Even in death, the way we are spoken about by the mainstream cishet world is traumatizing and violent. Even in death, trans women of color cannot escape the trauma of colonialism and genocide.
Coming out “of the closet” is the act of revealing your queer gender, sexual and/or romantic identity, an act made a necessity due to living in a society that assumes uniformly cisgender and heterosexual (which I will shorten to cishet) experiences. Although he wasn’t the first to advocate for it, the first openly gay American politician Harvey Milk promoted coming out as a political act because it raised visibility for a severely underrepresented group. To Milk, coming out both humanized the queer experience for cishet people and encouraged queer people to more easily build a stronger community.
While children can be born to any kind of parent and situation, unless drastic measures are taken, they will be raised in an overwhelmingly cisgendered and heterosexual (cishet) world. Cishet children and adults’ identities are affirmed by media, legal documents, population majority, history and other depictions of assumed cis-ness and heterosexuality.
2013, K. A. Cook, Crooked Words: A Collection of Queer, Transgender and Womanist Writings, self-published (2013), page 87:
Because of some ridiculous cishet notion that all queer women must look alike?
Overpriviliged cishet white men were the ones enforcing apartheid in the first place, so there are far better people out there to properly comment on the issue.
[…] it reinforces the problematic notion that 'true' feminism belongs to cishet white abled feminists; […]
2014, Taylor Stocks, "Angry Feminist Rant", The Out Port, June 2014, page 8:
I want us all to be united in combatting the problems of cis-het norms, but I need us to acknowledge that there still is rampant sexism that is coupling with genderism that often presents as harsh and lacking reality to us female-bodied genderbenders.
