What the article says is, of course, horrible. But even if you believe it, it is parents who put their kids in conversion camps. The only part where the govt. comes in is with the assertion that some people heading these “schools” are members of the CCP (which has over 90 million members so c’mon). There are two other articles in this series but they are paywalled so can’t talk about them.
Here is a good article covering LGBTQ+ news in China (positives and negatives).
Here is some direct rebuttal by someone more educated.
All this kind of coverage in Western news does is make certain conservative voices within the Global South associate lgbt rights as “western” and hurt marginalized people within.
These conditions are the same as in the USA and other countries. Trans people have roughly the same conditions around the entire globe based on my conversations with international trans women (including Chinese, Cuban, Iranian, and many, many Russian women). Anyone saying this is unique to China are scum and are imperialist apologizers hoping to ‘intervene’. LGBT people are first on the chopping block whenever there is an intervention. The only way for this to be resolved is if the local LGBT+allies community does something about it. Otherwise, we should always be open to refugees. That is all we can do.
I’d also like to point out that these sorts of things flourish just because of ignorance. There are many communists in places like China, Czechia, Vietnam, Cuba, and so on, that if you properly educate them on LGBT issues, they become stalwart allies in quick fashion. They legitimately have never been exposed to the idea of LGBT people beyond the surface level. My grandma, for instance, was a commie organizer a long time ago and since I have come out to her she did a complete 180 on LGBT issues and has even pushed all of her connections to be accepting as well. It required almost no pushing from me for her to do so, she educated herself and asked for book recommendations even.
But you also have to realize too that there are many reactionary groups that take advantage of this ignorance to stifle the LGBT community. And there are international liberal groups that seek to turn LGBT people into compradors and spies because of their precarious condition. It is very convenient for these liberal groups, LGBT people are everywhere and since we generally have it bad in every country, they can point to the miniscule amount of progress in the West to show these people ‘hope’ through intervention. It is very sinister, and it is an issue that comes up a lot in my discussions with LGBT people abroad. Some LGBT groups in countries like China even have rules about not speaking to foreigners for this fear that it could cause trouble. So this sort of rhetoric just ends up making the situation even more precarious and it makes it harder for people to find legitimate, altruistic help.
This is wild to me. Don’t get me wrong, I believe you 100%, but it’s strange to imagine actually experiencing this because all of the anti-LGBT people I’ve encountered have been aggressively hostile toward and immediately dismissive of any evidence against their positions.
It helps that they’re already on the anti-racism and workers rights train. My parents still haven’t come around because they have liberal brainworms, though my grandma has used her power as matriarch to bully them into being nicer. Shes pretty well known in our village back in Czechia, everyone knows her, so she kinda made it her business to begin to convince people. Theres also just the fact that it isn’t America. The default for LGBT people is obscurity, only in America and Western Europe is there a big political debate about it, though that is spreading to Eastern Europe too as time goes on.
It definitely puts new light on the claim stupidpol types love to make about how “all of the working class people outside of the west hate gay people, so the LGBT movement is bourgeois and imperialist.”
It’s nonsense. Most people don’t even know being gay or trans is a thing outside the west. It’s a curse and a blessing.
Shit, the idea wasnt even particularly well known in the west until the 80s and 90s. Like I didn’t even know being gay or trans was an option until I was like 14.
It makes sense, because in many places in the West, anti-LGBT rhetoric is like a huge and longstanding cultural project. A significant number of Christians believe that if they treat enough gay people with respect, God will get fed up at some point and genocide the entire society. If I was an American evangelical Christian, I would believe that one gay person walking around minding their own business is a greater threat of human misery than infinite Holocausts.
In some other places it might be a lot shallower, like just a vague belief in traditional gender roles and a deference to the word of their geriatric asshole relatives.