The LGBTQIA community has been subjected to a lot of rather strange questions about their daily lives and how they choose to live their lives, on a fairly – regular basis. It’s only when you flip the questions around to heterosexual people, do you realize how ridiculous it sounds.
A recent survey specifically for heterosexual people has recently gone viral on Twitter with 33,000 likes and 20,000 shares in 4 days. A professor of ‘Human Sexuality’ at a university in Florida decided to turn the tables and give the heterosexual students a slightest taste of what the LGBTQIA community goes though regularly. Elise, one of the professor’s students has been explaining the reason behind the mock survey and its relevance which she posted on Twitter and has been fielding responses to the comments. “Gay people are asked these questions all the time,” she tweeted to one dissenter. She says although her class is relatively open-minded, her professor was trying to make a point about the treatment of LGBTQIA in society.
The students were presented with a mock survey with questions like:
What do you think caused your heterosexuality?
When did you decide you were a heterosexual?
Is it possible that your heterosexuality is just a phase that you may grow out of?
Why do you insist on flaunting your heterosexuality? Why can’t you just be what you are and just keep quiet about it?
Why do you heterosexuals feel compelled to seduce others into your lifestyle?
Have you considered therapy to change your heterosexual tendencies?
Something you must know about this unique questionnaire is that the professor didn’t have to come up these questions. It may have been a slightly different form but has been around since 1972.
Martin Rochlin, a pioneer in the field of gay-affirmative psychotherapy, conceptualised the quiz as a way of putting straight people in the shoes of gay people, then widely considered ‘unnatural’. It had 22 questions, designed to shake the beliefs of “self-avowed heterosexuals”.
Although we are trying to normalize the LGBTQIA as a society, with the legalization of same sex marriage in several countries, it is still saddening and a telling sign to know that a real survey which is 45 years old, still holds good today.
We have a long way to go!
One thought on “What If The Tables Turned?”