Introduction: What I Didn't Know

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My son was not quite three when he first started telling us he was a boy. He didn’t say he wanted to be a boy, or wanted to be like one. He said, “I am a boy,” and he kept saying it—patiently, insistently, with the directness very small children bring to the things that matter most. This episode is about what I didn’t know. And what it took to find out.

I want to be precise about my not-knowing, because it’s more common than we admit. I wasn’t a man who believed transgender people were confused or mistaken. I was something simpler: a man who had never had a reason to think carefully about this. What my son was telling me was that I’d been working with a model that didn’t fit the data—and I had spent three decades as an aerospace engineer being trained for exactly that situation. The cardinal sin in my discipline isn’t ignorance. It’s pretending not to be ignorant. When the model doesn’t fit the data, you revise the model.

I talk honestly about the fear—the ancient, specific fear of a parent that the world will be harder for your child than your love can fix—and how curiosity, not certainty, was what finally loosened its grip. I started reading. I called physicians. My wife and I went to a conference and discovered we weren’t crazy, and we weren’t alone. And in the spring of 2016, another parent forced our family to go public, and I sat down and wrote the words this series is named for: Hello, world. I’m the dad of a trans kid.

I also say plainly what kind of series this is. It is not against religion—I’m an agnostic, genuinely. The argument is narrower: faith is not fact, and the laws governing everyone should rest on evidence everyone can evaluate. This is what I learned.