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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Here is a sentence I did not expect to write but now wonder why it took me so long. The most powerful, and perhaps most underrated, of human attributes is curiosity and its inseparable twin, critical thinking.
Within this humble duo lies the power to transform individuals, societies, and the entire human race. Courage, grit, and determination all have their place, of course, but it is curiosity and critical thinking that have opened our minds to the vastness of the universe and shown us the power in acknowledging what we know and what we don't know.
As an engineer, a large part of my job description requires the accurate assessment and management of risk and uncertainty. Fear of uncertainty, unfortunately, is a deeply ingrained evolutionary trait, and although it has certainly served us well in the past, it can be a liability in today's world.
In the earlier stages of our evolution, uncertainty meant we were in a high-risk situation. Survival in those times favored quick decisions rather than slower, but more thoughtful decisions. Fast forward to today and the opposite tends to be true. In fact, left unchecked, a fear of uncertainty can lead us to adopt false certainties that are much more dangerous to ourselves and others.
One way to overcome that fear is by engaging our sense of curiosity. When we examine a problem through the lens of curiosity, we route it through our prefrontal cortex instead of our amygdala. Uncertainty then becomes an asset, providing guiderails which are essential to good decision making.
But what I've observed over the last decade is a country that is becoming more and more addicted to certainty. And like most addictions, there are pushers, kingpins who are benefiting while everyone else in this equation is losing. The kingpins today are the political organizations behind the massive, well-funded campaigns to instill fear and doubt about trans kids, climate crisis, vaccines, women's bodily autonomy, and the true history of Black and Indigenous Americans.
This podcast series and the book behind it, are about the costs of this societal addiction to certainty and what we can do about it.
I want to start with a paradox I keep running into. We live in a civilization built, top to bottom, by the scientific method. The device you are listening to this on is a cathedral to it. The vaccine in your child's arm, the bridge you drove over this morning, the weather forecast that told you whether to bring a jacket — none of that exists without a specific, hard-won discipline: the willingness to hold beliefs lightly, test them against the world, and revise them when the world disagrees.
And yet, when it comes to the questions that most directly shape our common life — whose child gets care, whose history gets taught, whose body gets legislated, whose vote gets counted — a remarkable number of us shut that discipline off. We treat subjective claims as if they were objective. We treat ancient authority as if it were evidence. We treat “I feel this strongly” as if it settled anything beyond what the speaker is feeling.
The paradox isn't that people are religious, or that people have convictions. The paradox is that a culture can simultaneously be the most scientifically empowered in human history and the most epistemologically careless. We trust the method completely when it's keeping the plane in the air. We abandon it the moment it points somewhere uncomfortable.
Part of what's going on is biological. Uncertainty is physically unpleasant. The brain treats ambiguity the way it treats a stubbed toe — as something to resolve, and fast. Certainty feels like safety, even when it isn't. And there is a whole industry — political, religious, algorithmic — that has learned to sell certainty to people who are, underneath, just trying to stop the ache of not knowing.
