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.

  • BeamBrain [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    2 years ago

    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.

    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.

    • SerLava [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      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.

    • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      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.

      • BeamBrain [he/him]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        2 years ago

        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.”

        • kristina [she/her]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          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.