Earlier this week, a friend sent me a recent video clip of a well-known openly gay comedian being interviewed about her experience of coming out. During the interview, she talked about feeling ashamed about being gay, but what struck me most was when she said, “I’m gay and ashamed till the day I die.”
Along with the video, my friend, who is an openly gay man and in a long-term relationship with his partner, wrote, “We went from being afraid to come out to this kind of overexposure that, in reality, makes many uncomfortable.”
I was surprised by my friend’s response. While the conversation is certainly nuanced, whenever I hear someone say that being LGBTQ “isn’t for kids” or that “they’re too young to understand,” I get curious about the messages they internalized as a child and how those messages have affected their worldview. This curiosity drove me to write my book, “Raising LGTBQ Allies: A Parent’s Guide to Changing the Messages from the Playground.”
It’s easy for the comedian to say, as an adult, that she’s “gay and ashamed till the day I die” and wear it as a sort of badge of honor. But as children, we want to belong and be a part of the larger community.
As a therapist, I sit with LGBTQ clients daily and hear their stories of feeling misunderstood as children, which has created lasting sexual identity development challenges.
I understand that sometimes the pendulum can swing far in one direction when it comes to cultural shifts, but visibility is important and heteronormativity is a powerful force that causes negative consequences in our psyches.
I sort of joke that I wrote myself into graduate school because halfway through working on my book, I applied to grad school to become an LGBTQ-affirming therapist. In graduate school, I often shared my book’s message in classroom discussions because many of my childhood-development classes were taught through a heteronormative lens.
Heteronormativity — the belief, conscious or unconscious, that being heterosexual is the only natural or “normal” sexual expression — often shows up in the conversations we don’t have about the communities we don’t include. Heteronormativity is in everything from the songs we hear on the radio to the greeting cards we shop for at our local Target and the images we see in the articles we read on the internet.
Heteronormativity is especially prevalent in the textbooks that young people read in school and in the examples their teachers may unknowingly use in everyday classroom conversations.
Challenging heteronormativity in the classroom
Not everyone is heterosexual or cisgender. Yet we live in a heteronormative world, and many young people spend their days in classrooms and homes that are extensions of the world outside them. Through everything from pop culture to K–12 materials, the messages children receive inside and outside the classroom often put forth a heteronormative worldview.
According to an article from the American Marketing Association, the average consumer in the United States is exposed to 10,000 brand messages a day. In addition, research from Michigan State University Extension’s Stress Less With Mindfulness program, finds that the average person has 80,000 thoughts per day. Because we live in a heteronormative world, from the moment a child is born, families can unintentionally pass along anti-LGBTQ beliefs and encourage heteronormativity simply by the toys, books and movies their children are exposed to at home.
It’s made me wonder how many heteronormative messages, images and impressions an average youth receives on a daily basis in the United States — from both the media and their environment. Compounded with the number of thoughts the average person has per day and the intersectionality of familial, religious, cultural and societal beliefs (and just by doing basic math), we have an overwhelmingly heterosexual and cisgender equation.
Challenging heteronormativity at home
In math, if you want a different outcome, you have to change the equation. If we want to help create an affirming world for all children, we have to proactively challenge harmful social norms.
To help, here are six steps:
- Consider that at least one child in your class or family could be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer.
- Practice proactive self-introspection.
- Be inclusive and incorporate LGBTQ examples in discussions and everyday conversations.
- Show support by having LGBTQ-related books, signage, stickers or resource materials.
- Create an open, safe and affirming space (containment).
- Be vulnerable, ask questions and have authentic conversations (attunement).
Whether inside the home or classroom, challenging heteronormativity can prevent anti-LGBTQ bias from taking root inside a young person’s belief system. And giving all young people the space to discover who they are, while encouraging them to authentically share their lives with us, helps raise a new generation of LGBTQ allies.
Chris Tompkins is an author, therapist and educator. Learn more about Tompkins at linktr.ee/aroadtriptolove.
