Like, yes, of course, I do enjoy some of the perks of cis-het privilege - like having strangers coo about what a cute couple we are and not being bullied in bathrooms - but I don’t actually want to pay the price of passing for straight or female. In a flash, I go from feeling comfortably unnoticed to being simultaneously invisible and also an anomaly. The bizarrely unshakeable construct that men are in charge of women in cis-het couples is bad enough, but queerness and gender non-conformity adds even more complexity. “And for her?” is a question always directed at him, which never fails to make me throw up a little in my mouth. The problem starts when I have to start explaining my pronouns or, worse, when people assume that my partner is in charge of me or somehow authorized to speak on my behalf.
When people see me holding hands with a (presumably straight, since that’s the norm in our society) AMAB person, I am instantly granted all the perks of het coupledom - men don’t hit on me and women don’t assume I'm hitting on them - and best of all, no one stares in rapt normcore curiosity trying to parse out our genitalia or sexual preferences. Generally speaking, this kind of “ passing” makes everyday life a lot less stressful. I'm nonbinary, but solidly femme, so to anyone stubbornly existing in the cis-heteropatriarchal matrix, we look like your average white m/f couple. I recently went on vacation to Puerto Rico with my partner, who is a person who was assigned male at birth (AMAB).