Last I’ve heard, there were some issues, but things were getting better. Now I have stumbled upon this headline and wish to know more details about the situation.
Every country has issues with LGBT and I don't want to hear it from western imperialist lapdogs.
Especially since identity politics is frequently used to justify imperialism.
I can't speak to lgb part but as far as trans and queer rights not that great, they have a long way to go. Now is it to the point where "Trans and queer people and their supporters suffer ‘systemic persecution’" for the most part no. However its not easy to get access to estradiol as you need the permission of your closest relatives to start HRT and as of recent they have made it illegal to order online.
There was a discussion about this here
I'd also like to address some of the comments here, as a trans person fighting for trans liberation watching ppl try and disregard the material conditions of trans people for whatever reason, get fucked and stop claiming being trans, gay, bisexual etc is some American concept. We have existed throughout history in every culture and we will continue to regardless of politics, borders, etc.
I took a break from this site because I was getting tired of the fucking mental gymnastics some of ya'll do to defend china when it comes to lack of trans rights or issues. No country is perfect when it comes to trans rights does not mean we shouldn't critique any country in a quest to defend our humanity and access to healthcare. Stop abandoning your comrades because liberals have cooped parts of our movement, ask a LGBTQ person how we can fight imperialism and support our LGBTQ comrades at the same time (they are not mutually exclusive)
Some insight here: one of the key factors in Chinese cultural identity is the family unit. Whereas the American family unit is limited to yourself, your spouse, and your potential children, the Chinese family unit stretches further back to your parents/grandparents. There's a much stronger pressure to have and raise children, which impacts the cultural perception of LGBT rights.
There's a little checkbox labelled 'trans' in the Chinese developed and published video game I was playing yesterday.
That doesn't disprove it all the same way Zelensky being Jewish doesn't disprove anything, but so much of what I see about China flies in the face of what white people (and Chinese people who speak with American accents and speak less Chinese than I do) say about China. And considering where I live, I'm seeing a lot.
Western activists, many educated by, paid for, sympathetic and useful to CIA/NED are being harassed, rightfully for being dangerous western puppets. These are people who fell for the siren song of the west, who fully believe only liberalism can bring about LGBTQ+ rights and are willing to work with the west and undermine the CPC, China, the Chinese people, etc for that. Some of them are naive, some are self-hating Chinese convinced by the west that Chinese socialism and culture is evil and backwards and must be destroyed in order for progress to take place. I cannot speak to this particular instance.
Though the west is happy to groom and use fascists, far more useful in public propaganda are their efforts to groom liberals, faux-progressives. Much as the Solidarity-Union movement in Poland which was used by the CIA to bring down communism in Poland presented itself as being more for workers than the party but turned out to unleash the most horrible anti-worker consequences, so too are these types of people mostly of the same risk.
Are there perhaps issues with overly conservative types within the party pushing back on gay rights? Almost certainly. However these movements and movement leaders being crushed are I would bet to a one liberal in nature, allied with, influenced by the west and therefore dangerous.
Queer liberation as with other forms of liberation in China cannot and should not be based off western conceptions in the imperial core under liberal capitalism. It should be home-grown, developed with the party, and have a strong Marxist nature.
There is room for improvement in China but it is a developing country only a couple generations removed from feudalism so that is to be expected. There has been steady progress. There was a recent court ruling, I cannot remember the details but the court upheld I believe a trans persons rights in the fact of the private company they worked for.
I think this is the main point to remember. Rainbow imperialism is the order of the day, and the west will fund subversive LGBTQ groups in other nations in the hopes of sowing division and making that nation look homophobic. It's win/win as far as the west is concerned, as they try to place liberalism as the only way to actually ensure protection for these people.
And the western press preys on people's naivety about that all the time. I've heard so many people insist China is homophobic because they don't have big western style corporate funded pride parades. Rather than consider whether or not LGBTQ people in China want that, they insist that if China's LGBTQ people don't behave exactly like people in the west, they are being oppressed.
"Gay rights is when western style pride parades sponsored by lockheed martin and women's rights are when girl-boss drone pilots who kill women and children and force families out of homes for the bank's profits" - Many western liberals and "leftists" unironically who think what they know of a thing is the only way it can exist. Pure chauvinism.
Capitalism knows it has an awful image problem. It knows it is indefensible. It is clever however.
So it clothes itself in liberatory language and appropriates liberation movements, it clothes itself in the language of progress, it extols how progressive it is by inviting those in the imperial core who were typically marginalized to take part in the blood-letting (after beating the shit out of and scapegoating them for centuries), to let a few of them gain some wealth and power, to scream to the heavens how only liberal capitalism can accomplish this and look how much better our system is than the alternative of this only recently industrialized socialist nation and these groups of global south people suffering from centuries of depredation at the hands of the west, suffering from the west sponsoring the most fringe maniac religious extremists and their ideology to splinter and keep these regions down and bogged with war so the western hegemony is supreme. (Lenin said it better than I ever could of course)
It's white savior complex liberal-LGBTQ+ edition. Same as white savior complex liberal-feminism-edition. It says the western white liberal context truth is the only one that is real, all others are false, our path is the only real path, any who deny it are <insult here>.
There are some right deviationists (a couple in this thread and they are wrong) who want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, who ignorantly proclaim because there is liberal taint within these movements which are globally centered in the west (which always seeks to infect and control anything and everything) that the whole thing is decadence or bourgeois or whatever nonsense it is which is wrong. Instead we must seek to pry these concepts from liberalism, from capitalism as part of our greater drive to revolution. There's already many revolutionaries within these communities who want this who are being suppressed or carefully sidelined by high-powered corporatized concepts of rights.
China is the opposite of the west. In the west they allow liberal compromise feminists and LGBTQ+ and black civil rights leaders and kill, marginalize, humiliate, and sabotage revolutionary and Marxist ones while appropriating the movements to push consumption and loyalty to capitalism. In China they allow Marxist ones but seek to clamp down on, control, and put a stop to liberal ones. That is what most of this crying is about.
Of course China has a struggle to fight, of course there is progress to be made. But as a socialist country with an in-power communist party there is the risk of infiltration and it must be addressed. It is to Marxists in a nation like China to create this change, not by begging western CIA fronts and running dogs that call themselves civil society and "human rights" groups to sanction China or going for training (indoctrination) by these groups in the west but by applying Marxist principles, theory, and good old fashioned action.
Brilliantly put. I think one of the reasons this kind of liberalism is so enticing to so many is that liberalism is excellent at promising everything. We saw a similar situation with the USSR, where the western liberals promised that the citizens of the USSR could have everything they ever wanted under liberalism, and so there were calls for liberalisation, and liberalism is an ideology that cannot fail, it can only be failed, so the USSR's attempts at liberalisation were "failures" when they didn't give the people what they were promised, and the people were told that if they just liberalise a little bit more, everything they've ever wanted would be theirs.
I would imagine a similar situation in China as well, LGBTQ liberals could easily be swayed by the west's empty promises. After all, if you only hear about the west's opinion on gay rights from very loud internet liberals, you'd probably come away with the idea that the west is a haven of LGBTQ acceptance. No country is perfect, but liberalism is really good at tricking people that perfection is just a few liberalising reforms away...
last i heard is a odd combination of confucianism with british colonial law, so being cis homosexual is not okay, being trans straight is kinda ok.
anyhow, that doesn't exempt china from criticism, it is a socialist country with a culture that somepoint in the past had normalized homosexual relationship to the point that taoist religion have a god protector of gay men, and comparing to its peers like cuba that has the most advanced legislation in regards to lgbtqia+ and definition of family
No idea, but ProleWiki has something: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_and_issues_in_AES_countries#People's_Republic_of_China
Oh, that's why this was one of our most visited pages 3 days ago lol. Thanks!
:tips-fedora: why waste time type lot word when prolewiki link do trick?
Ying’s family – who are not supportive of her trans identity – had been keeping Ying, an adult over 18, under house arrest and cut off from the outside world. In August, they finally allowed her to leave to pursue her studies. She was now at school, but wanted to run away to be with her girlfriend in another city.
Together, they hatched a plan. Mei would take Ying’s phone to prevent her family from tracking her location and try to persuade them not to call the police. But after a month of failed mediation, the family notified the authorities, who traced the phone to Mei’s apartment. The police came and arrested her for kidnapping.
“It was my first time being arrested. They took me to the station and questioned me for 10 hours. They tried to make me confess, but I refused to say anything,” Mei tells the Guardian over an encrypted app. “Eventually, they let me go because there was no evidence.”
In the end, the police found Ying and took her back to her family. The failed rescue attempt is one of more than 10 similar cases Mei knows of where advocates have been arrested and questioned by police since she joined an informal network providing support to the LGBTQ+ community some years ago.
So this is the main anecdote in the article. The police and the family are rather understandable. The police has to respond to potential kidnappings, and the family couldn't contact their daughter for a month. The only objectionable thing I find is that the daughter was returned to the family without her consent, but the idea of child becoming an absolute adult at the age of 18 is an American idea so it's also understandable in cultural context to return a 19 year old.
Yes, the family involved in the situation is terrible and abusive. Is it state repression by the Chinese government? No. Are the LGBT+ folks having difficulty surviving as the title says? Also no.
Yes, China should improve on LGBT rights by legalizing gay marriage and allowing gay couples to adopt children. But it's kind of hard to claim that there is a crackdown on expressing queerness when there's gay weddings publicly happening across China right now.
The family were perfectly justified in horrifically abusing, torturing, and neglecting their child because they were trans and tried to escape their abuse? Then the police were perfectly justified in bringing the daughter back because she was “kidnapped” when trying to escape the abuse?
Further, being an adult at 19 is silly and a “western idea” so the daughter should be forced back into in an abusive situation against her will. What age does Chinese law state a person is legally an adult? Or are you going to pull more disgusting justification for transphobia and abuse out of your ass?
You say that the family was abusive but even because they couldn’t contact the child they’ve abused they’re perfectly justified in kidnapping them essentially???
“Cultural context”? Give me the cultural context that justifies this.
Should wives stay with husbands they beat them? Are parents allowed to abuse their children? What other amazing takes do you have?
Fuck you, that is vile and repulsive. You should be ashamed.
Yes, the family involved in the situation is terrible and abusive
Did you choose to just ignore this statement and others I wrote to make my position clear? I understand why you're angry, but you are completely misreading what I am saying to an absurd degree.
I am clearly making an argument that Mei being questioned by the police for kidnapping is not indicative of systematic discrimination.
You can choose to disagree with that statement, vehemently if you prefer. But you're arguing against a construct where I said that transphobia is a-okay and that Ying's treatment is acceptable. I didn't say that so there's not much for me to object.
As you know, Lemmygrad is an instance where we see LGBT liberation as a core tenet, so I think you're misreading the room here. We are objecting to Western slander of gay and trans genocide in China. That's very different from thinking that the state of affairs in China's acceptable.
I was not discussing the slander of the Chinese by western media. I was disgusted at your time regarding the ancedote.
So this is the main anecdote in the article. The police and the family are rather understandable.
but the idea of child becoming an absolute adult at the age of 18 is an American idea so it’s also understandable in cultural context to return a 19 year old.
Chinese law states an individual is a complete adult at 18.
“Eventually, they let me go because there was no evidence.”
We're supposed to believe this is some 1984 totalitarian hellhole
considering some of the comments in this thread, I want to point out that
- it's perfectly fine to provide legitimate criticism of LGBTQ+ rights in any country
- you should be skeptical of articles like these in bourgeois media, particularly from the imperial core (that doesn't mean they should be dismissed, just viewed with a critical eye)
- while violations (or alleged violations) of LGBTQ+ rights are used as war propaganda by imperialists (e.g. the absence of pride parades in a non-Western country doesn't imply that they're outlawed), LGBTQ+ people were around long before capitalism and something like "LGBT is a Western invention" is not acceptable
How hypocritical.
If you want to know more, I found this article here. Sex ed in China is mostly focused on disease prevention rather than sexual identity.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2331186X.2023.2270289
I can’t comment much, but I do know that there’s a lot of reactionary elements in China regarding not only lgbt issues but also gender equality as well.
Living in Shenzhen openly trans + lesbian and I haven't had problems yet
Addendum: people look at me funny and I guess that might be a deal breaker for some?
Ok, who let the stupidpol/leftypolack in?
Your kind will never be able to exclude us from liberation spaces, no matter how hard your insecure cishet ass tries. 🖕
What is blud yapping about, alunyanneгs is from the global south.
LGBT itself is a concept created by western capitalists to divide the working people, and now it has become an excuse to invade third world countries.What the proletariat wants is sexual liberation and equal rights.
Suck my girl dick. This is social chauvinism dressed in Marxist garb.
Yes, queer idpol is used to justify global south subjugation by the imperial core. That phenomenon does not make queerness as such, "A concept created by western capitalists to divide the working people".
The western queer movement sprang from largely colonized and lumpen elements within the periphery of the working class.
Simply put, you have it backwards. Queerness was not imposed by capital on the global south.
The western gender system, and expectations of heterosexuality were violently imposed on the people of the global south. A global south which is full of a vast array of different kinds of sexual expression, and third gender traditions.
I don't care about your social activities in the west at all, just remember.Your rich life comes from the blood and sweat of the global South.
Yeah, sorry, the people of the global south were sucking dick and transing their genders long before the Euros showed up.
The entire reason pinkwashed imperialism is bullshit, isn't because queerness is some decadent western imposition. It's because while the US imperial death machine tries to use the aesthetics of queer acceptance to justify the decimation of Gaza.
It ignores the Israeli State's rampant homophobia, and the fact that queer Palestinians who live in Gaza (as they have for its entire history) are just as much at risk of extermination as anyone else.
LGBT as a word became known after the Stonewall riots (follow the reference for the story), where police came to crack down on a known gay/trans bar and it ended up with the clients barricading themselves inside the bar and throwing bricks at cops.
LGBT identities have always existed whether they had a name or not. They didn't suddenly pop up in the 1990s.
You're actually playing into the western bourgeoisie's hand when you say that they created it and are trying to force it upon other cultures because it keeps you fighting your fellow proletariat. In many places non-binary gender identities (non-male and non-female) were commonly accepted until Christian missionaries came over. Uganda, which has recently destroyed all protections for gay people and made it a severe crime, did so because US missionaries funded by the FOX company (of FOX News) ran TV channels in the country that promoted anti-gay propaganda.
Yes, the CIA ran an ad with a "queer woman of color" proud of serving in the CIA. Yes, the US military likes to write biographies of their LGBT soldiers and officers. Yes, non-acceptance of LGBT rights is now used to separate the "us vs them" in geopolitics.
It doesn't invalidate the identity as a whole though. This is a shortcut of lumping everyone into the same basket.
The bourgeoisie is the one who decides to make the CIA and US Army ads featuring gay people and promoting how inclusive their imperialist murder machine is -- everyone can become a murderer!
Man, it even helps them! I can picture Biden chuckling gleefully every time he sees one of those ads, because he knows it's going to make gay rights look even more unappealing in the countries they're invading. And don't think he gives a fuck about gay rights because he voted to enshrine that marriage is between a man and a woman in 1996.
Don't look at the opportunists for guidance. If you can do that for Marxists you can do that for LGBT identities. This shift in how LGBT identities are perceived serves two purposes for the bourgeoisie: 1, it makes them unappealing in the countries I mentioned. 2, it makes liberals cheer even harder for invasion.
But LGBT people exist and will exist regardless of what their country does. I'm a worker and I exist whether my country is imperialist or not (and it is). Their rights are important to them: the first thing people ask me when I talk about marxism is about LGBT rights in AES countries. It's important in the same way the economy is important or labor rights are important to people. We don't get to decide what's important to the proletariat, they'll tell us.
I won't fault a prole for being homophobic if that's all they know and have learned. I know I'm not going to change their minds by being combative or in one essay. It takes time and listening. But as communists we must hold ourselves to a higher standard.
Thanks for such a calm and non-combative answer. I do understand why people can get combative, but that sort of thing usually doesn't help change people's minds.
This comment is particularly hilariously wrong when you remember how much capitalist countries (including western ones!) tried to squash LGBT people (and still tries to, see the US states outlawing trans people)
Ffs it was a crime to be gay in most capitalist countries until the 2000s, and in most places even something like marriage still isn't legal
Not exclusively bad though . It is just every country is not in pace with 1960s sexual liberation movement of US and the West.
The irony is that many places were well ahead of The West in that regard until the colonizers came and forced their binary norm onto them.
Well I don't about your country but India was pretty much backwards in terms of any rights of women and the oppressed castes. It was the British who employed the lower castes and gave them some dignity. That's all. Hijras in india were always frowned upon and were ostracized by the mainstream society for years. They are not mentioned in vedas and hindu texts (although gods can be trans or can have both feminine and masculine genders).
Go further East and things change considerably.
A good case study is Thailand. They managed to avoid being outright colonized, and their approach to gender is so far ahead of their SEA neighbours (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Philippines) where historically they were very similar.
I think it's due to some kind of buddhist philosophy. India was and is pretty backwards
It's not exclusively from Buddhism. Buddhism wasn't prevalent in the Philippines, but the indigenous animist religions had gods and legends that Western culture would call trans. The spiritual leaders, the babaylans, were exclusively women and the few men that felt a calling to that role switched gender expressions.
Queerness in Russia was apparently quite normal before Christian missionaries began westernizing them
Every culture deals with these issues in their own way. We should not expect that sexual and gender liberation will look the same in all parts of the world. In some instances the main reason why this liberation is now needed is because of patriarchal norms imposed by European colonizers. In order to liberate themselves they do not need to emulate the West's historical path but rather to go through a process of cultural decolonization drawing upon the progressive elements in their own traditions.
And keep in mind, not all aspects of the 1960s sexual liberation in the West were good...the normalization of pornography for instance happened during that time. There were quite a few aspects of the 1960s counterculture movement that were less than desirable from a Marxist viewpoint. Some of the more harmful ones like excessive drug use were deliberately pushed and encouraged by Cointelpro in order to subvert revolutionary groups and divert the energies of the youth into avenues that are non-threatening to the bourgeois state.
The CIA was also behind quite a few of the more popular "radical" media (magazines, etc.), artists and intellectuals of the time.
(Moved from c/genzedong after I realized this would be the better place to post this.)
why not ask it in !china@lemmygrad.ml? it's even modded by a chinese person
