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 12: Scientific Rebellion — A New Enlightenment
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What does it actually mean to rebel scientifically?
This is the question I have been circling for eleven episodes, and now I want to answer it directly. The answer is different depending on whether you are asking about individual practice, community organizing, or democratic governance. So I want to take it at all three levels.
At the individual level, Scientific Rebellion is an epistemic commitment. The commitment to hold your beliefs with a grip calibrated to the quality of the evidence supporting them. This sounds obvious when stated abstractly. It is profoundly countercultural in a society that rewards the comfort of certainty. We are rewarded — socially, psychologically — for the confident assertion of clear positions. We are penalized in social status, in the approval of our communities, sometimes in our sense of our own identity, for the honest acknowledgment of uncertainty.
The engineer's version of this commitment is the one I find most useful, and I want to describe it carefully. An engineer who is uncertain about a structural calculation does not resolve the uncertainty by confidence. They do more analysis. They consult the literature. They run the numbers again. They call a colleague and ask for a second opinion. They build in a safety factor to account for the residual uncertainty. And when the result comes back wrong — when the bridge behaves differently from the model — they do not defend the model. They update it.
That practice is not just an attitude. It is a set of habits of mind that runs counter to the default patterns of human cognition. The tendency to seek information that confirms what we already believe. The tendency to weight a vivid anecdote more heavily than systematic evidence. The tendency to evaluate the quality of an argument by the social status of the person making it. These tendencies are not character flaws. They are features of the cognitive system that has served our species well in other environments. But they are not adequate for the epistemic demands of democratic self-governance in a complex, diverse society. The rebellion, at the individual level, is the discipline to work against them.
Karl Popper proposed falsifiability as the criterion that separates scientific claims from non-scientific ones. A claim is scientific if and only if there is some possible evidence that could, in principle, show it to be wrong. I want to press that criterion into wider service. It is a test worth running on any claim anyone offers you. Ask — what evidence would change your mind on this? If the answer is nothing, you are no longer dealing with a knowledge claim. You are dealing with a faith claim dressed in the language of knowledge. Faith claims are legitimate in their own domain. As the basis for governance of a pluralistic society, they are not.
At the community level, Scientific Rebellion looks like the coalition work I described in the last episode. It looks like building alliances around shared commitment to evidence rather than shared ideology. It looks like creating spaces — congregations, PTAs, civic organizations, neighborhood networks — in which honest engagement with inconvenient facts is possible. It looks like protecting the institutional infrastructure that makes evidence-based reasoning possible at the scale of a community.
At the democratic governance level, Scientific Rebellion looks like accountability. It looks like the demand — made in school board meetings, in legislative hearings, in electoral campaigns — that those who make policy on behalf of a community be required to show their work. To demonstrate that the policies they are proposing are supported by evidence. To engage honestly with evidence that challenges their proposals. To accept the verdict of the evidence even when it is politically inconvenient.
