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.
Episodes
16 episodes
Trailer
"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 unp...
Origins of Scientific Rebellion
“Hello, world. I’m the dad of a trans kid.”That was how I started my first post to address the explosion of false accusations and conspiracy theories stemming from another parent outing our family on Facebook. I went on to explain...
Episode 1: A Superpower Hiding in Plain Sight
Here is a sentence I did not expect to write but now wonder why it took me so long. The most powerful, and perhaps most underrated, of human attributes is curiosity and its inseparable twin, critical thinking.Within this humble duo lies ...
Episode 2: What I Didn't Know
My son was not quite three when he first started telling us he was a boy. He had been assigned female at birth. At first my wife and I chalked it up to one of those “kids say the darndest things” comments. When he kept asserting it, we thought ...
Episode 3: Beginnings
In this episode I want to start at the very beginning. Not the beginning of my story. The beginning of the human nervous system, which is where the trouble starts.In the 1940s, the psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed what is now one of ...
Episode 4: Critical Thinking and the Scientific Method
In this episode I want to tell you about the toolkit. Not the romantic version of the scientific method you may remember from a high school poster — “observe, hypothesize, experiment, conclude” — but the actual, lived, hard-won toolkit that hum...
Episode 5: Morality from Religion? Nah.
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 pervasiv...
Episode 6: Faith as Certainty — A Complicated and Consequential History
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....
Episode 7: Race, Caste, and the Certainty of “Us” Versus “Them”
This episode is about how the United States manufactured one of the most consequential certainties in modern history — and what it has taken to dismantle it, piece by piece, where it has been dismantled.Race, as a biological category, do...
Episode 8: The Gender Binary and the Anxiety of Ambiguity
Our family's journey began on Easter Sunday more than a decade ago. We had recently joined the First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor, and that morning was worse than the usual fire drill. Frankly, we were just hoping to make it before the en...
Episode 9: Christian Nationalism — Power in the Clothes of Piety
Let me start this episode with a definition, because the phrase Christian nationalism is being used — on all sides — in ways that make the conversation harder than it needs to be.Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint ...
Episode 10: The War on Knowledge
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 dec...
Episode 11: Finding Common Ground in Uncertainty
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 dec...
Episode 12: Scientific Rebellion — A New Enlightenment
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...
Episode 13: The Promise of Uncertainty
Hello, world.I have been saying those words, in one form or another, since 2016. They have meant different things at different times. In 2016, they were a response to an immediate crisis — the attempt of someone in my community to define...
Episode 14: Epilogue — A New Path
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 h...