Heterosexual Privilege Essay

Submitted By Martha-Meza
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Heterosexual Privilege I have never experienced a moment when discrimination towards heterosexual occurs, because it is in fact a rarity. It is rare for a heterosexual person to be looked down upon or degraded by “friends”, “family”, and society. It is a privilege to not have to worry about anybody else’s sexuality than our own. It is a privilege to not worry about the homophobic reactions that can occur daily, at home, work, or any place for that matter. I have never had to worry about neglect of my family members or peers, I have never had to endure any hardships revolving my sexual orientation.
Privilege is a systematic institutionalized POSITIVE discrimination of a group. There are many groups such as the male privileged, white privilege, class privilege and a few others. Not many people think heterosexism is a privilege but it is indeed. We have privilege in marriage, adoptions, and cultural acceptance. Sadly, we do not notice our privilege, so we do not observe how is privilege affects the under privileged, and in this case the homosexuals. Homosexuals are constantly put under the microscope and while there are more people accepting gays, transsexual, pansexual and anything that is out of the “norm”. There have been thousands of articles all over the world trying to find the explanation for why people are gay. The say it’s bad parenting, they were abused, raped, horrible childhood, and they have a demon inside them. This gives the idea away if you were abused as a child and then turn gay as an adult, then that is the reason why you were gay, and that might be one reason but that is not the whole picture. I have read some radical articles, I was surprised by how many I found I the first place, so I searched up why are we heterosexual. I’m not going to lie I was expecting a few, but only found one. No one bothers to ask about heterosexuals people don’t question heterosexuality, not even homosexuals.
Homosexual disadvantages are unfortunately our privileges. This especially affects youth in things like suicide and depression. Research found gay and lesbian youth are 2 to 6 times more likely to attempt suicide than heterosexual youth. This is not the result of their overall happiness in society but it is our privilege to hurt and dismiss their existence. It’s our privilege as heterosexual to decide that sexuality is incorrect and not acceptable whether it is done unconsciously or not it is still done.
It is a privilege to hold hands in public, or to show public display of affection. It is acceptable to dress however we desire because we have the privilege not to be judged as gay or lesbian. We have the privilege to not stress about statistical numbers in rejection, homelessness, substance abuse, high dropout rates, verbal and physical assaults, lack of support, lack of role models, or victims of crime of our sexual orientation. Which is a scary thing for anybody to go through. To be in a
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