one thing most any leftist will say about china despite supporting the country is that they’re a very traditionalist culture, and so LGBTQ issues in particular are a blight on leftist westerner’s otherwise positive view of china.
upon scrolling thru rednote, i think that’s bullshit now. i really don’t think you’re worse off being LGBTQ in china than you are in america. yeah, you can’t get married, but that right is under constant threat of being taken away in the US anyway and let’s be real- it probably will be taken away. meanwhile, china is making progress on that front, the US wants to regress.
i saw multiple LGBTQ people on rednote. i saw a lesbian couple, one of the girls even said “LGBT is completely normal in china now, especially in the cities. even the older generations who might not accept it mind their own business”. can that be said about america? how many queer people here have been accosted by some boomer who couldn’t mind their own business? i saw the gayest fucking dude i’ve ever seen in my life (that’s a compliment). he was also wearing makeup and sassily singing along with destiny’s child. completely comfortable in his skin and with his identity, and while all of the comments and his speaking were in mandarin that i couldn’t understand, you can tell by the vibe it was all positive. meanwhile in progressive america, if you’re a guy who wants to put on makeup and go live on tiktok you’re gonna face all sorts of homophobia and bigotry.
one of the few things western liberals could really say about china, that even those of us who are left wing and pro china thought to be at least somewhat true, appears to just straight up not be true.
Thing is, do you have a big section of the party making conscious efforts to put policy in place to hurt LGTBQ, and that being like half of their campaign, and constant media attacks from reactionary media against LGBTQ? That’s what we have in the west, whether Republicans in the US and their associate media or far right in western Europe
Can’t say for the party because we never know how they really think, but there is no real animosity against LGBTQ people except in terms of Western LGBT “propaganda” and Western NGOs that promote “human rights” and “democracy” that they see as a form of Western cultural imperialism (which is why China went to great lengths with the firewall - it was never fully effective because if you really want, you can just VPN out of it, but it did a pretty good job of preserving Chinese culture and its traditional values within its cultural spaces instead of being diluted by Western culture as we’ve seen in many other countries).
I have said before that LGBT rights will most likely come from domestic grassroots movements as it should, but currently it’s still dominated by Western-brained libs who came back from overseas and attempting to emulate Western LGBT movement. As an example, as a collective society it’ll be hard pressed to see any kind of pride parade/celebration in China (although some of the libs did try lol) as that’d be seen as promoting individualism/rights of certain subset of the demographics. Instead, it strives to create equality for all groups of people without prioritizing on any particular group. In other words, advances in LGBT rights will take on a different form than what you’d expect from a Westerner’s perspective.
Thanks for your perspective, comrade, it’s really valuable having you in Hexbear, I appreciate your contributions a lot, especially in the news community <3