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 11: Finding Common Ground in Uncertainty
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This episode is about coalition. Specifically, the coalition I think is necessary to actually meet the moment. And I want to be honest, right at the start, about something difficult. The people whose manufactured certainty has, for the last decade, been weaponized against my son are not, on the whole, people I find easy to approach in a spirit of generosity. I am not writing this episode from a position of serene magnanimity. I am writing it from a position of calculation, honestly earned.
The calculation is this. The coalition that can actually stop what is happening to kids like mine cannot be built on shared anger alone. It has to be built on a shared commitment to evidence, to democratic norms, and to the dignity of every person. And to be wide enough to win, it has to include people of faith. Including people whose faith is not my own. Including, in some cases, people whose politics I do not share.
This episode is about the specific work of building that coalition. What it looks like. What it asks of me. And what — I want to argue — it also asks of people of faith.
The most common objection I hear to the argument I have been making is some version of this. You want to remove religion from public life, and that will never work because people's religious convictions are the deepest thing about them and you cannot expect them to leave those convictions at the door when they enter the public square.
Let me address this objection directly, because I think it obfuscates what I am arguing. I am not asking religious people to leave their religious convictions at the door. I am not asking them to pretend that their faith does not shape their moral intuitions, their understanding of the good life, or their sense of what their community owes its most vulnerable members. I am asking them to do what the best thinkers in every religious tradition have understood is required. To distinguish between their first-person faith commitments and the public justifications they are willing to offer for the coercive power of the state.
This distinction is not foreign to religious thought. It is at the center of the most sophisticated religious political philosophy in the American tradition. John Courtney Murray, the Jesuit theologian who shaped the Second Vatican Council's Declaration on Religious Freedom, argued that while a citizen may hold deeply religious or private views that inform their personal conscience, public argument for the coercive power of the state must rely on shared moral principles accessible to all, rather than purely confessional or theological doctrines. You can believe, privately, that your tradition is the one true path. That is your right, and I will defend it. But when you walk into a legislature, you have to offer your neighbor reasons your neighbor can, in principle, assess. Not reasons accessible only to fellow members of your tribe.
The Black Freedom Movement is, for me, the most powerful demonstration available of what this looks like. Martin Luther King Jr. Coretta Scott King. John Lewis. Bayard Rustin. These were deeply religious people whose faith was the engine of a commitment to human dignity that was, simultaneously, fully compatible with democratic pluralism and the scientific spirit. King's vision of the Beloved Community — a world in which, as he put it, our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation — is not the vision of a theocrat. It is the vision of someone who had internalized the moral uncertainty that authentic faith demands. The uncertainty that your own tribe is not, in fact, the final measure of moral worth.
