Fantasy and Reality

The people who are trying to re-legalize gender-identity discrimination are relying on a fundamental psychological principle: imagining something vividly makes it seem more probable.

This is sometimes called the "salience effect." Say an airplane crashes, and the news is filled with pictures of burning debris and injured people. You will find that people are especially afraid to fly right after that. The actual probability of a crash hasn't increased measurably, just the vividness of the idea. A kid gets abducted and all of a sudden playgrounds are empty as parents fear it will happen to their child. There's a nasty car-crash and drivers white-knuckle the wheel and keep a foot hovering over the brake pedal. Thinking about something makes it seem more likely to happen.

Now the shower-nuts want you to imagine something terrible happening if transgender people get the same rights as the rest of us. They can't point to a time that anything terrible has happened in any of the very many places that already have equal rights, so they have to make up something for you to focus on.

Their argument is very simple. It goes like this: imagine a creepy male sexual predator lurking in a ladies locker-room.

That's the whole thing. There is no rational link between that image and the nondiscrimination law, there is nothing in the law that will make that sort of event more probable. There is no law at the present time that says a man can't go into a ladies room, and it's not a problem. As it is, you don't even have to claim to "feel like a woman inside," a guy can walk in there any time he wants, as far as the law is concerned, as long as he behaves himself. He should put the seat down afterwards, but I don't think there's a law about that, at least in our county.

You can use your mind for dreaming, or you can use your mind for thinking, it's your call. In the dream world, things that happen at the same time cause each other; good people are beautiful and bad people are ugly; big things and things that are nearby are more important than small and distant things; famous people are more truthful and knowledgeable than ordinary people; strange things are dangerous; brightly-colored things are more significant than dull things; good and evil are real qualities that characterize individuals and even entire countries.

These are natural psychological responses, based on the fact that we evolved as social mammals with inborn talents that helped us survive in a dangerous world. Advertisers know how to capitalize on this kind of thinking, politicians know how to manipulate it. Some people never realize that there is another way to use your mind, where you confirm facts and sources of information and use valid reasoning to come to conclusions.

Here: Imagine what it would be like if we passed a law that said you couldn't discriminate against transgender people, and then a perverted ugly guy in a dress lurked in a ladies room, waving his festering penis at the women and children, drooling lewdly through the stubble of his untrimmed beard, staring at the smooth skin of their fertile, virginal bodies. Just imagine! Close your eyes and think about it, picture it, dwell on it. It could happen!

That's what we're up against. We all use this kind of thinking sometimes, when we make snap decisions, say, about who to be nice to and who to avoid, it is human nature. But civilized human nature is capable of knowing that the world can be seen from multiple perspectives. This is the beauty of being social mammals, we have a gift for taking someone else's point of view. Once you've made that leap, once you have realized that your own perspective is but one of many, egocentric dream-thinking seems insufficient and primitive. I want our political decisions, policy decisions, decisions about the direction of our society, to be made by a reasonable process, not by people imagining hypothetical possibilities, as if they were dreaming.