Here we go again on Saturday Smugness, and this weekend it’s all about exactly what the headline states: the logical fallacies put forth by a certain bigoted, discriminatory, and hateful sector of American society. If someone never took a college course that incorporated critical thinking into the curriculum, maybe they don’t know what a red herring is … so, here is the definition: “something that misleads or distracts from an important question, a relevant argument.” And therein lies the WNBA rub, folks.

Whether intentional or not, the red herring is “a seemingly plausible, though ultimately irrelevant, diversionary tactic.” We want to thank Brynn Tannehill of Public Notice on Substack for nailing this issue on the head and inspiring this piece, too; we would not have thought to write our own take on this if not for her excellent analysis published earlier today. The reality is that uninformed people make the ignorant assumption that “transgender athletes could just declare themselves one day and play the next.” Uh, no.

It doesn’t work that way, and it never has worked that way—nor will it ever work that way. But it surely gets the hackles up, eh?

At existing levels of competition—the NCAA, the Olympics, or professional leagues elsewhere—transgender athletes go through extreme transitions of a medical nature: chemical castration or gender reassignment surgery, etc. There’s no reason to think any American professional sports association, whether in men’s or women’s competition, would require anything different. But it just takes one ignorant person who should know better, since they evidently attended college, to slip the red herring into existence.

To quote Tannehill, “None of this discourse happened because there is a new high-profile transgender athlete in the news. In fact, there are no transgender players in the WNBA or on the verge of making the league. Nor is there one in the NCAA, Olympics, or FIFA.” Yet somehow this garbage has become a big headline, probably in terms of clickbait for mainstream mediot outlets to generate needed revenue from readers who don’t possess their own critical-thinking skills. We’re not going to bother linking it.

Astutely, Tannehill also points out the reality of what the underlying motivation is: “create precedents which push transgender people out of public life altogether.” This is all about the continued marginalization of “the other” in society, whatever that “other” is defined as demographically … and usually convenient for hateful people to point a finger at to blame for whatever ills they feel society has done to them, personally. As Aaron Sorkin once wrote, “making you afraid of it and telling you who’s to blame for it.”

That’s how you win elections, he argued.

That’s all this is, really, and if someone can’t see through the deceitful ruse, well … they won’t get the red herring concept, either. Again, this is a non-issue overall, as Tannehill clarifies with data in her article: “… the hypothesis that including transgender people will somehow destroy women’s sports has already been field tested for decades, and the evidence is pretty clear: trans athletes are a tiny and under-represented group in the sports they play, and they are far from dominant.” As usual, feelings based on falsehood.

We live in a world of deceit, fraud, and lies now, where something may “sound” good and right—but it’s very factually in error. If and when people realize that, it’s often too late: the stubbornness of pathos has dug in, and all the logos in the world won’t change a willfully ignorant person’s mind, sadly, as they live in a reality-distortion zone created of their own cognitive dissonance: a refusal to accept common sense, ethics, facts, law, logic, math, morality, rationality, reason, and science in their thought processes.

So then, what constitutes the real world around them? Not what they see; instead, what they feel. And that is where logic is lost.