Hello, world. I’m the dad of a trans kid.

Those words would have seemed strangely foreign to me some fifteen years ago. 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 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.

To be clear, I am not against faith. What I am against is the political use of certainty — the manufactured kind — as a weapon against people whose very existence threatens the carefully-crafted false narratives of those in power. In the episodes that follow, I will explore the relationship we have with uncertainty, both as individuals and collectively as a society.

Curiosity, I’m going to argue, is the most underrated human attribute, and critical thinking is not just a nice-to-have skill. Together, they form the closest thing humanity has to a superpower. The ability to see the world as it truly is, while also imagining the possibilities of creating a far better world — a more inclusive, equitable, and just world. The ability to make informed decisions based on facts and evidence. This is the superpower we urgently need to unleash today to prevent the abuses and oppression of authoritarian regimes.

Scientific Rebellion is a movement dedicated to teaching others about the importance of engaging this nascent superpower before it is too late. A movement not limited to scientists or scholars. A movement led and sustained by anyone who refuses to outsource decision making to people who either lack the curiosity or simply choose not to learn about those who don’t look or act like them, who either lack the critical thinking skills or choose to ignore facts and evidence when it suits their purposes. A movement to confront the manufactured certainty currently being weaponized against transgender kids, teachers of honest history, climate experts, and doctors who follow the evidence.

If you are a parent of a kid like mine, this is for you. If you are a person of faith trying to figure out where the line is between what your tradition asks of you and what a pluralistic democracy requires of all of us, this is for you. If you are tired — and I think most of us are — of being told to be afraid of people you have never met, this is for you.

This is Peter Tchoryk. Welcome, to the rebellion.