US-backed news outlets love to exaggerate and complain about China’s supposed anti-LGBT policies that don’t actually exist. There’s some really good discussion around this on r/Sino Reddit.
US-backed news outlets love to exaggerate and complain about China’s supposed anti-LGBT policies that don’t actually exist. There’s some really good discussion around this on r/Sino Reddit.
Yup I agree with this 100%.
There are Westerners that view the work of LGBT peoples in Asia as conservative or self-hating because they portray our work for acceptance and equal rights as short-sighted or fulfilling heteronormative ideals.
But the reality is that importing individualistic conceptions of LGBT expression, in it’s especially liberal forms like homonationalism - is harmful as it actually creates disunity and actually lays the foundation for further capitalist intrusion of our social lives.
To speak in a more local sense, gender diverse expression and non-hetero sexualities in Southeast Asian history were more “progressive” and prevalent here than in European societies up until “direct” colonization.
For many people here, “progressive” isn’t necessarily a march to the future, but a look to the past for the practices and cultures that were destroyed with the invasion of Eurocentric Capitalism.
In fact here in Malaysia, transgender people were fully integrated into society and gender reassignment surgeries up were allowed until 1983 where a fatwa discouraged the practice.
Indeed, LGBT westerners need not be so critical about Global South LGBT struggles when their only achievement is pink imperialism.
very interesting, now tell me how gay people were treated before wahhabism took place.
The issue is over here, although it may be easy to attribute homophobic attitudes to be external in origin, whether it was British colonization or Wahhabist-Salafist influence, it is much more complicated than that.
Obviously those 2 had it roles, and even profound roles, instituting homophobia into our laws and transmitted it downwards onto society.
The other issue is that the ruling class here themselves perpetuate it through self-orientalizing myths of Asian Values, through rigid notions of Malay identity having to be Muslim, through ideological discourses surrounding the ephemeral concepts of race.
All this adds up and the leads to the present day homophobia you find here. It’s a sad reality.
From what I know prior to colonial influence entirely, same-sex relations were recorded in the Malay Annals. It is assumed that no moralistic attributes were given to such people, which would make it the norm in general history, to be fair.
I’ve read some articles that LGBT perceptions in the early 80s and prior, to be morally neutral and sometimes marked with curiosity and friendliness -even by police. I haven’t looked deeply on gay people specifically, but I assume that a similar case is to be made, which makes sense considering that just up north in Thailand, as we both probably know, a country that was never directly colonized, is probably the most LGBT friendly country in SEA.
Agreed. Make Homos Great Again.