Are women human?
We’ve been programmed for centuries to believe that a family consists of a man and woman, programmed to believe that men and women are classified on their innate body parts, having the appropriate reproductive organs. In present day there are millions of people who are fighting for their individual rights, rights to identify how they feel on inside rather than what people see, and what society identifies as a true man or true woman. Before reading V.Spike Peterson and Laura Parisi’s argument on how heterosexism hinders human rights, I didn’t think how much affect heterosexism had on women rights. The categorization of a specific group (gender) is the first ingredient for discrimination. Peterson and Parisi mention the idea of family and what is expected and ‘appropriate’. If family is between a man and a woman, reproduction can only occur with both man and woman, that’s where heterosexism comes into play. People are shamed for their sexual orientation based on “family’, which in my opinion is bogus! So a relationship between two women is in fact, based on what society believes, inhumane, and against the idea of family. As stated, “Human rights discourse and practice reproduce this naturalization of heterosexism and the family, including gender inequalities within the family, by upholding the distinction between public/state and private/family sphere and focusing exclusively on states as both protectors and violators of individual rights”. One way of shaming homosexuality is the idea of family and reproduction. Heterosexism sets roles for both women and men, there is no “wiggle room”, you if you do not follow it you are not humane and therefore human rights do not apply to you.
Another factor on how heterosexism plays a huge part is it idealizes the male roles, what a man is “suppose” to be or more importantly what a man should not be. A man is strong, public sphere, doesn’t entwine in the private sphere at all. The woman is to raise the children and do household duties. Women are believed to be subordinate to a man in every way, heterosexism strips the rights away from birth and people are appointed rights based on their gender. “At the same time, heterosexism is oppressive it privileges males/masculinity and male-defines interests over females/femininity and interests of women qua women, and it denies/represses all other sexual orientations and gender identifications”. Based on history, we are born into our ‘roles’ based on our genitals and reproductive organs: we are identified as a woman because we have a vagina at birth and Vis versa for man. We in all actually have no real rights, there is a huge movement happening now in the LGBT community, and people are fighting for rights to identify, and what bathroom they can use etc. We need to keep pushing forward and continue to “remold” how we are classified and put into categories.
