Say you’re driving: You may have noticed many red octagons along the side of the road. Maybe you teach middle school as I do, where both Justin Bieber and AXE body spray seem to be everywhere. (With both becoming increasingly annoying with every passing day.) Or maybe you watch a lot of TV, where depending on the channel you watch you get bombarded with ads for toys, erectile disfunction pills or zit cream.
When you spend your time reading and researching LGBT issues as I do, certain words come up a lot. “LGBT” and “issues” come immediately to mind.
Another word I’m seeing a lot lately is “heteronormative.” This is a pretty rare occurrence for a six-syllable word. If Dr. Seuss had done this he’d have wiped out half of every line he ever wrote on just one word. His first book would have been “And To Think That I Got Familiarized With It” -- forget Mulberry Street.
So when a word that long begins popping up in a lot of places, I get the sense it must be pretty important. In a world of 140 character Tweets and six-second Vines, it takes a lot of patience to stick a word that long. Perhaps that stems from the fact that word seems to make a lot of LGBT people angry.
“Heterosexuality is presented as the norm in our society. As the norm, it is assumed until it is negated; innocent until proven guilty. Or rather, ‘normal’ until proven ‘abnormal.’” (1)
Wikipedia, of course, approaches the definition a bit more center of the road: “The body of lifestyle norms that holds that people fall into distinct and complementary genders (man and woman) with natural roles in life… (it) is often linked to heterosexism and homophobia.(2)
Interestingly, the word didn’t even come into use until 1991. Unlike the evolution of “gay,” “bisexual” or even “queer,” this word has come into being completely within my lifetime -- and I have to admit, the anger at this concept has mystified me somewhat.
I tend to look at the true meanings of words, not the baggage that they carry. It’s the reason I can talk about tampons and periods with my high school students -- yes, all of them -- without breaking into sweats or giggle fits. They’re words.
Heteronormative strikes me as the same: It means that being heterosexual is normal. And indeed, if you look at the definition of normal it reads: “nor·mal: adjective… conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected… noun… the usual, average, or typical state or condition.”(3)
Follow that with up with this: “Approximately 9 million Americans… identify as LGBT… and nearly 25.6 million Americans (11%) acknowledge at least some same-sex sexual attraction.”(4) This means that even with the most far-reaching idea of non-heteronormative behavior, some 89 percent of America still identifies with being heterosexual.
Hate to say it, but being heterosexual is normal, no matter how people might perceive the unfairness of that word. And when I first pondered the furor over this idea, that was pretty much where my reasoning ended.
Thankfully, I kept reading. (I stayed clear of any page involving Justin Bieber.) In a world where words and opinions form the basis of laws and equality, perception does matter.
“Heteronormative Bias and Discrimination in Public Health… affects public health practice, policy, and research,” says a study out of the University of North Carolina.(5) It shows up in how we address things like smoking and suicide rates in the LBGT community, as well legal discrimination against same-sex parents.(5)
It manifests itself in how we view everyday life, and the corners -- and closets -- it forces us into: “Since heterosexuality is integral to the way a society is organized, it becomes a naturalized ‘learned behavior.’ When a woman decides she is a lesbian… she is rejecting the ‘compulsion’ toward a heterosexual lifestyle and orientation.”(6)
There is the cynical part of me that thinks this will never change. Nearly 90 percent of the people seem to be perfectly happy in their heteronormative state; why would they get worked up about it?
But I also know that during the 1960’s only about 11 percent of the nation was African-American, and plenty of the white majority stood up for equality. Today’s overwhelming swell of support for gay marriage in this country certainly seems to suggest it’s possible. Indeed, the passage I just quoted above comes from Irondale High School in Minnesota, which starts out by calling heteronormativity a “cultural bias.” It all starts somewhere.(6)
Facebook now lets people choose from 56 different categories to identify gender. "While to many this change may not mean much, for those it affects it means a great deal," said a Facebook spokesman.(7)
It’s even beginning to appear on official hospital forms, in some places. Daily Californian writer Elisabeth Bahadori writes of a doctor’s visit where she was asked to choose her gender from “not two but three boxes. ‘Male,’ ‘female’ and ‘other.’” (8) Granted, this was Berkeley, the most liberal place in the universe, but that still counts for something.
Do I think we’re going to ever live in a world where the 89 percent completely forget they’re hetero? No, I don’t, even what that’s what Bahadori thinks should happen: (Like I said, she’s from Berkeley.)
“If the magazine is geared toward women, like Cosmopolitan or Allure, the titles say things like ‘Ways to Please Your Man Between the Sheets’ or ‘How to Use Your Femininity to Attract a Man’... If it’s a men’s magazine like GQ or Esquire, you’re hit with titles like ‘Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Pleasing Women’ or ‘The 100 Sexiest Women of the 21st Century.’ Any issues with the quality of the content aside, most mainstream media that has anything at all to do with sex only deals with it from a heterosexual perspective.”(8)
The simple truth is magazines and everything else in this country are made to sell to the majority, and I’m OK with that. That’s why LGBT people have many of their own publications. As one of the few drag queens I know that sports 18-inch feathers on my head, I accept that I’m in the minority, and I don’t ask them to raise the overhead stage lights just for me. (I do, however, plead for no Justin Bieber music; that kid just annoys the crap out of me.)
So what’s the solution, then?
I leave you with the thoughts of an old friend of mine, Dave Goff, who seems to have moved past all this research and media stuff and figured it out. From Santa Cruz, California, he’s a pretty laid back guy who I’m sure wouldn’t last a minute at Berkeley.
“Hair color is a great example because some people are born with blond hair, others can choose to have blond hair, and red hair is outside the norm, but we don't view it as a ‘defect,’” he writes. “I'm hoping our society will mature to the point that sexual orientation would be viewed the same as hair color in that regard.”
Smart guy. I’m pretty sure he despises Justin Bieber, too.
Reference
1) The Hawk: Womanifesto: ‘Mom, Dad. I’m straight.’ The oppression of heteronormativity
http://hawkhillnews.com/opinions/2013/10/22/womanifesto-mom-dad-im-straight-the-oppression-of-heteronormativity/
2) Wikipedia: Heteronormativity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronormativity
3) Google: Definition: Normal
https://www.google.com/search?q=definition%3A+normal&oq=definition%3A+normal&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.8799j0j1&sourceid=chrome&espv=2&es_sm=119&ie=UTF-8
4) The Williams Institute: How Many People are Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender?
http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/research/census-lgbt-demographics-studies/how-many-people-are-lesbian-gay-bisexual-and-transgender/
5) Carolina Digital Repository: Heteronormative Bias and Discrimination in Public Health
https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/record/uuid:db98a746-5d83-4d95-870e-2f332b06b2c9
6) Mounds View Schools: Irondale: Heteronormativity
http://www2.moundsviewschools.org/irondale/userfiles/coreym/heteronormativity.pdf
7) Slate.com: Confused by All the New Facebook Genders? Here's What They Mean.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/02/21/gender_facebook_now_has_56_categories_to_choose_from_including_cisgender.html
8) The Daily Californian: The heteronormative bias
http://www.dailycal.org/2013/02/12/the-heteronormative-bias/