Hello, World. I'm the Dad of a Trans Kid

Peter Tchoryk
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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.    

  1. EPISODE 1

    Episode 1: A Superpower Hiding in Plain Sight

    Send us Fan Mail 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 end of service. In the middle of the chaos, my two-and-a-half-year-old was determined not to put on a dress, and by determined, I mean he had channeled Jackie Chan, with kicks that landed cleanly and contortions worthy of a Cirque du Soleil performance. The dress, by the way, was the same one he and his sister wore only a couple months earlier for a school picture. His sister was only too happy to comply. Our son, on the other hand, was not. He claimed that the dress, in spite of the pictorial evidence, was not his. In fact, he refused to wear any clothes that looked "girly," which of course presented quite the problem, since our working assumption prior to that point was that we had another girl. Since our motivation was purely to avoid social shaming from being late, our knee-jerk reaction quickly gave way to compromise. We found an outfit that was passably gender neutral and ran with it. My son is seventeen now. But in my mind's eye, I can still see him as that little boy unabashedly making his way down the aisle in the middle of Easter Service. His awkwardly authentic stride. The passably-gender-neutral ensemble of faded t-shirt, sweatpants, and sneakers making him look like he'd just escaped from a poorly funded orphanage. Oliver Twist, with swagger. This, in contrast to his sister half-skipping, half-dancing her way down the aisle. Lacey spring dress, bright white shoes, pony-tailed hair bouncing with every step. Not exactly how we scripted it, but they were both happy. Us, not so much. That’s kind of been his life up to this point. Happy when he can just be his authentic self. But there is the flip side, too. He has had to witness adults expressing their outrage at school board meetings to protest the reading of a children’s book about a trans kid — a kid just like him. And he has spoken at those meetings alongside his sister, with a composure that puts the people opposing him to shame. That moment, looking back, was foreshadowing. The first visible signal of what we now know as gender dysphoria. The persistent, profound, insistent distress that occurs when a person's gender identity does not match the body they were assigned. It would turn his world upside down over the next two years. In that Easter morning moment, my son had a better grasp of an engineering principle than most of the adults in the room — including me. If the model doesn't match the data, it's time to change the model. He was telling us. We just had to start listening.

    12 min

  2. EPISODE 2

    Episode 2: What I Didn't Know

    Send us Fan Mail 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 maybe he was telling us he preferred doing boy things — kind of a tomboy. He consistently chose toys we associate more with boys. That wasn't a stretch. But that wasn't it either. He didn't say “I want to be a boy.” He didn't say “I want to be like a boy.” He said, “I am a boy.” And he kept saying it. Patiently. Insistently. With the directness that very small children bring to the things that matter most. Back then we hadn't even considered he could be transgender. The only transgender people we knew were adults. So we hadn't really thought about gender identity emerging at this age. But Jacq knew. He didn't have the word for it. He didn't need the word. What he was telling us was that someone had gotten something important wrong about him. The designation made at his birth, the box he had been placed in, the pronoun he had been given — it didn't fit. He was a boy. Not wanting to be a boy. A boy. This episode is about what I didn't know. And what it took to find out. Let me be precise about the nature of my not-knowing, because it is more instructive than many of us give it credit for. I was not a man who believed transgender people were confused or disordered or mistaken. I was something simpler and far more common. I was a man who had never had a reason to think carefully about this. Gender had presented itself to me as a settled question — not because I had evaluated the evidence and reached that conclusion, but because I had never had any particular reason to look. My children had arrived, been assigned their sexes at birth, and grown into themselves. Or so I had understood it. What my son was telling me, at age not-quite-three, was that I had been working with a model that didn't fit the data. And I had spent my career being trained for exactly this situation. To be a little more specific about my education, I have a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from Kettering University and a master’s in electrical engineering and optics from the University of Michigan. For more than three decades I have designed advanced aerospace systems — from satellite-based sensors and docking mechanisms for spacecraft, to optical air data systems and clear-air turbulence sensors for aircraft, to long-range atmospheric measurement systems for rocket launches and weather forecasting. Systems that must operate in harsh conditions I cannot directly observe, under conditions I cannot fully predict. The cardinal sin in my discipline — the failure mode that ends careers and, in less forgiving metaphors, brings bridges down — is not ignorance. Every engineer operates in conditions of partial ignorance. That's what makes the work hard and interesting. The cardinal sin is pretending not to be ignorant. It's applying certainty you haven't earned to a system that will eventually, under some condition you didn't anticipate, test that certainty and find it insufficient. When the model doesn't fit the data, you revise the model. My three-year-old son was data I had not anticipated. I had two choices. Force him into the model I had inherited. Or update the model. The engineering training made one of those options obviously correct. The fear — and I won't pretend the fear wasn't there — made it feel harder than it sounds. The fear deserves to be named, because it was real, and because I think it is recognizable to any parent listening. I was not afraid Jacq was wrong about who he was. His certainty was transparent and total. The honest certainty of direct experience. I was afraid of what it would mean for him in the world. I was afraid of the cruelty he might encounter. I was afraid of the systems that had not be

    16 min

  3. EPISODE 3

    Episode 3: Beginnings

    Send us Fan Mail 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 the most widely recognized frameworks in social science — a hierarchy of human needs. At the base of the pyramid sit the most elemental needs: food, water, warmth, rest. Above them sits safety. Only once those foundational needs are met can a human being move upward toward belonging, esteem, and what Maslow called self-actualization — the full realization of one's potential. The hierarchy has been critiqued and refined over the decades, but its core insight endures. Before we can be wise, generous, curious, or creative, we need to feel safe. Safety is not a luxury. Safety is the precondition for everything else that makes us human. This is not a metaphorical claim, it is a claim about the architecture of the human nervous system. The amygdala — the small, almond-shaped structure deep in the temporal lobe — is the brain's primary threat-detection system. It responds to perceived danger faster than the conscious mind can process information. It generates the fear response, the fight-or-flight activation, before the prefrontal cortex has had time to evaluate whether the perceived threat is real. This is adaptive. In the environment in which human beings evolved, the cost of a false alarm was trivial compared to the cost of missing a real threat. Better to run from a shadow that turns out to be a branch than to ignore a shadow that turns out to be a predator. We are the descendants of the ones who ran. The ones who hesitated too long are not our ancestors. The problem with this architecture is that it was designed for an environment of physical threats, and we live in an environment of social and cognitive threats for which it is poorly suited. The amygdala cannot reliably distinguish between a physical threat to bodily integrity and a social threat to group identity. And the political economy of manufactured certainty exploits this fact systematically. When political messaging frames LGBTQ people as threats to children, or immigrants as threats to the nation, or secular education as a threat to faith, it is activating a threat-detection system that evolved for lions, not for policy disagreements. The physiological response is similar. Elevated heart rate. Narrowed attention. Reduced capacity for complex reasoning. Increased in-group loyalty. Heightened out-group hostility. Joseph LeDoux, who has spent his career studying the neuroscience of fear, describes a useful distinction here. There is fear as a first-person subjective experience, and there are the threat-response systems that produce it. The threat-response systems are not infallible. They are, in fact, reliably manipulable. Every political strategist who has ever run a fear-based campaign has understood this. The question is whether we can, through conscious effort, interrupt the automatic threat response long enough to evaluate whether the perceived threat actually corresponds to anything real. This is supposed to be difficult. The architecture of the system is designed to prioritize speed over accuracy. But it is not impossible — and it is not optional, if we are to govern ourselves by evidence rather than fear. I would venture that most of the people who support policies that harm LGBTQ youth, that restrict teaching about racial history, that impose religious frameworks on secular governance – are not primarily motivated by malice. They are more likely to be motivated by fear. Genuinely experienced, neurologically real fear, that has been deliberately activated by political messaging designed to exploit the architecture of the threat-response system. Understanding this does not excuse it – accountability still matters. Fear-based governance causes the same harm regardless o

    18 min

  4. EPISODE 4

    Episode 4: Critical Thinking and the Scientific Method

    Send us Fan Mail 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 human beings spent thousands of years inventing in order to manage uncertainty without making things up. The story of human progress is, in no small part, the story of learning to manage uncertainty more honestly. For most of our species' existence, the tools were crude. When the crops failed, we needed an explanation adequate to the terror of starvation. When disease swept through the village, we needed urgently to understand why — and what to do about it. When someone died before their time, we needed to make sense of a loss that could otherwise destroy the community. In the absence of tools to investigate these things empirically, the most available explanations were supernatural. The gods were angry. The spirits were disturbed. The harvest god required appeasement. These were not stupid explanations. Given the knowledge available, they were the most logical responses to genuine uncertainty. They provided a framework for action, a basis for communal ritual, and a vocabulary for grief. They had real value. I want to acknowledge that clearly, because a recurring mistake in arguments like mine is to treat every expression of religious life as if it were straightforwardly a product of fear or manipulation. It is not. The complexity of human religious experience runs far deeper than that. What changed the calculus — slowly, unevenly, against fierce resistance — was the development of a different set of tools for managing uncertainty. Tools that did not require supernatural explanation. That were testable. Revisable. And in principle available to anyone, regardless of status or belief. Critical thinking began as something modest. The recognition that some claims are better supported than others, and that it is possible to evaluate claims systematically rather than simply accepting the ones that come from the most authoritative source. The period from 1500 to 1700 is called the Scientific Revolution for good reason. It represented a revolutionary shift in thinking. Long-held beliefs about anatomy, biology, astronomy, the natural world were shattered, challenging even the most sacred tenets of Holy Scripture. The early scientists who led this revolution sought absolute truth not through the interpretation of doctrine, but by being curious and using critical thinking. They built the foundation that Sir Francis Bacon ultimately synthesized into his scientific methodology. The scientific method is a process. You observe something. You form a hypothesis about why it happens. You test that hypothesis against evidence in ways that could in principle prove it wrong. You revise your understanding based on what you find. Then you invite others — ideally people who disagree with you — to try to break your conclusion. If it survives, it earns provisional acceptance. The best current explanation, held until better evidence or a better framework arrives. This is not an institution. It is not a credential. It is a procedure available to anyone, for distinguishing what is actually true from what merely feels true. The question I am asking is why have we not applied this method to the questions of social and political life with the same rigor and the same willingness to revise. Why do we accept, in the governance of our communities, a standard of evidence that would be immediately recognized as inadequate in any science laboratory? Stay tuned to find out.

    18 min

  5. EPISODE 5

    Episode 5: Morality from Religion? Nah.

    Send us Fan Mail 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.

    14 min

  6. EPISODE 6

    Episode 6: Faith as Certainty — A Complicated and Consequential History

    Send us Fan Mail 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. I am not arguing that religious faith is inherently harmful. I am not arguing that people of faith are intellectually deficient or that religious experience is meaningless. I'm an agnostic — which means I do not have a clue whether there is a God or some form of transcendence that the word God gestures toward. I’m simply applying critical thinking and being honest about uncertainty. Not knowing doesn’t fill me with dread or stop me from living my life to the fullest. There is no fight-or-flight response, because it’s not necessary. Quite the opposite. Acknowledging uncertainty is what triggers curiosity, the desire to seek knowledge and find answers. And that is liberating. It is empowering. None of this happens if we settle for false certainties.  I want to hold that position openly for a moment, because it's different from the position of the people whose faith I'm criticizing in this chapter, and different from the position of those who think all religion is simply false and religion's public role obviously illegitimate.  I was raised in a household that had a complex relationship with religion. I had experiences — the experience of community held together by shared commitment, the experience of hearing people articulate a vision of human dignity and mutual obligation that was genuine and inspiring. I do not dismiss those experiences as meaningless.  What I can tell you is that the faith that produces those experiences is categorically different from the faith addressed in this podcast. The faith that produces genuine humility, that's held with the tentativeness appropriate to questions that transcend human knowledge, that produces the commitment to human dignity rather than the defense of hierarchy — that faith is not what I'm arguing against. I'm arguing against the weaponization of faith. The political deployment of religious certainty to override the rights of people who are applying critical thinking and acknowledging uncertainty. The history of Christianity in America is, in many ways, the history of that tension. Between the prophetic tradition that calls the powerful to account for their treatment of the vulnerable. And the priestly tradition that legitimates existing power arrangements by blessing them. Both are present in Christian scripture. Both have been influential in American religious life. The question is which has been more influential, and which is more influential now. The history of every theocratic state in the modern world makes this point with painful clarity. Iran's Islamic Republic, which came to power promising justice and freedom from corrupt secular authority, has governed for four decades through a system in which religious law overrides democratic accountability. The Supreme Leader is not elected. His authority derives from his interpretation of divine law. The consequences for women, dissidents, religious minorities, and LGBTQ people have been catastrophic. The structural logic of faith-based governance, wherever it has been implemented, produces governments that are accountable to an unelected, self-appointed religious authority rather than to the citizens they govern. The American separation of church and state was designed precisely to prevent that. And it is under sustained, sophisticated, very well-funded attack.

    17 min

  7. EPISODE 7

    Episode 7: Race, Caste, and the Certainty of “Us” Versus “Them”

    Send us Fan Mail 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, does not exist in the way American society has long treated it. The Human Genome Project confirmed what biological anthropologists had been arguing for decades. There is more genetic variation within so-called racial groups than between them. The racial categories we use — Black, white, Indigenous, Asian — are social constructs. Products of history and power, not natural kinds. This does not mean that racism is not real. It means something more troubling. An elaborate and extraordinarily consequential hierarchy has been built on a foundation that was always fiction. That fiction served a function. It resolved an otherwise excruciating moral contradiction at the heart of a society founded on the proposition that all men are created equal. A slave-owning democracy requires an explanation of why some people are not really people in the relevant sense. The fiction of racial hierarchy — often dressed in pseudo-scientific language about cranial capacity or temperament, almost always accompanied by theological arguments about divine order — provided that explanation. It converted a political and economic choice into a fact of nature. It made the unbearable bearable by making it seem inevitable. Wilkerson writes that the caste system in America is four hundred years old, and will not be dismantled by a single law or a single election or a single generation. This is not a counsel of despair. It is realism about the scale of the project. The systems that have maintained racial hierarchy in America are not primarily about individual prejudice, which can be addressed by individual moral improvement. They are structural — embedded in inheritance laws, in the geographic distribution of wealth, in the funding formulas for public education, in the design of the criminal justice system, in the underwriting standards of the insurance industry, in the zoning laws of thousands of municipalities. Changing them requires changing the structures, not just the hearts. But the history of caste systems is also the history of their erosion. Slow. Uneven. Costly. Punctuated by violent setbacks. And ultimately irreversible once enough people have seen what they were always being asked not to see. The hierarchy of human worth is a lie. Lies cannot survive indefinite exposure to the evidence. They require maintenance. And the maintenance gets harder as the evidence accumulates. Our job — yours, mine, our kids' — is to keep the evidence accumulating, and to refuse, at every level, to do the maintenance work that the lie requires.

    16 min

  8. EPISODE 8

    Episode 8: The Gender Binary and the Anxiety of Ambiguity

    Send us Fan Mail 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 end of service. In the middle of the chaos, my two-and-a-half-year-old was determined not to put on a dress, and by determined, I mean he had channeled Jackie Chan, with kicks that landed cleanly and contortions worthy of a Cirque du Soleil performance. The dress, by the way, was the same one he and his sister wore only a couple months earlier for a school picture. His sister was only too happy to comply. Our son, on the other hand, was not. He claimed that the dress, in spite of the pictorial evidence, was not his. In fact, he refused to wear any clothes that looked "girly," which of course presented quite the problem, since our working assumption prior to that point was that we had another girl. Since our motivation was purely to avoid social shaming from being late, our knee-jerk reaction quickly gave way to compromise. We found an outfit that was passably gender neutral and ran with it. My son is seventeen now. But in my mind's eye, I can still see him as that little boy unabashedly making his way down the aisle in the middle of Easter Service. His awkwardly authentic stride. The passably-gender-neutral ensemble of faded t-shirt, sweatpants, and sneakers making him look like he'd just escaped from a poorly funded orphanage. Oliver Twist, with swagger. This, in contrast to his sister half-skipping, half-dancing her way down the aisle. Lacey spring dress, bright white shoes, pony-tailed hair bouncing with every step. Not exactly how we scripted it, but they were both happy. Us, not so much. That’s kind of been his life up to this point. Happy when he can just be his authentic self. But there is the flip side, too. He has had to witness adults expressing their outrage at school board meetings to protest the reading of a children’s book about a trans kid — a kid just like him. And he has spoken at those meetings alongside his sister, with a composure that puts the people opposing him to shame. That moment, looking back, was foreshadowing. The first visible signal of what we now know as gender dysphoria. The persistent, profound, insistent distress that occurs when a person's gender identity does not match the body they were assigned. It would turn his world upside down over the next two years. In that Easter morning moment, my son had a better grasp of an engineering principle than most of the adults in the room — including me. If the model doesn't match the data, it's time to change the model. He was telling us. We just had to start listening.

    18 min
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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.    

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