A heteronormative view, therefore, involves alignment of biological sex, sexuality, gender identity and gender roles. Heteronormativity has been linked to heterosexism and homophobia, and the effects of societal heteronormativity on lesbian, gay and bisexual individuals have been described as heterosexual or "straight" privilege.
I increasingly use the phrase heteronormative culture. So I thought I would define what I mean for future reference.
I'm not talking about the view that most people are straight. I'm talking about a lot of cultural norms rooted in the implicit assumption that nearly everyone is straight, thus being something other than a cis het person is some extremely tiny minority, so small as to be an aberration and therefore nothing society needs to incorporate any kind of cultural accommodation for.
This is not and has never been true. The lack of healthy societal norms for anything other than "You must fall in love with a member of the opposite sex, get married and have kids." actively creates a LOT of problems.
Let's do some math here:
If 10 percent of the human race is gay, 99 percent of gays keep that a secret ("stay in the closet") and live like the world expects them to live, that's potentially up to 20 percent of marriages involving a closeted gay person and a straight person who has been duped and is wondering why their marriage doesn't work.
And that 10 percent may be a low ball figure. Studies show that people are more willing to admit they are gay in social climates that aren't openly homophobic and threatening to them.
(Shocking news, that. I'm always like "Well, duh! We needed a STUDY for THAT???" when I read stuff like that.)
So potentially a lot of miserable marriages are rooted in heteronormative culture pressuring people to stay in the closet because the world has no life plan for you if you don't get married to someone of the opposite sex.
It's also getting in the way of economic development. In the US, heteronormative culture has shaped political policies such that "good jobs" are implicitly designed for breadwinner males with a wife and kids.
This was never the majority of the population but was a very large and influential cohort post World War II during the Baby Boom years. Since then demographics have diversified away from that and we have a lot more households with one to three members (who may not be "family") and a lot fewer with four or more members who were, historically, all family.
The cohort that gave birth to the Baby Boomers substantially shaped housing policy which is now fueling homelessness.
Myriad policies and practices are rooted in this implicit assumption that jobs are held by male breadwinners and he is supporting a wife and kids. It means that health insurance, retirement plans and other important aspects of the social safety net break if you don't match to the beat of the heteronormative drum or even if you do but get divorced.
This harms women's rights, men's rights, children's welfare, the LGBTQ crowd and any ethnicity that has any variation in dating and mating practices. Pretty much everyone is done a disservice by this inaccurate mental model which deeply shapes so much of American policy and culture.