My son expressed his gender before he was three. As an engineer, I had spent three decades trusting evidence over conviction — and now the loudest voices about my child were the ones who knew him least.

What I found, as I tried to understand what was happening to him and to families like ours, was a country that had grown addicted to certainty — political, religious, ideological — and that addiction was costing us our children, our institutions, and our capacity to think.

Hello, World. I’m the Dad of a Trans Kid is the book I wrote to make sense of it. It is part memoir and part argument: the story of how my family changed me, and the case for why curiosity — patient, evidence-based, willing to be wrong — is the only honest response to the world we actually live in.

“We have grown addicted to certainty. The cost of that addiction is everywhere — in our politics, in our pulpits, in the way we talk about our own children.”

What the book argues

The argument is direct: the epidemic underneath America’s culture wars is not a genuine disagreement on facts. It is the deliberate exploitation of humanity’s natural fears of the unknown — what I call manufactured certainty.

The antidote is already in our DNA. We know it as curiosity and critical thinking. At its best, the religious tradition knows it as doubt practiced as a discipline and humility placed before mystery. The fight we are in is, at root, a fight between two ways of knowing: one that says evidence sets the rules, and one that says authority does.

Inside the book

Approximately 75,000 words. Ten chapters in three parts, framed by a Preface and Introduction at the opening and a Conclusion and Epilogue at the close.

Part One — The Architecture of Fear

How human brains construct certainty and why they resist evidence that threatens identity. Maslow on the hierarchy of needs. LeDoux on fear and anxiety. Kruglanski on the need for cognitive closure. Hecht’s 2,500-year tradition of productive doubt. Sagan’s citizen’s toolkit. Tomasello on the evolutionary origins of human morality.

Part Two — When False Certainty Becomes a Weapon

How manufactured certainty has been deployed against religious outsiders, racial minorities, and transgender children. Ehrman on scripture. Anderson on the institutional backlash that follows every Black advancement. Wilkerson on caste as engineered hierarchy. Coates on what false certainty costs a child’s body. Bornstein on why the gender binary itself is the manufactured thing.

Part Three — The Movement

Du Mez and Stewart on the cultural and institutional machinery of Christian Nationalism. Sagan’s 1995 foreboding, now arrived. The Broockman-Kalla deep-canvassing research and Reverend William Barber’s fusion-politics framing. The affirmative case for Scientific Rebellion as a civic practice: an operating manual for curiosity as an act of public ethics.

Why I call it Scientific Rebellion

Not a rebellion against science — a rebellion in defense of it. Against the merchants of certainty who sell their answers as facts. For the curious, the doubting, the willing-to-learn. For anyone who believes that the most honest thing we can say in the face of a hard question is, I don’t know yet, but I want to find out.

“Doubt is not the enemy of faith. It is the discipline of it.”

Who the book is for

Parents of transgender, nonbinary, or gender-expansive children — and the grandparents, aunts, uncles, and friends in their lives who want to understand. Progressive and moderate readers of any faith tradition wrestling with how religion is being deployed in public life. Teachers, school administrators, pediatricians, mental-health clinicians, librarians, and social workers already doing the hard, quiet work this book names. Scientifically literate readers — engineers, physicians, researchers, data professionals — who want a book that honors rigor without retreating from moral stakes. And civically engaged readers concerned about Christian nationalism, epistemic decline, and the erosion of democratic norms.

About the author

Peter Tchoryk is the CEO of Michigan Aerospace Corporation, a University of Michigan research spin-off, and an electrical engineer with degrees from Kettering University and the University of Michigan. He has led aerospace and environmental research and development for more than three decades and is currently developing technology for biomedical diagnostics.

Peter’s work has supported NASA, NOAA, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, commercial space programs, and aerospace prime contractors. He has also founded Springmatter — an incubator for founders trying to “start something meaningful” by bringing overlooked, smaller-market products to life — which works in partnership with the University of Michigan and regional entrepreneurial networks.

Peter has been a public advocate for transgender rights since 2016. In the decade since, he has spoken at state hearings, schools, faith communities, school boards, and conferences across Michigan and nationally, with advocacy work alongside the Human Rights Campaign. His essays on fatherhood, faith, and science have appeared in The Huffington Post and regional media op-eds, and he has been interviewed on public radio and in regional and national press.

Peter has three children and three grandchildren. He lives in Dexter, Michigan, with his family. Hello, World. I’m the Dad of a Trans Kid is his first book.

Stay close to the rebellion

The manuscript is complete and currently seeking the right publisher. Sign up below to be the first to hear when the book is available — and in the meantime, the podcast walks through the book’s core arguments, episode by episode.