By God I know westoids are obnoxious with their disingenuous "teaching LGBT rights to the uncivilised savages" bullshit but supporting non-western homophobia is not the answer here.

I love logging onto hexbear dot net to see leftists debate whether my existence is literally imperialism

I expect that from Qatar with it being an officially Islamic state that specifically draws legislation from religion, but I don't expect it from an atheist, communist country like China. Anti-LGBT rhetoric is steeped in reactionary thought. The only justification against it is religion and when that doesn't work, they come up with conspiracy theories like the whole grooming thing or trans panic. I've seen more breathless coverage about puberty blockers than fucking safe drinking water, but that's reaction for you; take an edge case and make it seem like it's everywhere.

It's like that clip of that Walsh guy on Rogan getting fact checked. Walsh asserted without evidence that there were "millions" of kids on puberty blockers, but Rogan's producer fact-checked him and told him it's less than 5,000 over years. But hey, if we're doing wall-to-wall coverage of issues that effect 5,000 people, I've got some potholes on my work commute that need a fucking act of Congress to be filled, I guess.

That’sgonna be a :yikes: from me dawg

he missed :deeper-sadness:

You can think LGBT people deserve rights and still disagree with arrogant crackers grandstanding about it. I've talked before about the danger of allowing the West to use issues like feminism and LGBT rights as a cover for imperialism for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it allows reactionaries to paint those basic human rights as part and parcel of Western Imperialism.

These crackers don't give a single fuck about LGBT rights in Qatar, they just want to feel good about themselves regardless of the actual tangible harms their arrogant involvement is doing to the cause of LGBT rights in the Middle East.

"LGBT is a western psy op because I saw a NATO official holding a rainbow flag once" is a brain-poisoned take I see increasingly coming out of hegemonic officials in the imperial periphery because it erases the possibility that there was ever a domestic LGBT movement demanding fair treatment. Also how the fuck is Chen Weihua gonna say this shit? By his same logic Marxism in China is a German psy-op because Marx was German. It's stupid.

It's also incredibly frustrating because LGBT are still treated like shit in the West. It is far from some hegemonic Western principle. Turn the clock back 50 years and you have nearly LGBT movement in the imperial core getting dismissed as some kind of commie plot imported to drain America of its masculinity and so on. It's an excuse that can always be used. I was arguing with some Russians (who I ironically agreed with on their Ukraine takes) who were insisting that all LGBT movements in their domestic sphere are Western NGOs and what have you. I said "Why ban LGBT demonstrations and not just blanket ban Western NGOs if that's what you're worried about?" And then they used this tortured logic where "actually we're super nice to gays over here as long as they keep it in the bedroom it's just that LGBT is a western acronym and that's how you know it's a Western imported movement meant to destabilize us."

if :inshallah-script: USA/NATO/EU collapsed and was scattered to the four winds these motherfuckers would still blame LGBT as being a western psy op the same way American officials pretend every communist is some kind of fly that burst forth from the corpse of the USSR.

Qatar when the western value is British finance capitalism :porky-happy:

Qatar when the western value is letting gay people exist :porky-scared-flipped:

Speaking from experience. I realized I was gay in high school in China and nobody around me from my teachers and classmates to my parents and extended family gave me any trouble — except the grand narrative on everyone’s mind was that, because I am gay, my future lay completely with the west, mostly cuz of this “western value” idea Chen seems to subscribe to. It was a big factor why I so eagerly moved the US and became an absolutely cringe Eurocentric lib till recently.

There’s perhaps something to be said about how queer people in non-western worlds might be assumed/pushed to identify with the western capitalist world that has middle-class-washed and hijacked the lgbt liberation movements. But this line of thought is always too close to home for me to rationally think about

This is pretty par the course for leftists in the current or former global south. I hear this all the time from former left-wing guerrilla fighters. They call lgbt people an abomination that NATO uses to removed their culture. The more educated regions tend to be better about it. You'll find the same thing in poorer regions of the US.