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 4: Critical Thinking and the Scientific Method
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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 toolkit that human beings spent thousands of years inventing in order to manage uncertainty without making things up.
The story of human progress is, in no small part, the story of learning to manage uncertainty more honestly.
For most of our species' existence, the tools were crude. When the crops failed, we needed an explanation adequate to the terror of starvation. When disease swept through the village, we needed urgently to understand why — and what to do about it. When someone died before their time, we needed to make sense of a loss that could otherwise destroy the community.
In the absence of tools to investigate these things empirically, the most available explanations were supernatural. The gods were angry. The spirits were disturbed. The harvest god required appeasement. These were not stupid explanations. Given the knowledge available, they were the most logical responses to genuine uncertainty. They provided a framework for action, a basis for communal ritual, and a vocabulary for grief. They had real value. I want to acknowledge that clearly, because a recurring mistake in arguments like mine is to treat every expression of religious life as if it were straightforwardly a product of fear or manipulation. It is not. The complexity of human religious experience runs far deeper than that.
What changed the calculus — slowly, unevenly, against fierce resistance — was the development of a different set of tools for managing uncertainty. Tools that did not require supernatural explanation. That were testable. Revisable. And in principle available to anyone, regardless of status or belief.
Critical thinking began as something modest. The recognition that some claims are better supported than others, and that it is possible to evaluate claims systematically rather than simply accepting the ones that come from the most authoritative source.
The scientific method is a process. You observe something. You form a hypothesis about why it happens. You test that hypothesis against evidence in ways that could in principle prove it wrong. You revise your understanding based on what you find. Then you invite others — ideally people who disagree with you — to try to break your conclusion. If it survives, it earns provisional acceptance. The best current explanation, held until better evidence or a better framework arrives. This is not an institution. It is not a credential. It is a procedure available to anyone, for distinguishing what is actually true from what merely feels true.
The question I am asking in this book — and in this episode — is why we have not applied this method to the questions of social and political life with the same rigor and the same willingness to revise. Why do we accept, in the governance of our communities, a standard of evidence that would be immediately recognized as inadequate in any science laboratory?
