“Well, I know this, and anyone who’s ever really tried to live knows this: That what you say about somebody else — anybody else — reveals you. What I think of you as being is dictated by my own necessities, my own psychology, my own fears and desires. I’m not describing you when I talk about you; I’m describing me.” — James Baldwin

Something I hear as an atheist a lot is, “How do you live a moral life without believing in God? What keeps you from raping and killing people? If I didn’t have belief in God, I’d do [insert long series of disgusting acts].”

When we atheists hear that, it sounds a lot like projecting — like the only thing keeping you from doing bad things is a belief in God. We wonder — are you really so twisted that you would rape, murder, and generally be a terrible person if you didn’t believe in God? I mean, when you show you can’t conceive of living a moral life if you didn’t believe in God, you almost sound as if you’re saying that you’re truly hateful person underneath, and the only thing keeping you in check is the threat of hell.

Worse than that — when you project that twisted person you’d supposedly really be if you didn’t believe in God onto atheists, you can often become the very twisted person you’re projecting (in the real world, as opposed to an imaginary or theoretical one). Let me break that down.

Your thought that people who don’t believe in God are bad people somehow because you’d be a bad person if you didn’t believe in God seems, in the real world, to justify the belief that atheists are somehow worse people who deserve to go to hell (because, after all, if you didn’t believe in God, you’d deserve it). A lot of Christians won’t say that to an atheist’s face, but what I heard from pulpits when I was a Christian and what I hear from Christians in debates as an atheist — it all seems to support the theory that Christians who think they’d be bad people without God tend to think that atheists are also bad people without God — and that, therefore, these atheists deserve hell (and often, by extension, treatment as second-class citizens here on earth).

Thinking an atheist deserves hell is far more terrible than thinking they deserve — well anything else. By definition, hell is the worst punishment that exists.

I mean, it’s like condemning someone to death, even though he didn’t kill anyone, because if you were in that situation, you think you would have killed someone. The irony here is that the person you’re condemning is innocent, and you’re the only one who wound up killing someone. Your projection of the monster you’d be actually made you that monster in reality — and the person you projected that monster onto remains innocent.

You’re the monster, not the innocent person you projected your own twisted psychology onto.

I hear the similar rhetoric when people talk about transgender people going to the bathroom that happens to be labeled differently than the gender they were arbitrarily assigned. They say, “How are we going to keep transgender people from sexually harassing people?”

And that’s really projecting — they’re basically saying: “How do you keep from sexually harassing people if you don’t identify with the gender you were assigned at birth? I mean, if I didn’t identify with and try to fulfill the expectations attached to the gender I was assigned to at birth, all I’d want to do is sexually harass people.”

As if the only thing that’s keeping them from sexually harassing people is being cisgender.

But in the real world, transgender people are not the ones sexually assaulting cisgender people. Cisgender people are the ones sexually assaulting transgender people.

Here are some terrible statistics:

In 2005, we found out that 50% of transgender people will experience sexual assault at some point in their lives. As recently as 2015, 25% of transgender college students in a major survey stated that they had experienced sexual violence since enrolling in college — a space of life typically only about four-five years long.

Transgender people are not doing the sexual harassment.

The projectors are.

And that says very dark things about the people who can’t really imagine being transgender and not sexually assaulting people. Not only are they showing they secretly want to sexually assault people — their placement of that secret desire onto the transgender person becomes, in their mind, a license to engage in sexual assault themselves — against the transgender person. And a failure to see transgender people as a three-dimensional people. And an unhealthy interest in a transgender person’s extremities.

And this focus — and the resulting well-documented rampant violence from cisgender people — results in cisgender people committing further everyday injustices by denying transgender people any rights that do not fit into that projected fixation of sexuality, as is evidenced by the fact that there is widespread, well–documented discrimination against transgender people in every segment of society — including restrictions, most famously, on where transgender people are supposed to pee. As if going to the bathroom wasn’t hard enough with the perpetual threat of sexual assault from the cisgender people in the stalls.

Let’s be clear here. Transgender people are not the problem. The projectors have become their own boogeymen, and unleashed the darkest aspects of their nature onto people who are just trying to live their lives.

It’s the same flawed mentality in both instances.

What needs to happen is for people to stop projecting, start listening, and maybe trust that people are the way they represent themselves to be rather than as we imagine them to be. Especially if, like atheists and transgender people, stereotypes regularly replace these self-representations.

Thanks for reading.