- cross-posted to:
- lgbtq_plus
- china@sopuli.xyz
In recent years, China’s LGBTQ+ community has been swept up in the Chinese Communist party’s broader crackdown on civil society and freedom of expression. In May 2023, a well known LGBTQ+ advocacy group in Beijing announced it was closing due to “unavoidable” circumstances. Last February, two university students filed a lawsuit against the education ministry after they were punished for distributing rainbow flags on campus.
right, but you do understand that these things are interrelated. not all anti-LGBT policies explicitly target only LGBT people. if you restrict dressing “differently” and talking about sex, the people who dress differently or have different kinds of sex (queer people) are systemically disadvantaged when compared to straight and cis people. and if there’s bigotry in your society, there’s no guarantee that these restrictive policies are going to be applied to everybody equally.
like, bathroom bills don’t have to mention trans people to target trans people exclusively, because very few other groups of people have the motivation to choose a bathroom that doesn’t align with their assigned sex at birth. if you restrict a behavior queer people are statistically highly likely to engage in, the fact that it could also impact other groups doesn’t make it not a queer issue.
Yes, but they are applying it equally. They are banning all mentions of sex, not just queer sex. They are censoring anything that shows too much skin, not just queer dressing. This is why I pointed out them censoring a video game made for kids. Basically they said a leotard was too revealing.
The problem isn’t the enforcement. The problem is the reporting. As society there reports against the LGBTQ more than other ones. Again, that’s not the government doing anything unequal or targeting. Which is why I said it’s not exactly an LGBTQ issue. It becomes one because of the older conservatives.
look, if the realities of a system or policy are statistically more likely to target queer people, it is a queer issue lol. restrictions on discussing sex publicly disproportionately affect those who are sexual minorities, because all “legitimate” channels for learning about sex are usually targeted for heterosexual couplings. there’s a reason why queer people have a vested interest in sex education. modesty laws are also more oppressive for queer people by their nature.
anything that regulates how people dress also regulates gender expression, because clothing in most of the world is gendered. there are things that women wear that men can’t, things that are “too much skin” for women and not men. if you legislate what people can wear, you have a very good tool for targeting queer folks, even if it theoretically could also be used to target other kinds of self-expression. you can’t make a modesty law that isn’t also anti-queer by extension, because modesty as a concept is defined by patriarchy, heteronormativity, and cisnormativity.
Yup, most of the world has gendered clothing. But this is China, where for decades they rejected that. Their school uniforms still rejects gendered clothing.
https://www.koreaboo.com/stories/chinese-school-uniforms-korean-students-jealous/
It’s only relatively recently come back from Western fashion.
They’re literally trying to fight against what your talking about to such a degree that even your normal concept of gendered clothing is different. And I know that’s hard to wrap your head around, but that’s exactly why I’m saying, it’s not exactly what you think.
*Edit: Let’s look at this from another angle. China has been trying to enforce gender neutral ideas for some time, like gender neutral clothing. All this push for gender equality has lead China to become the home to the most female billionaires in the world.
https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/trends/wu-yajun-china-has-two-thirds-of-worlds-self-made-women-billionaires-meet-the-richest-8296901.html
The Chinese government is 25% female.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/239113/sshare-of-women-in-chinese-national-parliament/
So it’s in China’s position that while not great now, by constantly pushing gender neutral laws and trying to prevent sex being displayed in public, they’ll create equality.
As you point out though, that often leads to oppression and other terrible side effects.
I’m saying, I do not believe i personally understand the situation enough to make a judgement call. I just want people to be aware of what’s actually happening and not that it’s some kind of governmental anti-LGBTQ+ push. It’s China trying to be China for better or worse.