- Hey, it's Rowan,
and today I'm gonna be talking about heteronormativity.
(upbeat music)
So what is heteronormativity?
Well, it's the kind of global social assumption
that by default people are gonna be straight and cisgender.
This also kind of spills out into the association
that people who don't fit into those brackets
are somehow wrong or other.
It can also have repercussions in terms of the gender binary
and the gender norms that are assigned to people.
If you wanna know more
about this kind of background information and these terms
and how it affects society in general,
I really recommend you checking out
Hannah Witton's video that she posted a few days ago.
I'm gonna link that under description.
I watched Hannah's video and I've kind of been wanting
to make a video about heteronormativity for awhile,
and I think after watching I decided
that the most useful or interesting thing
for me to have done was to make a video
talking about kind of how it affects
queer people in particular
and kind of dotted through with some of my experiences
in how it affects me.
So just a bit of background.
I am always, always, always assumed to be straight.
I am not visibly queer.
Even when I try and be visibly queer with, like,
pin badges or bracelets or going to Pride,
people assume then that I'm an ally.
Even when I come out to them and say, I am gay
or I'm a lesbian, they will question it more times than not.
Sometimes more than once.
They will ask me if I'm sure or if, really?
Or, you're lying, or something like that.
This is all an example of heteronormativity in practise,
the idea that people assume so hard
that people must be straight as a default
that even when I tell them I'm not,
they don't believe me.
I talked about this to my friend Sarah who isn't monosexual,
and she talked to me about the fact
that a very similar kind of erasure process
can happen through heteronormativity
with people who are bisexual or pansexual
who, if they get into the relationship
with someone who is of what looks like
the kind of opposite gender to them,
they are assumed to be straight.
This kind of leads me into the first big point
that I wanna talk about,
which is that cornerstone of the queer experience,
coming out.
Coming out is so obviously to do with heteronormativity
because it is literally, like, based on the idea
that we will assume that someone is straight
up until the point that they actively tell us
that they are not.
And it can be a really hard thing for a lot of people
because it can sometimes feel
like actively marking yourself out as different,
and in many cases,
especially when coming out to family members or parents,
marking yourself out as some kind of disappointment.
And this is because your parents and your family
will often have an idea of what they want
from your life for you to be happy.
Because this is the idea of heteronormativity
that's been fed to us.
The idea that you get married to someone
of the opposite gender, you have kids,
this is something that you can, a basic thing,
that you have to be happy.
And when you present your parents or your family members
with this idea of, well, I'm never going to reach
what you consider to be the ideal of happiness,
that can be really tough.
But there's a kind of secondary side to this,
and that's that a lot of queer people,
when they're growing up,
also have that same heterosexual idea of happiness
fed to them, and they bite into it.
This is why, you know, as a queer person,
you might not be brought up in a homophobic environment.
You might not really necessarily think
that anyone is gonna react negatively to you coming out.
It can still be hard to come out
because you also have to reconcile it
with your ideas of what happiness are.
Even before you come out to yourself,
it can feel invalid or confusing
to be having these feelings
because it's not what is meant to be happening to you.
This also unfortunately can lead to (sighs)
hatred within the community,
people talking about, oh, it's okay to be gay in this way,
but it's not okay to be gay in that way.
Essentially the idea of, oh, I might not be able
to fulfil the heterosexual part
of this kind of dream life,
but I can still be a man, or I can still be a woman,
and that can be equally as damaging within the community
as it can from the outside world.
So in terms of how we are fed this kind of idea
of this one way to be happy
is because we have the erasure of LGBT or queer people
in the media, things like that.
When you're a kid and you're watching television,
chances are you aren't gonna see any gay characters,
but you're gonna see
a hell of a lot of heterosexual characters.
This is kind of a validation of heterosexual relationships
and a damning of queer ones.
This again can be feeding into doubting your own feelings
and also something that's gonna lead me
to talk about schools.
The idea that being queer is wrong in some way,
it's a cause for worry, is unacceptable,
is something not to be talked about.
So just within my school in the kind of the 90s, 2000s,
you had some real effects of heteronormativity coming in.
So the idea that homophobia wouldn't go challenged.
The idea that we were, you know, up until the age of 16,
we would learn about queer, LGBT people,
but we would never be allowed to acknowledge in class
that they were queer or LGBT.
That part of their experience was erased.
The fact that my school blocked LGBT helplines
and support groups online because of being LGBT,
and it was up there, like,
this website has been blocked for lesbian and gay content,
because it seems unacceptable,
even when it's trying to support kids.
You also had teachers implying
that teachers shouldn't come out as gay or queer
because it would inevitably lead
to inappropriate, coded sexual relationships with students.
The gay people as paedophiles myth
is still alive and well today.
And the last thing in schools is sex and relationship
and health education was woefully lacking
for queer students.
You know, when learning about relationships in school,
queer relationships weren't talked about.
Stuff like that when you're in a place of learning
and you aren't being acknowledged can be really damaging.
This can actually be really fucking dangerous.
Like, not talking to people
who have vaginas about the fact
that when they have sex with other people with vaginas,
they can also get STDs.
Like, the amount of people who don't know that
or don't know how to prevent it is massive.
And this idea of sex education
goes into the idea of sex in general.
So, I mean, heteronormativity,
and this also is, like, super fucked up
for everyone, not just queer people,
but, like, the concept of virginity completely falls down
when you start talking about anything other
than, like, penis and vagina sex.
So much emphasis is put on that,
and I've been asked multiple times by people
how lesbians lose their virginity.
Because people just can't grasp the idea
that sex isn't just this one thing.
The whole construct of virginity
is, like, a social construct that has no, like,
actual, objective meaning,
but so much meaning is placed on it in society
that it's just a really weird thing to think about
as a queer person trying to work out
your value in this system which places
such a value on virginity.
Which leads me on again to the doctors.
Like, this is also paired with the idea
of sex having to be talked about in, like, a polite way,
so it involves a lot of ambiguity
when you aren't just talking about cis and straight people.
So when we say things like being sexually active,
what does that mean?
Like, are you talking about sex
that can result in pregnancy specifically?
Are you talking about sex that can involve getting STDs?
Things like men who have sex with men,
the way that you understand sex
and the way that you understand men
kind of defines how you are understanding
whatever the health message is behind that,
and that can be really fucked up.
So it's like you don't actually,
when you say men that have sex with men,
you mean men who are having anal sex.
But you don't really mean men that are having anal sex.
You mean any time that a penis is entering an anus,
anyone who has that kind of sex, listen up,
this is something to do with you.
So it's things like the HPV vaccine,
which is to do with cervical cancer,
that can also, the same thing that can cause cervical cancer
can also cause anal cancer.
And so all schoolgirls in the UK got vaccinated,
and no boys did,
regardless of whether or not they would need it.
It was just wasn't something
that seemed to have been considered.
And the last thing I wanna talk about,
it's kind of gonna segue into
how it may seem obvious that heteronormativity
affects queer people in a negative way,
but it also affects everyone.
So I know a lot of people who have,
kind of cis women, who have chronic pain,
who have real issues with their reproductive systems
who are being talked out of having procedures
because it may affect their fertility.
It may essentially affect their baby-having potential.
Even women who do not want children,
because the doctors assume that at some point,
in order to fulfil their happiness in life,
they will want to have them
and they will regret this procedure,
however much pain it's gonna be putting them in
for the rest of their lives.
And this just idea around what it is to have a perfect life,
what it is to want what your meant to want,
to love who you're meant to love,
to be who you're meant to be
gets so fucked up with heteronormativity.
And what I kinda wanna hear from you guys
is watching this video, watching Hannah's video,
is there stuff that you think about a lot?
Is there stuff that you've only just realised
from watching these videos
about how heteronormativity affects your lives?
If you have any thoughts on that,
please leave a comment below or tweet at me
if you want to, as well,
'cause I'm just really interested
in how other people are experiencing this.
Yeah, that was just, like, a super rambley video about it.
I hope that that was interesting in some way.
Until I see you next time, bye.
(upbeat music)