I am still writing my sixth month blog-anniversary post, but I thought I would write another post.
I want to talk about the world of HETERONORMALISM.
I am learning Mandarin Chinese and have to make a family tree. Most of the other kids have a mom and dad. And I have two moms.
In Chinese, paternal grandmother is a different word than maternal grandmother. If you lived in China and spoke Mandarin, your father's father would be ye ye and your mother's father would be lao ye. I technically have two "Lao ye"s.
So my teacher was talking to me and I had to tell her I had two moms.
She said: Oh, you have two moms?, and I said yes, I have two moms.
Then she said it would be alright for me to do a family tree of my two moms and that we should celebrate diversity.
My teacher came from China. She is very nice and I know she'd never say bad things about my family because she's an educator and educators don't talk badly about the families of the kids they teach. I was still nervous. China is different from the United States.
I'm not sure what I'm doing to differentiate my family members. I'll just have to use first names for my relatives even though that isn't a thing people usually do in China. I told my mom about this, just the bit about the words being different for maternal and paternal. She said they should have those things (family trees) banned. I thought that was extreme. What's your viewpoint on it?
Heteronormalism- It just stinks. I know that not everybody is like me, in fact, almost all people I have met DON'T have a family like mine.
Once, a year or so back, a friend of my family's was watching me and K (we're twins). This is weird, but she asked us if we were "interested in boys yet". I'm not mentioning this to discuss my own situation, but that this kind of thing happens. When talking about the male or female generally people ask women if they have a boyfriend or men about a girlfriend. Heteronormative.
I'm not protesting this as much as pointing out that it is heteronormative. Our society believes that is normal. It may be because straight people are the majority, but it just makes me a bit sad.
-M