Alienated

Written by: Judah | Illustrated by: Angela Zheng | Layout by: Cami Miceli

Sometimes it feels like I’ve crash-landed in a different environment when I enter my dorm after coming back from a queer organization meeting, whether it be OutWrite, QTPOC, or TransUp. My roommates are by no means bad people. In fact, I like them very much and consider them my friends. They’re super sweet. It’s just that I often feel alienated. My attitudes, my mannerisms, they change because I’m no longer in a queer space with queer people, but in a cishet space with cishet people. It isn’t because my roommates are queerphobic, because they were pretty cool when I said I was pansexual. But I allowed them a vision into only part of my identity, hiding the fact that I’m non-binary because it’s hard to gauge whether or not it’s still safe for me to say something about it. Once I am outside a queer space, I no longer feel accepted as being non-binary and have to hide this aspect of myself. Cishet spaces are an entirely different world, despite looking similar to LGBTQ+ spaces.

Most spaces make cisgender heterosexuality the norm. Queerness is often seen as a threat to this norm, and there’s the ugly history of homophobia and transphobia to back this fact up. For the longest time, cishet spaces felt like black holes for queer people. Queer people were forcefully sucked in as they tried to navigate the vast galaxy that was life. Sometimes they were able to find their way out and other times they were stuck, forever disappeared into the void.

As queerness becomes normalized in this day and age, these spaces no longer feel like black holes. They begin to feel like separate planets, entities that seem familiar with a thinly veiled wall of separation. When we land in cishet spaces, it is seen as a type of invasion. We are not them. They are not us. The erasure of queer history has lead to the idea that queerness is new, although we’ve been here the whole time. Yet, for some odd, homophobic reason we are seen as the other, the different ones, despite us coexisting with cishet people since the beginning of time.

For many of us queer folk, we have to hide who we are. We blend into cishet spaces, silent amongst our cishet peers, afraid to even mention anything that could cause animosity towards us. Before we can be probed with questions, our anatomies are examined by cishets who believe that we don’t exist, or worse, believe that we are enemies. If cishets do find out about us, we are alienated and othered and used as a scapegoat for moral arguments regarding queer folk. We are no longer viewed as human; we are something else.

That’s why we tend to hide it through code-switching. In socio-linguistics, code-switching commonly refers to multilingual people using mixed up facets of their languages and mannerisms; code in this context refers to language and behaviors. Code-switching has been a defense mechanism for people of color, especially those that speak another language besides English. It is a way of masking their otherness. The same thing can be appliedto queer folks because we also have to switch up our languages and mannerisms to conform to cishet standards in order for many of us to blend in and avoid complete alienation in cishet spaces.

The most common type of codeswitch for queer folk, especially folks that identify as trans, gender-nonconforming and/or nonbinary, is pronouns, whether it be for ourselves or our partners. I often switch pronouns and names in spaces because not many understand the concept of being non-binary. In cishet spaces, my tool of blending in is adapting my language to be more cishet-oriented, especially in a space that seems hostile and unsafe for someone like me. I’m not the only one that does this; there are plenty of queer people that do.

In a small survey that I conducted, I asked how comfortable queer people felt in cishet spaces on a scale of one being the most uncomfortable and/ or welcome to five being the most comfortable and/ or welcome. The average answer was low (1-2), as those who took the survey felt generally awkward in cishet spaces. And for all the right reasons.

It gets emotionally taxing to have to hear the wrong pronouns for yourself or say the wrong pronouns for your partner because you fear homophobia, transphobia, etc. in all its forms-- it was one of the common answers I found when people discussed code-switching within cishet environments.

Vinn, for instance, has to hide who he is andwho his partners are because his parents don’t accept his queerness. He has to “pretend that it doesn’t hurt every time they use the wrong name and pronouns.”

Similarly to Vinn, there’s Jasper. Jasper is often afraid of saying their pronouns in class, especially in their STEM courses, which are overwhelmingly cishet. They feel unsafe letting people know their pronouns because they aren’t sure if people will react harshly to them.

As Christopher puts it, we feel like we have to “walk on eggshells” around cishet people. Even those who anonymously took my survey said they would often hide the genders of their partners and act differently in order to blend into cishet environments.

There are people out there that think homophobia and transphobia are dead. Code-switching shows us that we still needpermission to enter cishet spaces even when they’re the default. If we speak up, we are seen as a disturbance. For example, Tiffany Moore, a trans woman, was misgendered at a GameStop and stoof up against the cashier’s transphobia by speaking up against the employee’s misgendering. A clip of the incident went viral early last Janurary. News outlets interpreted her behavior as aggressive, and cishet people ran with the narrative, ignoring the fact that she had been misgendered multiple times in the video. She had every right to be angry, especially after she corrected the GameStop employee multiple times. Yet, she was seen as the aggressor. She was already seen as alien for being trans; vilifying her was just the next step in the horrid cycle of rampant transmisogyny.

We deserve the same respect and the same feeling of safety that cishets do everywhere. We have to mold ourselves to fit the ideals of cishet people because normalization efforts have only gone so far. We are welcome in cishet spaces only for as long as we adhere to their definitionsof us.

That’s why we cultivate spaces of our own-- whole planets and galaxies where we get to be us. The reason these safe spaces exist is to foster community and solidarity, and show that we are entities with our own feelings and thoughts. Our spaces give us the freedom to be ourselves, our real selves. We don’t need to hide who we are and who we’re with. We can breathe in these spaces and never have to walk on “eggshells.” In these spaces, we define ourselves. In these spaces, we don’t necessarily have to code-switch when it comes to our queerness.

As much as these queer galaxies sound beautiful, unfortunately, the reality is that we are on the same planet as cishet people. We deserve to exist as humans because we’re people with dreams and aspirations, not things that should be poked at and probed for our differences.