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If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that no one likes being told who they are or who they are not.

As a gay transgender man, I would say I live an extreme version of projection, because there are a great many people in this world who are blatantly ignorant when it comes to the reality of what it is to live a gay transgender life but assume from the moment they have heard and/or seen a single thing about me that they are welcome and knowledgeable enough on my life as a gay transgender person that they assert their perceived expertise of my character, intentions, intelligence, motivations, authenticity, and/or lived experience.

So people make assumptions on top of assumptions, often within the first interaction when I materialize within their physical world. Ignorance paired with arrogance can be exhausting, and I don’t choose to revisit it with those who conduct themselves that way. That said, I can’t tell you how many times people have made the wildest of assertions about me without knowing anything about my personality or my life, for that matter; with that said, let’s review the root of projection, shall we?

We’ll cover: psychological defense mechanisms, cognitive biases, social conditioning, identity protection, and emotional regulation.

Psychological Defense Mechanisms

• Projection — Attributing one’s own feelings, insecurities, prejudices, fears, and/or undesirable traits to another person instead of acknowledging them internally.
• Displacement — Redirecting unresolved anger, frustration, and/or resentment toward a readily available target.
• Denial — Rejecting info about oneself that conflicts with one’s preferred self-perception and image and attributing the discomfort to others.
• Externalization — Assigning responsibility for internal conflicts, personal shortcomings and defaults, and/or emotional discomfort to outside individuals and/or groups.
• Reaction formation — Expressing an exaggerated, over-the-top opposite attitude to hide feelings and/or impulses that are challenging to acknowledge.
• Scapegoating — Assigning blame to a person and/or group to avoid confronting more deeply complicated personal and/or complex systemic problems.

Identity Protection & Tribal Psychology

• In-group bias — Viewing individuals who share one’s identity, culture, beliefs, and/or affiliations more favorably than those outside the group.
• Out-group homogeneity bias — Assuming that everyone in an opposing group thinks, acts, and/or believes the same way.
• Identity fusion — Being so psychologically attached to a group identity that criticism of the group feels like a personal threat and/or an attack. For example, think about cults and/or religious indoctrination; it always aligns itself with identity.
• Social categorization — Reducing people to labels, demographics, affiliations, and/or political identities rather than recognizing their individuality.
• Identity foreclosure — Adopting beliefs and/or identities without sufficiently questioning and/or independently reviewing them.
• Collective defensiveness — Interpreting a different point of view and/or a disagreement with one’s group as disrespect, hostility, and/or an attempt to undermine said group.
• Moral tribalism — Dividing individuals into morally superior and inferior categories based on perceived group membership. For example, a group telling people they are better than others outside of the tribe.

Distorted Perception & Cognitive Biases

• Confirmation bias — Seeking info that reinforces existing beliefs while dismissing concrete contradictory facts and evidence. For example, saying transgender people don’t exist simply because a person is hateful, regardless of hate, as a fact, transgender people like myself still very much do exist in this world.
• Fundamental attribution error — Explaining another person’s actions through presumed character defects while overlooking circumstances and/or context.
• Stereotyping — Using generalized assumptions about a group and/or identity to determine how a person must think and/or act.
• Black-and-white thinking — Viewing individuals and scenarios in absolute categories, such as: good or bad, victim or aggressor, right or wrong,
• Mind reading: Assuming you know another person’s intent, motives, and/or beliefs without discussing it or establishing evidence.
• Selective perception: Acknowledging only the behaviors that support a pre-existing narrative about a person.
• Hostile attribution bias — Interpreting ambiguous actions as intentionally hostile, aggressive, threatening, and/or antagonistic.
• Availability heuristic — Judging an entire group of people based on particular memorable, emotionally charged, and/or highly publicized examples.
• Essentialism — Assuming that a person’s identity determines their inherent morality, personality, behavior, and/or worldview. For example, there is that old saying, ‘don’t judge a book by its cover ’; for this very reason, you do not know what you do not know about someone until you connect with them on a human level.

Emotional & Psychological Insecurity

• Projection of insecurity — Assigning one’s own unresolved shortcomings and/or fears to another person.
• Fear of ambiguity — Experiencing discomfort with accepting that individuals can retain complex, contradictory, and/or evolving beliefs.
• Need for certainty — Using rigid categories and assumptions to construct a sense of psychological stability in an unpredictable, chaotic world.
• Low tolerance for cognitive dissonance — Struggling to reconcile information that challenges deeply held beliefs.
• Threat sensitivity — Perceiving differences in another person’s identity, opinion, and/or expression as potential threats to one’s own security and/or status.
• Inferiority compensation — Attempting to feel psychologically superior by punching down on, diminishing, judging, and/or categorizing other people.
• Unresolved shame — Redirecting personal feelings of shame towards others through criticisms, accusations, and/or moral judgments.
• Emotional reasoning — Treating one’s personal emotional reaction to someone as proof of that person’s intentions and/or character.

Environmental Influences & Social Conditioning

• Learned prejudice — Internalizing assumptions and judgments absorbed from family, culture, institutions, news media, and/or social environments.
• Groupthink — Conforming to collective thoughts and beliefs to maintain acceptance and to avoid social rejection.
• Social conformity — Adopting group attitudes, thoughts, and/or assumptions without independently vetting their validity.
• Narrative conditioning — Interpreting individuals through pre-existing cultural, political, and/or ideological narratives.
• Algorithmic reinforcement- Repeated conditioning to ideologically similar content that reinforces existing biases and/or perceptions.
• Moral conditioning — Learning to associate particular identities with virtue or wrongdoing without actually evaluating people independently.
• Status preservation — Assuming things about individuals to protect one’s perceived social position, authority, and/or standing.
• Inherited antagonism — Perpetuating historical, cultural, and/or intergenerational resentments and assigning them to people who may have had zero involvement in the original conflict.

Interpersonal & Relational Dynamics

• Transference — Unconsciously transferring feelings and/or expectations from previous relationships onto someone in the present time.
• Emotional generalization — Treating a person as though they represent everyone who has previously caused pain and/or disappointment.
• Premature judgment — Forming conclusions about a person’s character before obtaining sufficient information.
• False consensus effect — Assuming that a person’s own beliefs, values, and/or life interpretations are universally shared.
• Personalization — Interpreting another individual’s actions and/or opinions as being personally directed at oneself when they may actually not be at all.
• Boundary confusion — Assuming that someone else’s beliefs, choices, and/or identity has to conform with one’s own expectations.
• Dehumanization — Reducing people to political, racial, cultural, religious, and/or ideological categories as opposed to recognizing their full lived humanity.

The Deeper Psychological Pattern

Many of these mechanisms come together in one central phenomenon: people sometimes respond to what a person represents in their minds rather than to the actual living, breathing, feeling person standing right in front of them.

This forms a cycle:

• Identity recognition — An individual notices a perceived cultural, political, social, and/or ideological identity.
• Psychological association — Previous experiences, conditioning, stereotypes, and/or existing beliefs get activated.
• Assumption formation — The individual assigns motives, intentions, values, or characteristics without sufficient evidence.
• Emotional response — Fear, defensiveness, superiority, resentment, and/or hostility come out.
• Confirmation of the original narrative — The individual interprets subsequent interactions as facts that their original assumptions were correct.

What Psychologically Mature Responses Look Like

The counterpoint to projection and/or identity-based assumptions is the ability to enact:

• Individuation — Recognizing people as individuals rather than representatives of a collective group.
• Intellectual humility — Accepting that one’s own interpretation may be incomplete and/or incorrect.
• Emotional self-awareness — Recognizing when one’s personal experiences influence one’s perceptions of other people.
• Perspective-taking — Considering another person’s lived experience without immediately agreeing with it.
• Epistemic curiosity — Asking questions before reaching conclusions.
• Differentiation — Understanding that disagreement does not always indicate hostility and/or moral inferiority.
• Psychological flexibility — Allowing people to exist outside the labels and/or stories we have constructed for them.

In Conclusion

When people assign someone a character, motive, belief system, and/or moral position based primarily on the identity they perceive them to hold, they stop relating to the person and actually start relating to their own psychological interpretation of that person.

Perhaps one of the most important distinctions:

Understanding a person’s identity is not at all the same as assuming you understand their psychology.

An individual’s identity may provide context; however, it does not provide total access or full understanding of their intentions, moral values, lived experiences, personality, and/or humanity.

That said, the next time you have the opportunity to meet and speak with a transgender person, assume nothing and be open-minded. You may very well have one of the most enlightening conversations of your lifetime.

To your success.

ABOUT DYLAN THOMAS COTTER

Rebel with a cause, driven by authenticity, self-expression, and liberation for all.

Rev. Dylan Thomas Cotter is a strategist, public relations leader, and brand communications executive with more than fifteen years of experience at the intersection of entertainment, media, and technology. Cotter is known for securing numerous Tier 1 (top-tier) and Tier 2 media placements across key markets.

His latest books, Dear Cisgender Reader Walk Beside Me: An Invitation to Understanding My Big, Exciting Gay Transgender Life and Think Like a Transgender Thought Leader, are out now.