What is Compulsory Heterosexuality?
Compulsory heterosexuality is the societal expectation and assumption that you are (and will be) cisgender and heterosexual. We experience pressure to be cisgender and heterosexual (cishet) before we even know what that means. We learn, before we can even put it into words, that cishet is the “right” way to be. The phrase was first coined by Adrienne Rich in 1980, in her essay, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence. The phrase can be kind of a mouthful, so people often shorten this term to “CompHet.”
Why Does Compulsory Heterosexuality Matter?
More than just social pressure, it’s an intense expectation we learn from infancy. The influence of CompHet starts long before we understand or experience sexuality. In fact, it often starts before we even can form complete sentences. We see heterosexual romance portrayed as a desired, idealized outcome in kids’ movies. We experience subtle (or not so subtle) nudges about gender in the toys we’re given and the clothes we wear. In kindergarten, some adult asks you if you “have a boyfriend at school.” We may overhear our parents using derogatory language about anyone who doesn’t fit the cishet mold. And we hear things like, “Someday when you get married” and there’s no question about the gender of this supposed future spouse.
What Impact Does CompHet Have On People?
Experiencing life in a CompHet world can lead to:
- self-hatred or low self-worth
- confusion
- shame
- loneliness
- difficulty with close relationships
- delayed emotional development
- estrangement from family
Negative effects can happen to anyone, not just queer people. CompHet can restrict your choices around appearance, career, hobbies, finances, and more. It ignores the concept of asexuality. The negative impacts may be more evident if you grew up in high-control or fundamentalist religion. Not only were you likely subject to rigid expectations, including purity culture, but you also experienced the added pressure of avoiding eternal damnation and the wrath of an omniscient, omnipotent deity. So when we combine those beliefs with the LGBTQIA+ experience, this can lead to religious trauma, like hell nightmares or extreme anxiety.
What Does CompHet Have To Do With Coming Out Later In Life?
If you learned from birth, both implicitly and explicitly, to perform your assigned gender in specific ways, to seek happiness (and maybe “God’s will”) by finding a binary-opposite partner, and to ignore or suppress your queer sexual desires and tendencies, you’re going to be very practiced at living that way. It can take a lot of time and effort to peel back those layers and discover who you really are. Even if you were sure at a young age that you were queer or trans, it can be very difficult to come out as a teen when your family is expected to be unsupportive. As kids, we are 100% dependent on our parents for food and shelter, and we’re subject to parents’ decisions. We’re also wired to seek our parents’ approval. If we’re faced with the choice to be out or be safe and accepted, we’re usually going to choose the latter.
Put another way: If everyone around you loves to draw, or at least acts like they do, you probably will do your best to learn to draw. You may even get pretty good at it. Imagine then, one day you have the opportunity to mess around with clay, and you find out you’re actually a sculptor. You learn that you can actually make art this way, and you realize you don’t really like drawing as much as you thought you did, or as everyone assumed you would. CompHet is like living in a world with only pencils and paper. You may not even know to seek out the clay. Or maybe you were aware that sculpting is a thing, but you learned that it was bad or wrong.
Sometimes it takes additional years, experiences, and perspective to understand ourselves fully or to feel safe enough to come out. We don’t choose the environments in which we are raised. We can only choose how to grow and heal.
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