Article is 2 years old, but it's a happy article and I wanted to post it anyways.
EDIT: For anyone curious, here's a link to her Douyin page: https://www.douyin.com/user/MS4wLjABAAAAC-deOgCmNN2bIugq3od6LBI-Ws7Pn8EuLwWBjZg-ghg It says she has 11.151 million followers and 170 million likes, which is awesome.
Yep, give it 20-30 years and I bet that China will be the LGBTQ+ safe haven. For the shitty things China does, I am vastly more willing to tolerate them specifically because they keep working on making them better.
In shithole America, problems are ignored and the good things they opposed for 50 years get propagandized even while politicians are stripping them away.
China already is the LGBTQ+ safe haven, as are Cuba and Vietnam. I think LGBTQ+ rights are about more than corporate sponsorships and pride parades. The question is: are LGBTQ+ people free to be themselves? Are they committing suicide in droves? Are they being targeted by death squads? While their situation is not perfect in AES countries, I do think that it’s actually already better.
At the core of queer liberation today are at least some rights that are at odds with the demands of the austerity-addicted, tyrannic capitalist class, such as free and accessible healthcare for transition, reproductive medicine, HIV prevention and treatment; encompassing protections from discrimination in areas like working and housing, and a protection from targeted harassment campaigns that is fundamentally contrarian to how the free speech paradigm works in a media landscape dominated by the most reactionary stratas of fossil capital. Moreover, from my lived experience as a trans woman i can say that the way liberal democracy organizes majorities and manufactures consent is absolutely terrifying when you're part of a group that's probably less than 1% of the population, unless that less than 1% group is the bourgeoisie.
Now the problem here and the reason that for the last decades, queer communities were more visible in the imperial core than in the periphery, is that liberal democracy makes grassroots organizing outside of sanctioned party structures a lot easier than the societal model you see in the siege socialism AES states necessarily had to practice. That frequently meant that widespread societal acceptance and queer organizing lagged significantly behind the legal situation of queer people in AES states. The East German DDR legalized gay sex a full year before the West German BRD followed suit with a partial legalization that only caught up to the DDR's laws 4 years after "reunification". For trans people, the situation after the West annexed their home country was dire, as it led to a drastic worsening of their legal situation - the DDR did not have the forced sterilizations and forced divorces that were part of changing your name and gender ID in the BRD until the 2010s. But societal acceptance of gay and lesbian people reliably polled higher in the West than in the East, because the West had a very public, thriving (and, unfortunately, also very commercialized) gay subculture, whereas the DDR, apart from a few gay work groups within the party, did not have anything but clandestine cruising spots until the first state-funded gay bars opened up in Berlin in the 1980s. As cool as state-funded gay bars are, that's a bit late to the party for Berlin. When we look at the state of Eastern Europe today, it's a sad reality that after the collapse of AES there, the reactionary backlash had it easy to roll back progress in queer liberation, with the main exception being Slovenia, which during Tito's years, when it was part of Yugoslavia, had a very active, well-organized queer community and was the first region in Europe to host a queer film festival. Up until today, it is the most accepting nation out of all the post-AES ones in that part of the world.
As materialists, we are quick to dismiss the liberal talking points of visibility and representation and awareness, and they are indeed pointless if they are mistaken to be an end in themselves and lead to no material changes beyond, but from lived experience i can tell you that it matters if people are familiar with queer experiences. It's the only way to create a welcoming, open social environment that allows you to thrive as a queer person, and in the past AES states frequently struggled with that part in spite of political goodwill, while many places in the West succeeded at this in spite of queer communities still having to fight our governments tooth and nail for every tiny bit of legal and political recognition. Make no mistake, queer liberation in the west is a success story of the tenacity, endurance and ingenuity of our own community, not something that our supposedly so benevolent freedom-loving governments handed down to us. Let no rainbow capitalist and no warmongering liar who dares to put the NATO star on one of our pride flags deceive you: We do not have our rights due to western values, we have them because of decades of organization and struggle against the repressive cishetnormative morals of the West, and it's simply that this struggle is a lot easier when your government doesn't have to worry with every NGO if it is a front for the CIA working on a coup. The West's efforts at regime change actively undermine the possibility for queer self liberation in the post-colonial world. It is easy to scapegoat queer activists as Western agents when our plight is instrumentalized by imperialists the way it is today.
So what's the way forward here? We can look to Cuba for the answer. Not only have they just trained 10 doctors in gender reassignment surgery, doctors who, in the usual Cuban tradition, will help people all across LatAm with their knowledge, people who could otherwise never afford such surgeries. Cuba also has demonstrated a clear willingness to win the people over and spread acceptance of queer rights, as we saw before the referendum for the new family code. Their information campaign successfully countered the opposition of reactionary actors like the Catholic church and made the people of Cuba approve of what's probably the most progressive family law in the world. Socialist states do not only need to give legal recognition to queer people, the party needs to play an active role in engaging with and provifing a platform for the queer community, as for all groups among the masses that have been marginalized under capitalism. This is essential to build a truyl unified, solidaric society working towards communism.
The statistics out of the Beijing LGBT center are a little better than America and there are different hurdles to get over, but I think you're overstating things a bit here
Main thing is the party bans discriminatory language in the news about any group, so you don't have insane people talking about trans stuff 24/7 to incite genocide.
Dug into it, and there wasn't any reasons given, however some people that used to go there speculated the following:
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The US Consulate was invited to speak at the center a couple of times... which seems uh... like an extremely bad decision. I've talked to people in China involved in centers and that is a HUGE no-no.
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There were conflicts with neighboring buildings that led to them being kicked out of their building.
Yeah there are plenty of groups that still operate in Beijing, obviously, at least 10 major ones from what I can tell. So while it does suck, its overblown that people think this is the end of LGBT activities in Beijing in western media.
Unfortunately, a co-founder of the Beijing LGBT Center, Wan Yanhai, had ties to the NED, which the government has been cracking down on more recently. Yanhai had a fellowship with them. He was also one of the signatories of the Charter 08 manifesto, which called for the end of CCP rule and privatization of all state-owned enterprises. Also doesn’t really help that there are still some out of touch socially conservative boomers in the government, who believe LGBT activism to be a western plot. China is still overall making progress in LGBT rights, especially with younger Chinese being generally very supportive, but there are still occasional setbacks along the way like this.
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I'm pretty sure the one you're thinking about allegedly had a director with ClA connections which was the stated reason for the shutdown
Yeah apparently. Wasn't aware of that, but they have a research paper floating around on Chinese LGBT statistics. No western agency discusses the reasoning for the shut down, which is usually given. Shanghai Pride and many other orgs are still operating though. I'll dig a bit to see if I can turn up anything.
Are they that good in China? Is that a recent development? I would agree with Cuba but would you mind providing sources for China and Vietnam?
Luna Oi on twitter has been talking about Vietnam moving in the direction of Cuba with regard to LGBTQ+ issues. That’s about as specific as I can get.
I bet that China will be the LGBTQ+ safe haven. For the shitty things China does, I am vastly more willing to tolerate them specifically because they keep working on making them better.
I can't, for the life of me, find it. But there's a short documentary that I watched about a year ago on YouTube, called something like "A Day of Transition", which was about trans people in China, and the recent strides that have been made in areas like employment protections.
So things are definitely moving in a positive direction.
Afaik they’re like around 2000s USA in regards to lgbt issues, wouldn’t be too surprised if civil unions (or hell even marriages) became a thing there in the next ten years
They don't allow same-sex marriage for one. You can get a legalized guardianship but that's paperwork and offers less legal rights and recognition.
The average LGBTQ+ person in China may be better off than the average person in America but if you remove the south I don't think that'd hold true anymore.
fair enough; I figured "does" implied that they were actively doing something malicious, but there are certainly many issues that still need to be resolved
Nicely written article with none of that deadnaming nonsense that journalists love to include
LOVE TO SEE IT. the younger generation of chinese people give me so much hope for the future. im having a hard time translating with the limited knowledge of chinese that i have, what pronouns do you think theyd use in english?
edit: im dumb, she/her, article says. im so pessimistic about news articles about trans people that i never even stopped to consider it a legitimate source lmao
chinese is wierd in that pre-1919 there were no gendered pronouns until the adoption of 她, before that all people were addressed as 他, both are written differently but they're pronounced the same way in mandarin
Always find it interesting how often native Mandarin speakers with good English tend to just freely switch between he and she for the same person in spoken English, but never in writing.
here's a link to her Douyin page: https://www.douyin.com/user/MS4wLjABAAAAC-deOgCmNN2bIugq3od6LBI-Ws7Pn8EuLwWBjZg-ghg
It locked me out with Chinese captchas. I don't know what it wants from me
Me just banging things randomly like a toddler with a block in the hole toy it hasn't worked out yet.
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lol dual purpose captcha that keeps both bots and anglos out
and they say china doesnt innovate
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i think you need to click on those three characters in the photo (maybe in order?)
edit: so it would be 4, 2, 3?
Yeah I gave it a couple good shots, I figure it's telling us to pick out the characters in certain colors or something like that.
Maybe we're robots
I’ve only encountered the puzzle piece captchas which are relatively easy, but if I encounter something in Chinese that requires an explanation I’ll use the google translate camera function (or iphone camera app works too) to live translate it from simplified Chinese to English. It’s generally pretty accurate I think, and I’ve also managed to order stuff on Taobao this way.
but i though we're Chinese wumao bots with high social credit scores???
pick out the characters presented in the top line of text from the picture, in order
Damn the article is like, way ahead of what you get in most western articles about trans people, even the "liberal" ones like the guardian in terms of being unambiguously supportive
and then it just has the weirdest fucking chaser sounding shit right at the end of the article for literally no reason
With a fair complexion, long hair framing a cute doll-like face and a pair of Bambi eyes the lovely internet celebrity has won more than 2 million fans
Is this chasing or just how any woman would be talked about who is attractive and famous? Not defending it per se, just curious if it's on the kinda misogyny or chasing side. Or is all chasing of trans-women also tinted by misogyny? Probably a book about this if I googled well enough
She is undeniably cute. Hot male celebrities get talked about the same way except it's terms like rugged, handsome, chiseled, broody, easy smile, and whatever else is used to describe a himbo.
Still find it weird, don't get me wrong. Like that's a thing that I just kinda prefer not to be said outside of contexts where the goal of that person is to look cute or in personal/non-weird conversations. Just was wondering if it's chasing, the weird horny shit, maybe misogyny, or a combo.
Ahhh I just realized that I was also confused about something. I thought she is an athlete actually, but she's just an internet celebrity. Less weird then already. Still skeptical but much less
outside of contexts where the goal of that person is to look cute
I don't enjoy people talking that way but, as a popular public figure whose appearance is part of her brand, is this not the case?
See my response below/above. Was for some reason under the impression she was an athlete.
If we're gonna be honest she's definitely making content to try and appeal to the audience by looking cute and people are watching because she's cute (you can verify if you can make it past the captcha haha)
They just transparently put out an honest assessment of an uncomfortable truth
How to define chasing is a difficult subject. For example, atm i date other trans people exclusively (which is known as t4t), that doesn't make me a chaser. It just means that i find myself emotionally most comfortable among people who have the same experience, intuitively know needs of mine that cis people will always struggle to understand and that we can give comfort to each other naturally, with the smallest efforts. I also find it liberating for myself and healing for my self-image to experience the bodies of other trans people as beautiful and desirable, to recognize that we can be cherished the way we are, that there is a unique wonder in being part of each others' transformative years. There's a very strong tendency in the trans community for t4t dating and while there's some idealization to it, i can generally say that it helps us a lot to have that kind of bond.
With prototypical chasers, it's a wholly different issue. There is no respect for our experience, only a manipulative exploitation of our needs, playing on our vulnerabilities, treating us as disposable objects. Or these approaches are so unbelievably rude i can't call them anything but sexual harassment. That's hardly surprising, as chasing is often heavily interlinked with transphobia, i'd go as far as to say that almost all transphobic men are secretly chasers as well. There is a strong fetishistic aspect to it that disregards our interests and completely subjugates them to the sexual impulses of the chaser. For example, a lot of them are only interested in unoperated trans women, ignore the massive amounts of dysphoria many of us have around our genitals and around things like topping a partner and taking on stereotypically masculine roles in sex. This is vastly different from a t4t attitude towards unoperated or pre-operated trans people, where there's widespread acceptance of and affection for all kinds of transfeminine genitals that places the well-being and comfort of our lovers over anything else.
When we look at society at large, how trans celebrities are seen usually falls somewhere inbetween these extremes, but it's almost always at least a bit problematic. There's always some kind of othering and exoticizing involved in how we are portrayed, but i think there's also a genuine and heartfelt fascination with us, even though it's often strongly transmedicalist and overemphasizes efforts to be as cis-passing as possible. The quote you provide is a good example for this, for the surprised, wide-eyed wonder how much one of us can look hyperfeminine. I get that, i've seen tons of transition timelines and many still make my jaw drop, but it's a fine line to walk. We tend to suck up compliments like a sponge, but it's obviously very harmful to set celebs like this as the standard we all have to live up to.
I also wouldn't ask where the mysogyny starts and the transphobia ends, these are almost always interlinked when we're talking about transfemmes. Transmysogyny is an actual field of study among trans scholars and has been since Julia Serrano first published Whipping Girl.
Thanks a lot for this explanation. There's obviously much more going on than just can be simply understood and I will continue reading, especially knowing there's more studies in the field. Whipping Girl goes next in my list
