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 14: Epilogue — A New Path
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I have seen up close what happens when a society looks away. When it allows manufactured certainty to govern the lives of the vulnerable. I have seen it in the faces of young people forced to testify and defend their own humanity.
But I have also seen what happens when a few people decide, at whatever personal cost, that they will not be silent and will not capitulate. I have seen the pediatrician who kept prescribing. The librarian who kept lending. The parent who kept showing up. The student who kept testifying. The neighbor who kept showing up at school board meetings even when the votes were going the wrong way.
These people do not have the comfort of manufactured certainty. They have something harder and more durable. The honest conviction, grounded in evidence, that they are right. And the willingness to act on that conviction in conditions that do not make it easy.
That is the standard this moment demands. It is the standard I am trying to meet. It is what I am asking of you.
My choice is unequivocal. I stand for scientific rebellion against the weaponization of false certainty — against every system that uses manufactured truth as a license to tell some human beings that their existence is a problem to be solved. I stand for evidence-based governance, for the separation of faith and fact, for the inclusion of every community whose dignity has been placed outside the circle by people who claimed to speak for God. I choose curiosity, in a world addicted to certainty.
I stand for my son. And I stand for every parent, every child, every teacher, every physician, every congregation that has chosen love over doctrine and paid for it.
And I do not stand alone. I stand with those who refuse to be governed by false certainty — who insist, at whatever personal cost, that the evidence matters, that every human being counts, and that a democracy built on manufactured lies will not hold.
So where do we go from here? Are we willing to do the work that evidence-based governance requires — the work of honest uncertainty, of committing ourselves to making a new path guided by critical thinking? Or will we take the comfortable, but misguided path of manufactured certainty.
I hope you agree, it's time we blaze a new path, with curiosity and critical thinking as our guides.
