Heteronormativity Quotes

“You’re not really mad that I’m not having children.

In fact, I would probably love to one day.

You’re mad that I’m expressing autonomy of choice.

You’re mad that I’m considering other options.

You’re mad that I don’t view that as my ultimate potential.

You’re mad that I dare be selfish enough to make choices based on my best interest, something women are not supposed to do.

You’re mad that I consider it a choice, and that I, a woman, am exercising choice.

You’re not mad that I’m not having babies.

You’re mad because I’m acting like a man.”
― Alice Minium

“It is critical to note that our biases against the other are empowered less by our assumptions of their otherness and more by our assumptions about our own normality.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci

“Is having a child actually fundamentally bettering the world as a whole in any way? There is no shortage of children. Wouldn’t it be better to let people who want children have them, and leave everyone else alone?”
― Alice Minium

“I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write.”
― Jeanette Winterson

“When you're accustomed to being considered 'normal', difference feels like a perversion.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci

“Heterosexual choice is allowed to be the background of a writer’s life; its wallpaper. So is maleness. And whiteness. Step out of that and you will be called a feminist writer, a lesbian writer, a gay writer, a woman writer. A black writer. You will never be called a heterosexual writer or a male writer or a white writer. Those signifiers are absorbed into the single word ‘writer’.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Love

“You know, there's this bullshit idea that you just magically know when you like someone romantically or sexually. But that's all it is - bullshit. Emotions are messy. People are messy. I imagine that magic makes it all just messier. And anything that isn't a clear-cut heterosexual romance out of a Disney film or a Hollywood romcom is constantly being put into doubt and questioned, because we are so used to seeing the same simple story repeated over and over again. That being straight or gay are the only options, that one person is right for you your entire life, that you just know you're meant to be, that couples have to be exclusive to be real relationships, that couples need to be couples, that romance always comes with sex. Life is not that easy. People and attraction are way more complicated than that.”
― Anna Kirchner, Little Black Bird

“The surest way to get a bunch of queers to do anything is to make a rule nonsensically forbidding us from doing it.”
― Zena Sharman, The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Health and Health Care

“Even if we are married to the same person, and remain faithful to her or him for the rest of our lives, that will still not stop our desires from straying. We will continue to lust after Shah Rukh Khan or Sophia Loren even as we might stay happily married. This is the way desire operates—through fantasy rather than fact.”
― Madhavi Menon, Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India

“...we are always both seeing and not seeing desire around us, especially when that desire steers clear of the form of a heterosexual couple.”
― Madhavi Menon, Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India

“I like you. I like us. But I don't want you to push yourself to make it romantic or sexual or whatever just because you think we should, because we have matching heart lines, or are bonded by magic, or you think I'm your soulmate. Besides, I'm still figuring things out myself and I don't like the idea that I'm attracted to you only because of magic. Or that I'm attracted to magic itself.”
― Anna Kirchner, Little Black Bird

“There's nothing wrong with you. And I don't like your idea that I can 'fix' you. You aren't broken. There's nothing to fix.”
― Anna Kirchner, Little Black Bird

“I don’t feel like I’ve been lying to anyone, though. I mean, since I was little, everyone’s told me that I like girls. Think about it—even when you’re in kindergarten, there are all sorts of messages that eventually you’ll grow up to like girls. Man, when you’re barely able to walk people make these cutesy comments about your girlfriends and how you’re going to be a lady killer and all sorts of crap like that. You were an ugly little kid, Derek, so perhaps you didn’t get that sort of attention, but I’ve always been told that I’m straight. And that’s the story I was trying to make happen. I didn’t come up with the lie. It wasn’t mine. They handed the lie to me, and I tried like hell to make it work for a while. No one meant any harm, but I’ve spent some long nights unable to sleep, worrying about how it’s all going to work out and blaming myself for being some sort of pervert. You know, I was lying in bed at night worrying when I was in, like, eighth grade. That ain’t right.”
― Kenneth Logan, True Letters from a Fictional Life

“Asking us to push away the very walls that are constantly crushing us into small, confined boxes is toxic.”
― Jamie Windust, In Their Shoes: Navigating Non-Binary Life

“Sexual-patriarchal relational systems overwhelm, from media glorifying sexual connection above other forms of intimacy and interaction, to medical, economic, and legal structures that automatically privilege sexual/domestic/romantic dyadic partnerships and genetic family bonds over other chosen platonic relationships and support systems. Oppressive social structures and micro-aggressive interpersonal interactions constantly grate on us, damaging our health and maybe even pushing us to seek care, but often available formal assistance is part of the same harmful system and populated by the same privileged persons.”
― Zena Sharman, The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Health and Health Care

“The fact is, however, that in those early days we were not as emancipated as I would like to remember. There was discrimination although at the time few of us were aware of it. I had to unlearn what men in our society are brainwashed throughout our lives to believe, the myth that men are stud football players who bring in the money and women are supposed to stay home and wash dishes! There is sexism among gay males and lesbians just as there is sexism in the non-gay population - because we are all conceived and nurtured by a heterosexual society whose prejudices are reflected in us. We are the children.”
― Troy D. Perry, Don't Be Afraid Anymore: The Story of Reverend Troy D. Perry and the Metropolitan Community Churches

“To express Choice, Agency, or Control over my own reproductive choices is Not My Place, it is Selfish, it makes me Inferior, it makes me Incomplete, it makes me Un-Woman.

By this logic, to exercise choice over my own reproduction is un-woman. To choose self over reproduction is un-woman. To exercise the agency of Self is to violate social norms of womanhood. Women do not exist to do things for themselves. Women have a social duty to be incubators, regardless of person.”
― Alice Minium

“It's okay not to know. It's okay to question. It's okay to change your mind. It's okay to change your label or not want a label at all. It's okay to challenge the heteronormative standards of the society. Hell, it's okay to challenge amatonormative standards of the society.”
― Anna Kirchner, Little Black Bird

“It was the most obnoxiously heterosexual thing Ava had seen since the last St. Patrick's Day parade.”
― Nino Cipri, Finna

“Maybe it's not the heteronormative dream that she grew up wishing for, but... knowing who you are and loving yourself is so much better than that, I think.”
― Alice Oseman, Loveless

“The men's needs are strong and overwhelming. They need the faggots and their friends in order to know who they are not. But the faggots and their friends will no longer need the men. They can sit and produce high, invisible love energy or they can do anything. But they will not need. And when the faggots and their friends cease being the faggots and their friends, the deathly dance of the men will begin to wane and a new dance will begin to emerge. Then the third revolutions will engulf us all.”
― Larry Mitchell

“At the core of Lacanian ethics if therefore the idea that the subject who steps into the real - the place of the lack in the Other - severes its ties to the symbolic order. Such a subject is no longer embarassed by its inability to adhere to the rules of social behavior but instead embraces - feels compelled to embrace - the destructive energies of the real. This subject is not interested in trying to solve its problem within the parameteres of the system but rather insists on changing the game entirely, on defying the very structuring principles of the system, which is why the act opens a gateway to what might, from the perspective of the established order, seem completely inconceivable (or even utterly insane).”
― Mari Ruti, The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory's Defiant Subjects

“Let me say it again so that there is no mistake: Even for those who have chosen to fully accept and affirm their 2SLGBTQIA+ siblings in Christ, until we let go of our narrow and prideful belief in the supremacy of the “normal”, we will not only continue to perpetuate harm to the already vulnerable, but we will deny the Church the opportunity to encounter aspects of the Divine only found in those who “transgress” those false and narrow boundaries.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci

“At the core of Lacanian ethics is therefore the idea that the subject who steps into the real - the place of the lack in the Other - severes its ties to the symbolic order. Such a subject is no longer embarassed by its inability to adhere to the rules of social behavior but instead embraces - feels compelled to embrace - the destructive energies of the real. This subject is not interested in trying to solve its problem within the parameteres of the system but rather insists on changing the game entirely, on defying the very structuring principles of the system, which is why "the act" opens a gateway to what might, from the perspective of the established order, seem completely inconceivable (or even utterly insane).”
― Mari Ruti, The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory's Defiant Subjects

“The greatest barriers that we face in this historic moment are not born of our unique identities and experiences as 2SLGBTQIA+ people, but rather stem from the systems of power that have ignorantly and arrogantly assumed to be “normal”.”
― Jamie Arpin-Ricci

“Il rifiuto di mangiare carne non è solo un rifiuto del patriarcato, ma un fallimento e un’interruzione dell’eteronormatività fondata sulla trasmissione identitaria. Dichiarare di essere vegan funziona come un vero e proprio coming out (tanto che esiste la vegefobia), e la persona vegana che rifiuta l’uccisione degli animali è considerata una killjoy perché <> la felicità della famiglia, i suoi ruoli e tradizioni, ma anche il futuro al quale ruoli e tradizioni saranno tramandati.”
― Federica Timeto

“Il rifiuto di mangiare carne non è solo un rifiuto del patriarcato, ma un fallimento e un’interruzione dell’eteronormatività fondata sulla trasmissione identitaria. Dichiarare di essere vegan funziona come un vero e proprio coming out (tanto che esiste la vegefobia), e la persona vegana che rifiuta l’uccisione degli animali è considerata una killjoy perché “uccide” la felicità della famiglia, i suoi ruoli e tradizioni, ma anche il futuro al quale ruoli e tradizioni saranno tramandati.”
― Federica Timeto, Animali si diventa. Femminismi e liberazione animale

“Parfois, j'ai le sentiment que l'on m'a volé du temps. Ce temps passé à tenter de me fondre dans le monde hétéro sans comprendre le mien.”
― Élodie Font, Coming In

“I just wanted to fit in.”
― Emma Goswell, Coming Out Stories - Personal Experiences of Coming Out from Across the LGBTQ+ Spectrum

“(A Flock of Geese)

She often wondered why an inexplicable sorrow wells within her each time a flock of geese takes to the sky…

Do their flights remind her that she has wasted her life in the trivialities of daily existence? Or do they hint that she has lost her own capacity to fly?

Sometimes, in her sadness, she reflects on years poured out like a naïve bride dreaming of the perfect groom— planning every minute detail until her wings were clipped, unaware that the bride, the groom, the wedding are roles society invented to tether those who yearn to build new worlds rather than hang in one made for them by others.

When the honking of another passing flock echoes overhead—just as her most beautiful years flew by— that cry ignites in her an uncontrollable urge to depart, to reject the illusion of home and stability, the wedding and the groom, the guests dancing through the night celebrating the clipping of her wings…

December 14, 2023”
― Louis Yako, سرطان في كل مكان [Cancer Everywhere]