Look Me In The Eye!

You have probably heard all of these:

• "Liars can't look you in the eye."
• "Their truth, your truth, and the truth."
• "Imposter syndrome."
• "I don't belong here."

One of them is simply false, and it does real damage. One of them is useful, if you are willing to follow it all the way down. Two of them are lies we tell about ourselves — and they were handed to us.

Let's take them one at a time.

"Liars Can't Look You in the Eye"

This one is the worst, because it is both universally believed and flatly wrong.

Start with how widespread it is. A team of ninety researchers surveyed people across 75 countries and 43 languages, asking an open-ended question: how can you tell when someone is lying? The dominant answer, everywhere they looked, was that liars avert their gaze. Roughly 64 percent of respondents named it, and the belief held steady across languages and age groups. About 70 percent of non-English-speaking participants said the same, as did two-thirds of respondents over 30. This is not an American folk belief. It is close to a human universal.

And it is wrong.

The researchers who documented the stereotype said so themselves: the behaviors that dominate our picture of the liar are not the ones experimenters actually find useful. The reference point is a comprehensive meta-analysis by DePaulo and colleagues covering 158 possible cues to deception. Gaze aversion came out with an effect size of 0.03 — statistically indistinguishable from nothing.

Twenty years of further research has not rescued it. When researchers recently surveyed deception experts about what they actually agree on, consensus turned out to be thin across nearly every question, with one exception: more than 80 percent agreed that gaze aversion is not generally diagnostic of deception.

So why do people look away? Because there are a dozen ordinary reasons, and none of them is guilt.

Looking away is how people think. This is the finding that deserves to be better known. Glenberg and colleagues showed in 1998 that looking away from someone's face during demanding mental work helps adults answer hard arithmetic and verbal-reasoning questions. Researchers call it gaze aversion, and children develop it as a skill. It barely appears at age five, then climbs steeply until, by around eight, children use it the way adults do to manage cognitive load. It works well enough that when researchers trained five-year-olds to look away while thinking, the trained children outperformed untrained controls on difficult questions.

Read that again. Looking away is a technique. We teach it to children because it makes them think better.

For autistic people, forced eye contact is a stress response, not a social one. Using fMRI, Hadjikhani and colleagues found that when autistic participants' gaze was constrained to the eye region of a face, they showed markedly higher activation in subcortical face-processing regions, including the amygdala, than non-autistic controls. That is the brain's threat system. The lead researcher's conclusion was blunt: requiring autistic children to hold eye contact in behavioral therapy may generate considerable anxiety, and gradual habituation should be considered instead. When autistic people are asked directly, they describe adverse emotional and physiological reactions, a feeling of being invaded, and sensory overload.

For me this has always led to me literally "Seeing White" or "Seeing Red". Literally I go blind under personal conflict. An Argument with a colleague, a partner, Someone in Authority, causes me real problems. 

Culture varies. Sustained direct eye contact reads as attention and honesty in some cultures and as aggression or disrespect in others, particularly across differences in age, gender, and status.

And shame looks exactly like guilt. This is the cruelest part. DePaulo's own analysis notes that shame has a characteristic demeanor, and that demeanor includes gaze aversion and a closed posture. So the person who has been made to feel ashamed of themselves presents as deceptive. They are not lying. They have been taught to look at the floor.

I also have dealt with this. Shame of being what and who I am, Shame of failed relationships. Shame of not being able to be the Atlas to make things work, to hold up the family, to do what was expected of me and to comply and behave. Shame of existing and not being "Normal"... Normal....

So....put it together and you get a stereotype that systematically misreads shy people, traumatized people, autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people, people from the wrong culture, people who are concentrating hard, and people carrying shame that somebody else installed. As one deception researcher observed, an honest person on the autism spectrum can come across as deceptive purely because of demeanor.

People have lost jobs, custody cases, and criminal trials to this piece of folk wisdom. It belongs in the garbage. 

This idea has no place in our world and the sooner we get rid of it..the better.

"Their Truth, Your Truth, and The Truth"

I like this one, though not in the way it usually gets used. People often say "your truth" to mean that truth is personal and therefore unchallengeable. That is not what I mean. I mean that there are three different things in the room and only one of them is truth.

Watch what happens when any relationship ends. I am speaking from experience here.

One person says "I really know how to pick them," or "I pick the same kind of person every single time." Notice what is missing. Not one word about why this keeps happening. Not one word about the fact that they are the only constant across every failed relationship they have ever had. The story is built so that the storyteller never has to appear in it as a cause.

Then there is the other side's version, which, if they are also in denial, is the identical structure with the names swapped. Two people, both wronged, both blameless, both protecting a fragile ego with a narrative that has a hole in it exactly the shape of themselves.

And then there is the truth. If some invisible entity could have watched the whole thing, it would see what actually happened: X did Y, so Y did A, B, and C, which led X to do Z, and on and on for years. The truth is almost always more complicated, more mutual, and less flattering than either side's version of it.

Here is the useful part. You do not get access to the real truth by winning the argument, destroying the other person so that "you win" or "your way or the highway".  You get it by being willing to find yourself in the story as someone who did things, not only as someone to whom things were done.

The Truth is always more complex that 1 or 0, yes or no, right or wrong. 

"Imposter Syndrome" and "I Don't Belong Here"

These two are the self-lie. They are the negative thinking we aim at ourselves.

But here is what I have come to believe: they are usually not original to us. They were installed.

I dug on this.... and the term goes back to a 1978 paper by Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes on high-achieving women. It has since become one of the most widely circulated ideas in professional life. Then Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey made an argument in the Harvard Business Review that reframed the whole thing for me. Systemic racism, classism, xenophobia, and related biases were simply absent from the concept when it was developed, and entire groups were left out of the original study. The result is a framework that assigns blame to individuals while ignoring the conditions that produced the feeling in the first place. Their point is that the concept aims our attention at repairing women rather than at repairing the institutions women work inside.

And then the line I keep coming back to: "We don't belong because we were never supposed to belong." Our presence in these rooms, they note, is the product of decades of grassroots organizing and grudgingly enacted legislation. Think about it RWCN (Right Wing Christian Nationalism) and Nazi Fascism Wants Men to dominate and Women to comply. And for anything that is LGBTQ to go away... Its Rotten.

That is not a syndrome. That is an accurate perception of a room that was built without you in mind. Calling it a personal pathology is a way of handing you the bill for someone else's architecture.

So where does it come from? Societal training. Ignorance, both our own and society's. A genuine lack of confidence, sometimes. Economic stratification between the haves and the have-nots. Rigid caste systems do this by design.

In trans life, it takes a particular shape: a lifetime of internal conflict colliding with a lifetime of binary gender training.

Clinicians have a name for this. It is called the gender minority stress model, adapted for trans people by Hendricks and Testa in 2012. It separates distal stressors, meaning actual discrimination, violence, and non-affirmation out in the world, from proximal stressors, meaning what happens inside you as a result: expectations of rejection, concealment of your identity, and internalized transphobia. Researchers describe that last one as a deeply felt sense that one is wrong or bad for being transgender.

Read that chain of causation carefully, because the order matters. The feeling of not belonging is downstream. It is what a hostile environment does to a person. It is not a defect you brought with you.

The Training Itself

The classic version of the training goes like this: gender is fixed at conception, humans are only ever male or female, and this is a biological law, immutable. This is taught in kindergarten, in elementary school, and in some rigid religious traditions. Not all of them, and the distinction matters.

The World Professional Association for Transgender Health takes a different view, and it is worth citing because it is a clinical standard rather than an opinion. WPATH's Standards of Care, Version 8, states that "gender diversity is a natural variation in people and is not inherently pathological." SOC-8 also lays out the history plainly: people who cross cultural boundaries of sex and gender have existed worldwide since ancient times, and while the framing of that diversity as illness is a relatively recent development, a number of cultures traditionally welcomed and celebrated it. WPATH's stated position is that trans and gender-diverse people represent an important part of human diversity that ought to be valued.

The immutable law turns out to be a fairly recent local custom.

SCOTUS....and The law regarding Transgender Rights To Exist

The current legal fight makes the stakes concrete. On January 20, 2025, TRUMP/RWCN Executive Order 14168 declared that federal policy recognizes two sexes, defined sex as "an individual's immutable biological classification as either male or female," explicitly excluded gender identity from that definition, and directed that government identification documents, passports included, reflect it. Two days later the State Department reverted to its pre-1992 practice, requiring all new passports to show sex assigned at birth.

AND Context worth holding onto: for 33 years, across six presidential administrations, transgender Americans had been able to obtain passports with sex markers matching their gender identity.

The ACLU sued on behalf of Ashton Orr and others. The record in that case is not abstract. One plaintiff, AC Goldberg, who is transgender and intersex, described being sexually assaulted by TSA officers during a search. Another, Chastain Anderson, was strip searched while traveling with documents that did not match her gender expression. Ashton Orr and Ray Gorlin were accused of presenting fraudulent identity documents and forced to out themselves to TSA agents.

Judge Julia Kobick granted a preliminary injunction, finding the policy likely driven by animus (And bigotry) and likely unconstitutional, and expanded it to a certified class in June 2025. The First Circuit unanimously declined to stay it. The Trump/RWCN administration then went to the Supreme Court.

On November 6, 2025, the Supreme Court granted the stay, allowing the policy to take effect while litigation continued. The order was unsigned and issued on the emergency docket without full merits briefing. Its reasoning was that listing sex at birth on a passport is no more an equal protection problem than listing country of birth, since in both cases the government is simply recording a historical fact. Justice Jackson dissented, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan. It was the second time the Court had allowed a Trump/RWCN administration policy targeting trans people to take effect, following the transgender military service ban in May.

As of this year, on June 5, 2026, the First Circuit dismissed the government's appeal as moot and vacated the preliminary injunction, at the plaintiffs' own request. They gave up preliminary relief so that the stayed district court proceedings could resume and the case could be decided on the merits. That is a strategic retreat, not a surrender.

An unsigned order on the emergency docket, with three Supreme Court dissents and no full argument (From the Trump RWCN owned Judges), is not a considered ruling on whether we exist. It is a decision about what happens while the real question is still being litigated. Do not let anyone tell you the question is settled. Fight for your rights to exist. Bigotry must be abolished at all levels 

What I Do About All of This

• Recognize that eye contact, or the lack of it, tells you nothing. Not about honesty, not about character. The research is unambiguous and the stereotype is close to universal, which means most people judging you are running on folklore.
• Recognize that the truth is deeper and more complex than any one person's side of it — including mine. Especially mine.
• Recognize that the feeling of not belonging is usually a report on the room, not on me. It was installed by people with an interest in installing it.
• Recognize that I belong, and that I am what I am, regardless of what governments, religions, and bigots say. I have as much right to exist and to be myself as anyone alive.
• My actions are the ultimate truth. Not my reputation, not my documents, not someone else's reading of my face. What I actually do.

References

• Bond, C. F., Jr., and the Global Deception Research Team (2006). A World of Lies. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 37(1), 60–74.
• DePaulo, B. M., Lindsay, J. J., Malone, B. E., Muhlenbruck, L., Charlton, K., & Cooper, H. (2003). Cues to Deception. Psychological Bulletin, 129(1), 74–118.
• Denault, V., et al. (2024). What have we learned about cues to deception? A survey of expert opinions. Psychology, Crime & Law.
• Glenberg, A. M., Schroeder, J. L., & Robertson, D. A. (1998). Averting the gaze disengages the environment and facilitates remembering. Memory & Cognition, 26(4), 651–658.
• Doherty-Sneddon, G., & Phelps, F. G. (2005). Gaze aversion: A response to cognitive or social difficulty? Memory & Cognition, 33(4), 727–733.
• Phelps, F. G., Doherty-Sneddon, G., & Warnock, H. (2006). Helping children think: Gaze aversion and teaching. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 24(3), 577–588.
• Hadjikhani, N., et al. (2017). Look me in the eyes: constraining gaze in the eye-region provokes abnormally high subcortical activation in autism. Scientific Reports, 7, 3163.
• Trevisan, D. A., Roberts, N., Lin, C., & Birmingham, E. (2017). How do adults and teens with self-declared Autism Spectrum Disorder experience eye contact? PLOS ONE, 12(11).
• Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 15(3), 241–247.
• Tulshyan, R., & Burey, J.-A. (2021, February 11). Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome. Harvard Business Review.
• Hendricks, M. L., & Testa, R. J. (2012). A conceptual framework for clinical work with transgender and gender nonconforming clients: An adaptation of the Minority Stress Model. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 43(5), 460–467.
• Meyer, I. H. (2003). Prejudice, social stress, and mental health in lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations. Psychological Bulletin, 129(5), 674–697.
• Coleman, E., et al. (2022). Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People, Version 8. International Journal of Transgender Health, 23(sup1), S1–S259.
• Executive Order 14168, 90 Fed. Reg. 8615 (January 20, 2025).
• Trump v. Orr, 607 U.S. ___ (2025) (order granting stay, Nov. 6, 2025) (Jackson, J., dissenting).
• Orr v. Trump, No. 25-1579 (1st Cir. June 5, 2026) (dismissing appeal as moot; vacating preliminary injunction).