not so much.
That’s kind of been his life up to this point. Happy when he can just be his authentic self. But there is the flip side, too. He has had to witness adults expressing their outrage at school board meetings to protest the reading of a children’s book about a trans kid — a kid just like him. And he has spoken at those meetings alongside his sister, with a composure that puts the people opposing him to shame.
That moment, looking back, was foreshadowing. The first visible signal of what we now know as gender dysphoria. The persistent, profound, insistent distress that occurs when a person's gender identity does not match the body they were assigned. It would turn his world upside down over the next two years.
In that Easter morning moment, my son had a better grasp of an engineering principle than most of the adults in the room — including me. If the model doesn't match the data, it's time to change the model. He was telling us. We just had to start listening.
