Hello, World. I'm the Dad of a Trans Kid
Companion audio-essay series to the book "Hello, World. I’m the Dad of a Trans Kid." 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
On April 14, 2026, the Vice President of the United States stood on a Turning Point USA stage and lectured the Vatican on just-war theology. In the country I grew up in, that would have been a constitutional crisis. In the country I’ve been describing across this series, it was a Tuesday. This is where the argument reaches its destination—because the manufacturing of certainty is no longer happening at t...
What does it actually mean to rebel scientifically? I’ve been circling that question through the course of this series. This one answers it directly—at three levels: the individual, the community, and democratic governance.
For one person, Scientific Rebellion is the discipline of holding your beliefs only as tightly as the evidence supports them, and not one bit tighter. That sounds obvious. It is profou...
This episode is about coalition—and I want to be honest, right at the start, about something difficult. The people whose manufactured certainty has been weaponized against my son are not, on the whole, people I find easy to approach with generosity. I am not writing this from a sense of serene magnanimity. I’m writing it with the practical awareness that we won’t find a solution unless we find comm...
In the summer of 2016, I went to testify before the Michigan State Board of Education about my son. What I didn’t expect were the buses—hundreds of protesters bused in from churches across the state, ready to testify that what they were witnessing was satanic abuse and the grooming of children. The conflict in that room was not really about transgender students. It was about epistemology: who gets to dec...
Let me start with a definition, because “Christian nationalism” gets used in ways that make this conversation harder than it needs to be. Amanda Tyler, of the Baptist Joint Committee, offers the cleanest one: the belief that America is defined by Christianity and that the government should keep it that way. That is a claim about power. It is dressed in the language of faith, but its content is political&...
Our family’s journey began on an Easter Sunday more than a decade ago, with a two-and-a-half-year-old who had channeled Jackie Chan rather than put on a dress. What I saw that morning was not a child performing an ideology. It was a child telling the truth about his experience in the only language he had. This episode is about how I learned to receive that truth honestly—and about the science that change...
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. I start with my son, whose certainty about who he is was the honest kind, grounded in direct experience. The certainty deployed against him is the manufactured kind. And it is only the most recent of the false certainties that sort human beings into fixed c...
This episode is about the difference between faith held humbly and faith turned into a weapon. Our public conversation collapses the two constantly, so I draw the line carefully before I make the harder argument. I’m an agnostic, not an atheist. I was raised Catholic, I experienced genuine community and genuine inspiration in church, and I do not reduce those experiences to social psychology. I am not writing ...
This episode is about where morality actually comes from—and to tell you that, I have to start with my own family. My father was born in Soviet Ukraine during Stalin’s forced famine. My mother spent her childhood under Nazi occupation, a short walk from a Versailles draped in a Nazi banner. Neither of them trusted the Church, and yet both felt an obligation to belong. The certainty it offered was powerfu...
This episode is about the toolkit. Not the romantic version of the scientific method from a high school poster, but the actual, hard-won set of tools human beings spent thousands of years inventing in order to manage uncertainty without making things up.
I trace that story—from Socrates, who was a philosopher of questions rather than answers, to Eratosthenes, who measured the Earth with a stick and some sunligh...
I want to start at the very beginning—not the beginning of my story, but the beginning of the human nervous system. Which is where the trouble starts. Before a human being can be curious, they have to feel safe. That’s not a slogan. It’s close to a law of human nature, and every argument in this series depends on it being true.
This episode is about the biology of certainty. The amygdala fires befor...
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-...
We live in a civilization built, top to bottom, by the scientific method. The device you’re listening to this on is a cathedral to it. And yet, on the questions that shape our common life—whose child gets care, whose history gets taught, whose body gets legislated—a remarkable number of us shut that discipline off. This episode is about why, and about what I’ve come to think of as a cultural ...
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 ...
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