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 5: Morality from Religion? Nah.
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There is a claim at the center of almost every argument for keeping religion embedded in public life: without religion, we have no morality. Strip away the church and the commandments, and all that remains is chaos. This argument is so pervasive that it has become almost invisible. An assumption so widely shared that questioning it feels like questioning whether children need parents.
It is also, as it happens, precisely backwards.
Morality does not require religion. If anything, morality has survived despite some of what organized religion has done in its name. Let me make this argument carefully, because it is easy to make carelessly in ways that are unfair to religious people.
I am not claiming religion has never produced moral goods. It has. The American abolition movement was substantially religiously motivated. Frederick Douglass. Harriet Tubman. The Quakers who ran the Underground Railroad. The white northern clergy who preached against slavery in the years before the Civil War. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was organized largely through Black churches, led largely by ministers, and spoke a moral language thoroughly grounded in the Hebrew prophetic tradition. Liberation theology in Latin America produced generations of activists. The Catholic Worker movement, founded by Dorothy Day, built one of the most substantial networks of practical care for the poor in American history. These are not edge cases. They are central to the history of moral progress.
What I am claiming is more specific. The moral content of these movements — their commitment to human dignity, their opposition to domination, their insistence on the equal worth of every person — is not derived from religion in the sense that it is not available by any other route. The same commitments can be reached, and have been reached, by rigorous secular reasoning. The Enlightenment thinkers who developed the philosophical foundations of human rights — Locke, Kant, Mill, later Rawls — arrived at conclusions about human dignity that are not distinguishable in their content from what the prophets insisted on. The route was different. The conclusions were the same.
Martin Luther King Jr. understood the distinction precisely. What he called the social gospel was not an appeal to Biblical authority as such. It was an insistence that faith, lived honestly, points toward the same evolved moral truths that a clear examination of human dignity requires. That every person counts. That suffering matters. That the powerful do not have the right to oppress the powerless simply because they are powerful. He did not derive his moral commitments from Scripture and then apply them to civil rights. He recognized that Scripture, read honestly, condemns the same things that evolved moral intuition condemns. The cruelty of arbitrary power. The dehumanization of people who do not fit the dominant category. The cowardice of those who could speak and chose silence.
That is the social gospel. It is being fiercely opposed today, just as it was in King's time, precisely because it points to the same moral conclusion that the evidence of evolutionary psychology points to. That every human being's dignity is not negotiable. And that no institution's certainty about God's preferences changes that.
