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Comment by notadev | Hacker News Reader

Terms like “heteronormativity” and “cisgender” are just ways they attempt to marginalize normal people and their normal sexual development. These people who use these terms are objectively and statistically outliers in society. And since they can’t convince anyone to accept their abnormality, they instead try to change language to remove the idea of there being a standard/normal baseline.

They think that because you’re not trying to make them “explore their gender identity” while teaching them ABCs that you are pushing something. It’s absolute projection. I support all people to live their lives how they see fit, but I refuse to use their newspeak or pretend like there is not a natural normal.

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Interestingly, newspeak was about removing words from language so that certain ideas couldn't be expressed. It was explicitly not about adding words to the language, and certainly not about adding words to convey additional nuance and precision where there was previously none.

It seems to me like you're actually arguing to try and remove words that people have introduced to the language, and to erase the nuances they convey, because you don't find it to be "normal" or "natural". What is normal or natural is entirely subjective, and varies across cultures and across time, and in any case we don't generally yoke ourselves to what is natural (we are, after all, speaking through an artificial medium because we find it advantageous, and though we weren't born with wings we often find it advantageous to fly.)

It might be interesting to give 1984 another read.

I know it’s from 1984, but it’s considered a word itself as far as I can tell. I was using it as “Deliberately ambiguous and contradictory language used to mislead and manipulate the public.” Heterosexuality is the norm, it is the default. Heteronormativity is some nonsense phrase that is used in place of “normal” to try and draw a false equivalency between normal and abnormal. It is intended to muddy the waters and mislead like most contemporary “woke” language.

There's nothing ambiguous or misleading, what you're actually objecting to is the concrete and specific use of language to describe ideas you don't like and which you don't want to see proliferate. You aren't objecting to people being mislead, you're objecting to people understanding. Do give 1984 a read, I think you'll find the irony that you are appropriating a term used in that book in order to invert it's meaning and to take the very actions that the book is criticizing quite amusing, and then we can be in on the joke together.

Heterosexuality doesn't have to be the default, and indeed, that era is ending. The evidence for it is right here; you feel compelled to go to bat for the notion, not something you'd need to do if it really were mystically natural and inextricably true. Heterosexuality is promulgated as a default because it is key to a power structure called the patriarchy. The patriarchy works by assigning certain gender roles to men and women; these roles allow men to subjugate women, and also allow men to be subjugated by other men. The patriarchy's strength lies in the rigidity of those gender roles, and as the gender roles are loosened the patriarchy gets weaker. Lots of power within our society is expressed through patriarchy, for instance, the idea that men express their agency through violence instead of through emotion and that they should readily throw their lives away in service of a cause is useful for recruiting men as soldiers and police, and soldiers and police are useful in upholding many other power structures (like state power or the power of the rich). So over the last few millenia, many different power structures have come to rely on the existence of patriarchy, and it's been woven into our mythology and the fabric of our society. The fluidity of gender roles is a direct challenge to patriarchy, and people with nonconforming identities have been forced into the closet through violence and social reprisal.

This was a natural series of events in the sense that all of history took place in the context of the natural world, sure. But cancer is natural, we don't have to accept it. In the same way, I reject your heteronormativity. I think it sucks. I don't think people are "naturally" any particular gender, it's a role we learn to play as we're socialized. That doesn't make it bad, there's nothing wrong with being a man or a woman, there's nothing wrong with embracing very traditional views of what that means if that's what makes you happy. I live my life as a pretty traditional man. But that isn't all there is to life, and that's not all it should mean to be human.

Heterosexuality being prevalent within the population (note that I purposefully avoid idioms like "X is the norm" as ambiguous, especially in this context) is merely the flip side of LGBTQIA+ folks being a minority. Now, a minority can have a robust subculture - and one can certainly make that claim about LGBTQ identity today - but that doesn't somehow make it into not-a-minority.

Social and cultural norms are beside the point here; in fact, the most traditional societies are those that tend to feature the most salient spaces for same-sex quasi-romantic affection and emotionality, with such things as compadrazgo and sworn brotherhood/sisterhood. So it's just not clear how "heteronormativity" is supposed to be an internally coherent concept.

You're conflating heterosexuality and heteronormativity. You could have a society where heterosexuality is prevalent, without having heteronormativity. Heteronormativity encompasses both heterosexuality and a specific set of gender roles for men and women; so it is not enough for heterosexuality to be prevalent. You need to conflate these genders with heterosexuality, prescribe them, and marginalize sexual and gender identities that do not conform to this.

Heteronormativity isn't an epistemology, there's no burden for it to be consistent. It's a set of beliefs and attitudes, and a label that allows you to critique them. Why would we expect that to be any more consistent than the human behavior it describes (which is to say, only somewhat)? Will this label break down and stop making sense as society changes? Yes, I imagine it will. Will it become unwieldy and eventually fail altogether if we employ it in an analysis spanning cultures with very different conceptions of gender? Absolutely. But you might as well ask whether the concept of pop music is consistent and relate it to the works of Beethoven, if you think that's useful in your analysis than go for it, but if it doesn't work in that circumstance it isn't a condemnation of the idea. The only burden on heteronormativity is to be useful in describing real world behavior, which it clearly is.

If you want to know whether heteronormativity is a real phenomenon, you need look no further than the comment I criticized. It doesn't say, heterosexuality is prevalent; it says, heterosexuality is total, that it is "natural" and "normal", that it is inseparable from gender, and that people living as (or even describing) other gender and sexual identities are doing it to trick you.

> Heteronormativity encompasses both heterosexuality and a specific set of gender roles for men and women

Heteronormativity is just heterosexuality as a normative element of social structures (not merely prevalent in society, but where deviation from it is viewed as transgressive.) In modern societies, it is typically tied to patriarchy (a particular normatige structure of gender roles, in which social power is attached to male roles), cisnormativity, and, in particular societies, it may be attached to things like White supremacy that are superficially farther from sex/gender dynamics, but these are nevertheless distinct if linked elements of the cultures they appear in.

Hmm, pardon, where is it we differ? The word "just" makes me think this is a correction, but I agree with all of that, and I feel like if you that if you take all of that to be true, you get the sentence of mine you've quoted.

I don’t see it as a strong disagreement, but there is a slight but sometimes important difference between heteronormativity including, e.g., cisnormativity and patriarchy, versus heteronormativity being distinct from them but frequently co-occurring with them.

But we certainly agree that heteronormativity is different than society having a majority heterosexual orientation.

For sure, I can see how I elided some concepts there; I think my definition was appropriate to the context of this conversation, but I appreciate you keeping me honest.

> where deviation from it is viewed as transgressive

Note that by this standard, much of LGBTQ+ culture might well be described as heteronormative, since glorifying social transgression as such (not merely inasmuch as it might inevitably follow from having a non-majority gender or sexual orientation) has long been a staple of that particular identity.

> you need look no further than the comment I criticized. It doesn't say, heterosexuality is prevalent; it says, heterosexuality is total

That comment actually said "heterosexuality is normal", which is of course ambiguous - it could mean either of "prevalent" or "not merely prevalent but standard, with deviations from it being seen as undesirable". Heteronormativity might be a description of the latter claim, but to deny that heterosexuality is especially common would be mere wishful thinking.

The claim that gender and sexual orientation are linked would've been quite recognizable to ancient cultures including classical Greece and Rome, where heterosexual behavior was not normative and other sexual arrangements were often celebrated (though their dark, exploitive side, linked to the ubiquity of rape culture as purposeful male domination, was not unrecognized either; and this later fed into Christian condemnation of such practices). So it makes little sense to view that as "heteronormative" either.

It isn't ambiguous if you consider the entire comment, where they go on to clarify what they mean by invoking a naturalism fallacy and contrasting it with other identities (which they clearly describe in pejorative terms as "abnormal" and "misleading" with an overall tone of derision). Of course I acknowledge that most people are heterosexual, that's such misrepresentation of what I'm saying (including that I've directly acknowledged this point already) I can't suspend my disbelief it isn't willful. I've provided definitions for all of this, you're choosing not to engage with them.

I make no claims about heteronormativity in Greece or Rome (I do say that the patriarchy is several millennia old, so this could be read as an implicit claim that patriarchy existed in Greece and Rome [and I wouldn't take issue with that claim], but I don't think you'd find this disagreeable, given the "rape culture as purposeful male domination" you reference, and that the definition of patiarchy I provided specifically calls out the domination of men), and gender and sexual identities certainly are linked in the sense that certain combinations are more common than others - they just aren't synonyms. As I noted, there is no burden for this concept to translate to other cultures and time periods in order for us to accept it as a useful model for the purposes of our discussion; I've not seen a counterargument from you on this, so I don't see why I would accept these observations of Greece and Rome as being deleterious to my point, anyway.

But what I'm taking issue with is merely your claim of heteronormativity as a "set of beliefs and attitudes" that one can ascertain in anything like a consistent way. If compadrazgo and sworn brotherhood are too exotic for you, consider contemporary "bro" subculture; is it heteronormative? Some people might certainly claim as much, calling it especially misogynistic. Yet it also reportedly involves a lot of emotional affection and bonding among males. By and large, it just doesn't square with what you've been supposing in your earlier comments.

If you'd like to explain why we should demand that a label describing a set of human behaviors be entirely consistent in order to be considered, when the human behaviors we're describing are frequently inconsistent and contradictory (but still real and worth discussing), then I'm happy to respond. I don't see anything wrong with your examples, I'm not familiar with compadrazgo or sworn brotherhood but I'd be willing to learn more (and until such a time as I read up on them am willing to take what you say about them on face value), I think bro culture is a super interesting thread to tug on and an incisive choice on your part, but if you repeat your argument without engaging with mine, I don't see what you expect me to do other than repeat myself (which I respectfully decline to do).

I've seen that I expressed myself in a confusing way when I said "heterosexuality doesn't have to be the default, and that era is ending", I don't mean, LGBTQ identities will become the majority, what I meant was, the assumption of heterosexuality will no longer be made. In the same way you shouldn't assume people's handedness because, though you know most people are right-hand dominant, you also expect that any group of people of a significant size will contain many left handed people.

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