Heterosexism: First Slide
Warren Blumenfeld describes heterosexism as the overarching system of advantages bestowed on heterosexuals based on the institutionalization of heterosexual norms or standards and founded on the ideology that all people are or should be heterosexual, which privileges heterosexuals and heterosexuality, while excluding the needs, concerns, cultures, and the life experiences of lesbians, gay males, bisexuals, pansexuals, and asexuals.
Pansexuals: people who reject the sex/gender binary, and who find that gender and sex are irrelevant in influencing whether they will be sexually, emotionally, and romantically attracted to others, they are attracted to people regardless of their gender and sex.
Religious endorsement for heterosexuality * People cite religious texts to support the social norms of heterosexuality * Religious denominations have worked hard to end oppression toward a number of groups, including those who transgress heterosexual norms, religious textual passages * Religious textual passages have been used to justify the construction and maintenance of the institution of slavery, the persecution and murder of Jews, male domination over and denial of rights of women, adult domination and persecution of young people, denial of rights, gender non-conformity
Medical model supports for heterosexuality * Medical and psychological professions have often proposed and addressed, in starkly medical language, the alleged “deficiencies” of, for example, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, as well as peoples of color, people who are differently-abled, youth and elders. * Homosexuality and bisexuality are not with the sexual identity perse, not with who we are, but rather with the ways we are socially constructed and treated * Rather than projecting ourselves through the “medical model” as deficient,