Fear Me Not: The Power of Curiosity to Heal a World Addicted to Certainty

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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.

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. The day his refusal to wear a dress marked the beginning of our gender odyssey. 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.

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.

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

That was how I started my first post to address the explosion of false accusations and conspiracy theories stemming from another parent outing our family on Facebook. I went on to explain that our young trans son was not actually a threat to God and country, or his 2nd grade class.

That was back in the Spring of 2016.

It seems like another lifetime ago when our son first made it clear that someone got it wrong on his assigned gender. And he was right. Gender, like many other things in nature, is on a spectrum. The year was 2011, and he wasn’t yet three years old.

The need for Scientific Rebellion grew out of my experience advocating for the trans community over the past decade and a half. The world unfortunately, is now a far more dangerous place than it was just a few short years ago.

While I still believe sharing our story is worthwhile and necessary, it has become painfully clear that it is in no way sufficient. It will take a heck of a lot more to overcome the intentional dehumanization and vilification of the trans community and its allies.

And it is not just the trans community that faces persecution and elimination from American life. Critical thinking and scientific discourse itself are under fire, and anyone who does not fit the far right’s white patriarchal Christian standard may find themselves an enemy of the state.

Every generation has its challenges. But the youngest generations inheriting the world today face trials across the spectrum of existential threats, including some that could make the planet itself uninhabitable. From social injustices to genocide. From environmental disasters to climate crisis. From terrorism to nuclear war. It is no wonder why so many people today disengage from the political process altogether. We seem to be trying the same things over and over again, hoping for a different outcome.
 
 So how do we motivate people in the face of such daunting challenges? How do we reconcile the America that exists today against the vision of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution? How do we confront an American culture that has benefited so greatly from the technological advances of the modern age while simultaneously rejecting scientific discourse on the issues that matter most?

It may seem a tall order, but there is a path forward. And the best news is we already have the tools to make it happen: curiosity and critical thinking. These tools, used together, are the closest thing we have to a superpower.

But even the most powerful tools are useless if we don’t commit to using them. I believe – and I think the evidence will show – that humanity’s failure to move beyond a medieval mindset is a direct result of our lack of commitment to curiosity and critical thinking. We are choosing, individually and collectively, to suffer through crises and a never-ending cycle of violence and oppression that are largely of our own making.

The Scientific Revolution gave humanity the tools to challenge the manufactured certainty so often used to oppress and control the population. It’s time we pick up where the Scientific Revolution fell short and recommit ourselves to finishing the job. It’s time we take direct, non-violent action to ensure all our laws and public policies are based on facts and evidence.

Are you ready?

This is Peter Tchoryk. Welcome, to the Rebellion.

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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 addiction: an addiction to certainty.

I’m Pete Tchoryk. I’m an engineer, and I’m the father of a transgender son. Across this series I argue that the most underrated of human attributes is curiosity and its inseparable twin, critical thinking—the closest thing we have to a superpower. But a superpower does us no good if we can’t access it, and there’s a requirement that has to come first: the willingness to be uncertain. If we can’t admit to not knowing, we’ve already decided we have all the answers we need.

I lay out the frame the whole series returns to. The difference between objective truth and subjective truth, and why a society that loses the ability to tell them apart has lost the one tool it has for governing itself honestly. The difference between honest certainty—the kind my son had at three when he told us who he was—and manufactured certainty, produced on purpose, by people who have studied how to produce it, to keep a set of arrangements from being examined. I’ll name the engineering tools I reach for, and the authors I trust, from Carl Sagan to Isabel Wilkerson to the Reverend William Barber.

This is a series with a political thesis, but it is not partisan. The scientific method does not have a political party. If you’re willing to ask one more question—and to accept the answer even when you don’t like it—start here.

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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.

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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 before the conscious mind can catch up—adaptive when the threat is a lion, a liability when the “threat” is a policy disagreement or a changing neighborhood. Political messaging that frames LGBTQ people, or immigrants, or secular education as dangers is activating a threat-detection system that evolved for predators, not for pluralism. I walk through the research—Maslow, Joseph LeDoux, social identity theory, Arie Kruglanski’s “need for cognitive closure”—that explains why a frightened, fatigued, threat-saturated nation becomes a market for manufactured certainty.

Then the hopeful half of the same biology: the brain that craves certainty can also examine that craving and ask for the evidence. I tell the story of the eugenics movement and the campaign against Galileo—two histories of false certainty dressed in borrowed authority—and what they tell us about the present. I introduce a stone railroad bridge near my home in Dexter, Michigan, designed by Frederick Pelham, and the plain fact at the center of this series: a bridge carries the load or it does not, and no amount of certainty about who is permitted to be an engineer changes the arithmetic of the arch.

The question is not whether we’ll seek certainty. We will—it’s as inevitable as hunger. The question is whether the certainty we find is proportioned to the evidence, or sold to us by people who profit from our fear.

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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 sunlight in 240 BCE and got it right, to Francis Bacon, who in 1620 made the deceptively simple proposal that you should start with observations and revise your principles when they fail. Four centuries of that method gave us vaccines, antibiotics, semiconductors, and a map of the cosmos. But here’s the part we tend to skip: the generation that founded this country reached for the same tool. Franklin was a working scientist. Hamilton opened the ninth Federalist with the science of politics. Madison studied every confederacy in history to catalog how each one failed. That’s an engineer’s method—you study the bridges that fell down.

And in all that comparative work, not one founder put government by divine mandate forward as a candidate. Theocracy wasn’t an idea they overlooked. It was one they had already tested. The First Amendment is what they did with the results. It was not an oversight. It was a finding.

I also anchor the terms this series runs on—objective and subjective truth, logic, reason, falsifiability, epistemology—because they’ve been so thoroughly muddied that recovering their meaning now feels like an act of resistance. It closes on the sentence that holds the whole argument together: when the model doesn’t fit the data, you revise the model. It’s not a complicated rule. It is, however, an unpopular one.

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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 powerful enough to overcome the distrust. I recognized that same pull in myself—which is why I’m not describing a weakness I watched from a safe distance.

There’s a claim at the center of almost every argument for keeping religion embedded in public life: without it, we have no morality. That claim is precisely backwards. I make the case carefully, because it’s easy to make it carelessly. Religion has produced real moral goods—abolition, the civil rights movement, the Catholic Worker movement. But the moral content of those movements is reachable by secular reasoning too, and the deeper story is that morality evolved rather than was revealed. Drawing on Michael Tomasello, Jonathan Haidt, and Derek Parfit, I show that our ancestors were already governing themselves by mutual aid long before they had a word for any god.

Then the harder part: what religious institutions have actually done with morality over the centuries when they held the most power. The record is not encouraging. I look at the secular societies that score highest on nearly every measure of human flourishing, at Martin Luther King’s social gospel, and at the moral disengagement that lets otherwise decent people vote for harm.

I’ve been told that as an agnostic parent of a trans child my moral standing here is limited. I reject that completely—and I explain why. Morality before religion. Evidence before revelation. Democracy before theocracy. When an institution tells you your son’s dignity is up for a vote because a doctrine says so, the appropriate response is the one Rosa Parks gave the bus driver. Nah.

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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 against faith. I am writing against the weaponization of faith.

American Christianity has always carried a tension—between the prophetic tradition that calls the powerful to account, and the priestly tradition that blesses existing power. I trace which one has tended to win, from the Doctrine of Discovery that authorized the trans-Atlantic slave trade, to the Southern churches that defended segregation, to the white moderate church Dr. King addressed from a Birmingham jail. The thread isn’t only malice. The thread is certainty—divine certainty, which by design cannot be argued with.

Then I make it concrete and present-tense. Four of the ten largest American hospital chains are now Catholic, and theological directives written by an all-male body of bishops are quietly overriding evidence-based medicine in the very rooms where the most vulnerable people go for help. I walk through the expansion of religious exemptions—Hobby Lobby, 303 Creative—that has built a two-tiered civil rights system, and through Project 2025, whose vision of the good society is explicitly theological.

As an engineer, I have a name for this: a single point of failure. You cannot argue with God, subject God to peer review, or vote God out. I end where the good news is—with the dissenters inside religion who have already done the work of telling humble faith from weaponized faith, and who are not my enemy but my ally.

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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 categories and call the sorting natural.

The most persistent and destructive of those is race. Race as a biological category does not exist the way American society has long treated it—the Human Genome Project confirmed it. But the fiction served a function: it made a slave-owning democracy bearable by making it seem inevitable. Drawing on Claude Steele, Carol Anderson, and especially Isabel Wilkerson’s framework of caste, I show why the Black Freedom Movement, LGBTQ liberation, and the movement for women’s equality are not separate fights wearing borrowed solidarity. They are the same fight against the same enemy.

I spend time with one photograph: Elizabeth Eckford walking alone toward Little Rock Central High in 1957, a white girl her own age screaming behind her. That expression is not exactly malice. It’s the terror of someone whose map of the world is losing its edges. My son disturbs maps. So did Black students in white schools. The faces change; the expression does not. The question it poses across seventy years is immediate: when the crowd forms, where do you stand?

I also look at Indigenous communities, the case for reparations, and the war on Black history in our schools. And I push back on a passive phrase—“the evidence is accumulating”—because evidence doesn’t gather mass on its own. People do that work. Our job is to keep it accumulating, and to refuse to do the maintenance the lie requires.

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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 changes how you hear the whole story.

I give you the clinical evidence up front, because it’s unambiguous. Gender identity is present and stable from early childhood and is not amenable to social pressure. When a child’s identity is affirmed, outcomes are dramatically better—the variable that produces the difference is not the child, it’s the response of the people around them. The biology of sex is not binary. Gender identity is not binary. The Tordoff study found access to gender-affirming care associated with sharply lower odds of depression and suicidality. For our family, affirming our son’s identity was a decision made to keep him alive.

I also trace where the campaign against transgender children actually came from—not from worried parents or uncertain physicians, but from a specific political calculation made in Houston in 2014, a bathroom-panic template that was replicated nationally and then refocused on the most vulnerable target available: kids. I testified before the Michigan State Board of Education in 2016. I talk about a bill that sought to make my support for my son’s evidence-based medical care a felony punishable by life in prison.

My son is seventeen now. He has navigated all of this with a composure most of the adults opposing him cannot muster. If the people who hold power would have one real conversation with one of these kids, the manufactured certainty would crumble. Because kids don’t perform certainty. They live.