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.

  • sooper_dooper_roofer [none/use name]
    ·
    18 hours ago

    I'm gonna be racist, it's not a governmental issue, Asians just don't get violent about stupid shit.

    The structure of White hate is:

    • 1/3 of whites intensely seethingly hate XYZ
    • white institutions SOMETIMES pass laws in response outlawing hate against XYZ (after dragging their feet for multiple decades/centuries)
    • the law is rarely enforced but whites will point to it as evidence that they're "more progressive" than other races while Black people get lynched in the year 2023

    The structure of Asian hate is:

    • nobody cares
    • sooper_dooper_roofer [none/use name]
      ·
      18 hours ago

      this goes back as far as the bronze age, where despite having the EARLIEST documented transgender woman, european culture were the least permissive of it. most other major cultures had "third genders", especially Indian/East Asian/CaribbeanAfrican ones. The transgender fossil was in a Polish Corded Ware grave, and thus pretty close to modern Europeans

      • GoodGuyWithACat [he/him]
        ·
        13 hours ago

        #notalleuropeans

        Ancient Norse myths and poetry suggest some sort of trans-gender or maybe third gender. For example if a woman were to take on a man's role (I e. warrior) she could be seen as a man. There was also stigmas against "men acting as women" but it's less clear what that means. Does it mean men being bottoms? Probably not because there's artwork depicting group sex and man on man love. Some historians suggest the stigma is for a man getting pregnant, a la Loki birthing Fenris, but it's unclear how that actually occurred in society. Women in men's roles has much more archaeological and poetic evidence.

        • AcidSmiley [she/her]
          ·
          5 hours ago

          It's hard to say with the Norse stuff how these things were viewed because the transcripts we have are almost exclusively from after Scandinavia was christianized. So the original accounts of gender nonconformity may have been more positive, with queerphobia being pushed into descriptions retroactively to discredit the "old ways" of trans women and men in drag performing seidr and things like that.