“It’s different for heterosexuals”: exploring cis-heteronormativity in COVID-19 public health directives and its impacts on Canadian gay, bisexual, and queer men
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Critical scholarship has illustrated how COVID-19 public health policies can enact racism, classism, and cis-heteronormativity, perpetuating harms among vulnerable communities. We sought to examine the accounts of gay, bisexual, and queer men (GBQM) in Canada on how normative ideologies played out in COVID-19 directives and what impacts these orders had on their lives. Two rounds of semi-structured interviews with GBQM in Montreal (n = 30), Toronto (n = 33), and Vancouver (n = 30) were conducted between November 2020-February 2021 and June-October 2021 (N = 93). Our reflexive thematic analysis drew on the frameworks of cis-heteronormativity and intersectionality to examine how normative assumptions about kinship, sociality, and privilege in COVID-19 public health directives were understood and experienced by GBQM. Our participants explicated how cis-heteronormativity was pervasive in COVID-19 public health messaging, noting that stay-at-home orders and limits on social gatherings reinforced heterosexual forms of kinship. The privileging of cis-heteronormative sociality had detrimental effects on the sense of belonging and identity formation of many participants due to restricted access to queer spaces during the pandemic. Others indicated that stay-at-home orders failed to account for the heterogeneity of queer people’s experiences of homelessness and structural racism. These findings provide valuable insights into how public health efforts to control COVID-19 infections have overlooked the complex forms of kinship among GBQM, the importance of queer spaces and community organizations, and the varying vulnerabilities of diverse lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ+) groups.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".