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 6: Faith as Certainty — A Complicated and Consequential History
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This episode is about the difference between humble faith and weaponized faith. The difference matters enormously, and our public conversation regularly collapses the two. So I want to draw the line carefully, before I make the harder argument.
I am not arguing that religious faith is inherently harmful. I am not arguing that people of faith are intellectually deficient or that religious experience is meaningless. I'm an agnostic — which means I do not have a clue whether there is a God or some form of transcendence that the word God gestures toward. I’m simply applying critical thinking and being honest about uncertainty.
Not knowing doesn’t fill me with dread or stop me from living my life to the fullest. There is no fight-or-flight response, because it’s not necessary. Quite the opposite. Acknowledging uncertainty is what triggers curiosity, the desire to seek knowledge and find answers. And that is liberating. It is empowering. None of this happens if we settle for false certainties.
I want to hold that position openly for a moment, because it's different from the position of the people whose faith I'm criticizing in this chapter, and different from the position of those who think all religion is simply false and religion's public role obviously illegitimate.
I was raised in a household that had a complex relationship with religion. I had experiences — the experience of community held together by shared commitment, the experience of hearing people articulate a vision of human dignity and mutual obligation that was genuine and inspiring. I do not dismiss those experiences as meaningless.
What I can tell you is that the faith that produces those experiences is categorically different from the faith addressed in this podcast. The faith that produces genuine humility, that's held with the tentativeness appropriate to questions that transcend human knowledge, that produces the commitment to human dignity rather than the defense of hierarchy — that faith is not what I'm arguing against. I'm arguing against the weaponization of faith. The political deployment of religious certainty to override the rights of people who are applying critical thinking and acknowledging uncertainty.
The history of Christianity in America is, in many ways, the history of that tension. Between the prophetic tradition that calls the powerful to account for their treatment of the vulnerable. And the priestly tradition that legitimates existing power arrangements by blessing them. Both are present in Christian scripture. Both have been influential in American religious life. The question is which has been more influential, and which is more influential now.
The history of every theocratic state in the modern world makes this point with painful clarity. Iran's Islamic Republic, which came to power promising justice and freedom from corrupt secular authority, has governed for four decades through a system in which religious law overrides democratic accountability. The Supreme Leader is not elected. His authority derives from his interpretation of divine law. The consequences for women, dissidents, religious minorities, and LGBTQ people have been catastrophic.
The structural logic of faith-based governance, wherever it has been implemented, produces governments that are accountable to an unelected, self-appointed religious authority rather than to the citizens they govern. The American separation of church and state was designed precisely to prevent that. And it is under sustained, sophisticated, very well-funded attack.
