These issues aside, the above comments from my respondents point to the fact that straight rituals are oppressive on a far greater order of magnitude, because of not only their disturbing content (e.g., throwing a party to announce the shape of an unborn baby’s genitals) but also their compulsory force. Heteronormativity is not a neutral cultural formation organized around a natural, freely occurring sexual preference but an obligatory system structuring many of the world’s societies, a system “that has had to be imposed, managed, organized, propagandized and maintained by force.”44 [...]