Escaping Narnia: Heteronormativity

Did you fly out the closet riding the rainbow, but you still feel like you're tied down to heterosexual patterns in some ways? Or are you an allied provider, teacher, or parent and you're here to recognize and unlearn how heteronormativity seeps into your life? 

​Heternormativity is "the privileging of heteronormative ideals and constructs onto LGBT culture and identity."  This conditioning plays out across so many parts of our lives, including gender roles, gender expression, navigating polyamory, etc. It sets the bar that heterosexuality is the "normal" standard, which can have an insidious impact on the livelihood of an LGBTQI+ person.  

I often have clients approach me with concerns about their friends' and families'  heteronormative questions like the following: 
"So which one of you is the man?" 
"It's just a phase." 
"Why do you wear a dress?"
"Well, you don't look gay."

Maybe you're nonbinary but feel like you need to pass as a certain binary gender to be valid. Maybe you think your sexual identity is just something you're doing in the midst of college chaos. Maybe you think one of you needs to be the man and one of you needs to be the woman in your gay relationship. Maybe you had to jump through 14 different obstacles to convince yourself to put the dress on because that goes against everything you've been taught. This is heteronormativity. It has our genders and sexualities confined in a strict paradigm, even as we attempt to live out our truths. 

These pressures and implicit biases make LGBTQI+ people infinitely more shame-prone. If you feel ashamed, you can't be vulnerable, and if you can't be vulnerable, you can't feel safe, but recognition leads to resistance. For both LGBTQI+ people and allies, all the power of change lies in the awareness of thought patterns and behaviors. By naming and identifying where yours are, you are better able to counteract them. 

For a more thorough understanding, below are two wonderful, illustrative websites that list heterosexual and cisgender privileges. 

Heterosexual Privilege by Sam Killermann

Cisgender Privileges by Sam Killermann