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.

  • TheDrink [he/him]
    ·
    20 hours ago

    Just wanna add that China's a really big country so I'm sure there's a lot of degrees to it the same as there is in the US, but all we have as outsiders looking towards China is kind of a vague notion that is painted for us by mainstream media narratives which generally skew towards portraying old fashioned or bigoted attitudes, which clashes with the specific community that we can see and interact with on internet melting pots like what XHS has suddenly turned into.

    But I guess what I'm saying is that if it were America, we would know that there's a big cultural difference between the Deep South and the Northeast, California and Texas, etc. We know that the culture and politics in general are a reactionary backlash right now, and that parts of the LGBT community (especially trans comrades in conservative areas) are worse off now than they were five years ago.

    But all of that subtlety of understanding is lost when looking at China unless you really study it or you grew up immersed in it or you live and immerse yourself in it for long enough to pick up on them. So while seeing progressive Chinese people on XHS does give me warm fuzzies and hopefully push my own perception of Chinese LGBT attitudes towards a more correct understanding, I also try to keep in mind that I'm only looking at a small section of a very big picture.

    edit: To use an example in reverse, imagine a Chinese person on TikTok seeing all of the pro-Palestinian sentiment and concluding that Americans are very pro-Palestine.