Chances are many queer students on campus have been faced with situations where others have made sweeping assumptions about them. Included in this list of assumptions are ones about sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, and all the others that feed annoyingly into the daily dose of microaggressions, or small acts of mostly non-physical aggression. Not only are they extremely annoying, but microaggressions can be harmful and damaging.
Assuming someone’s gender identity, for example, can have very detrimental effects on that person’s mental and physical wellbeing.
Many gender-variant folks already have to deal with systemic institutional oppression, so the last thing they need to hear is someone mis-gendering them, or assuming they somehow need to fit within a binary model.
These assumptions have been spoon-fed to us throughout our lives, so it can be difficult to escape the way in which we’ve been socialized to assume. But with a little bit of dismantling, we can all work on relating to each other without assumptions.
Unlearning is an important part of creating safe(r) spaces among the queer community and the community at large. We can unlearn the assumption that everybody is heterosexual. We can unlearn the assumption that everyone is either a man or a woman. We can unlearn the assumption that everybody wants a long-term monogamous marriage. There are so many things we can unlearn that would create stronger relationships among our communities.
So what is the moral of this article? Check your assumptions and be aware of the way in which microaggressions pervade our campus. Doing so would foster stronger relationships in which you can really get to know each other.