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.

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 embrace today to prevent the abuses and oppression of authoritarian regimes.

Scientific Rebellion is a movement dedicated to teaching others about the importance of accessing and applying 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.

You will hear the engineer in me. You will hear the father. You will hear about the painful times and the heartwarming times, the serious times and the “can’t make this up” absurd times. Just be prepared for plenty of engineer-dad type anecdotes. I won’t deny they are a guilty pleasure.

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.

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 frumpy t-shirt-sweatpants-sneakers ensemble. Oliver Twist, with swagger. This, in contrast to his sister half-skipping, half-dancing her way down. Lacey spring dress, bright white shoes, pony-tailed hair bouncing with every step. Not exactly how we scripted it, but they were both happy.

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.

This podcast series and the book it was built on are for him, and for every kid who found themselves having to defend their own humanity. It is also for those who don’t know who to believe and genuinely want to learn more about trans kids and the other wedge issues being used to divide us. And it is for anyone desperate to know if there is a better way to live — there is — and curious enough to keep listening.

Are you ready?

This is Peter Tchoryk. Welcome, to the rebellion.

Sign up on this site to receive updates on the soon-to-be-published book, “Hello, World, I’m the Dad of a Trans Kid: The Case for Curiosity in a World Addicted to Certainty.” If podcasts are your thing, please check out the podcast series of the same name.