I saw an independent poll from China once that I wished I’d saved which highlighted the nuance of the issue and the bullshit nature of polls. So grain of salt, this is my rough memory.

It had a question like “what is your opinion on homosexuality?” Slim majority negative

“What is your opinion of homosexuality in people you don’t know” overwhelmingly answered “none of my business”

“Would you be happy if your child was homosexual?” Large majority no.

But here’s the kicker there was a question “would you prefer your child be single, childless and heterosexual or married, have children and homosexual?” Overwhelmingly the latter option.

Like even if there’s homophobia it has different material roots and manifestations than it does in the west.

I remember when my chinese language partner sent me a little text she wrote in English about her home city Chengdu. There was a line in there about the city's culture where she said that in Chengdu, "you will often see homosexuals holding hands!"

She 100% meant this as a positive thing btw, she's a total sweetheart.

While there's no gay marriage, China does have civil unions. Which gives gay people equal rights in the eyes of the law. It was China's way to placate both sides. The conservatives and the liberals. Imagine, a country that works with and negotiates with its citizens to try to improve the outcome for everyone. Crazy right?

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2019-08-09/LGBT-couples-in-China-file-for-voluntary-guardianship-J15eC8QcrC/index.html

XHS is a platform dominated by young urban liberal women and isn't going to be particularly representative of Chinese society as a whole.

Like I don't think it's showing lies or anything, queer people can and do live safely and openly in China's cities, but the app might not show realities of rural conservatism, or the fact that homophobia is still very common within family units if not in broader society. Just something to be aware of.

Makes sense. Cuba had some great strides on LGBTQ issues too.

I was watching this show in the hostel I'm staying at. My Chinese friends explained to me that the show was cancelled after the first episode was aired because the two male leads could be construed as being in a relationship. To be clear there is nothing overtly gay, they are just two attractive men who care about each other and who do not have any female love interests in the show.

When I remarked how ridiculous that was I got push back from two women who told me that it is wrong to expose children to the idea of being gay. I continued to say they were being ridiculous and that China can do better than that.

On the topic, I just came across an informative post here outlining proper lgbtq terms in Chinese:

[EDIT: Removed link because link tracker bot is threatening to delete my post, and I have no idea how to change the link and have it still work. I give up. Can we maybe add Xiaohongshu to a whitelist or something? Seems like this bot is preventing any links from that site being posted.]

EDIT 2: http://xhslink.com/a/CQUBvMecxdX3 apparently comments don’t actually get removed, so here’s the link.

I can’t copy and paste text from there on mobile so here are screenshots:

Just wanna add that China's a really big country so I'm sure there's a lot of degrees to it the same as there is in the US, but all we have as outsiders looking towards China is kind of a vague notion that is painted for us by mainstream media narratives which generally skew towards portraying old fashioned or bigoted attitudes, which clashes with the specific community that we can see and interact with on internet melting pots like what XHS has suddenly turned into.

But I guess what I'm saying is that if it were America, we would know that there's a big cultural difference between the Deep South and the Northeast, California and Texas, etc. We know that the culture and politics in general are a reactionary backlash right now, and that parts of the LGBT community (especially trans comrades in conservative areas) are worse off now than they were five years ago.

But all of that subtlety of understanding is lost when looking at China unless you really study it or you grew up immersed in it or you live and immerse yourself in it for long enough to pick up on them. So while seeing progressive Chinese people on XHS does give me warm fuzzies and hopefully push my own perception of Chinese LGBT attitudes towards a more correct understanding, I also try to keep in mind that I'm only looking at a small section of a very big picture.

edit: To use an example in reverse, imagine a Chinese person on TikTok seeing all of the pro-Palestinian sentiment and concluding that Americans are very pro-Palestine.

I knew. Real china fan hours rn.

Generally people don’t give a damn about what you do in private, but you won’t see LGBT stuff on mainstream media etc.

Sometimes there are some subtly implied relationships but nowhere near as liberal as you’d see in the West. Chinese censorship is very strict (many TV shows had to be re-written because the censorship does not approve certain parts in them) and it has gotten worse since Covid because of a lot of racist propaganda against China.

My personal experience has been that LGBT spaces have regressed since Covid, but we’ll see what happens after Biden.

The App is not really a good standard in gauging the sentiment nor the policies of the whole country.

The understanding of systematic discrimination is abysmal for the common people especially in Guangzhou in my personal experience.

The most substantial predudice I've seen on xhs has been antisemitism, which was surprising due to how few Jewish people live in China

Nearly all the LGBTQ people I have seen on XHS have been Chinese. I have not been seeking LGBTQ content out, so results could differ if you search for it.

Apparently the #le tag is very popular but has been censored in the past. Now they also have #wuhluhwuh. Half my explore page is queer content so it hasn’t been censored for me thus far. Far from, I just keep getting pushed more of it.

I have some questions on LGBT content in Chinese webcomics, since English-speaking yuri communities always bring this up when they bash China:
1: what exactly happened to Tamen de Gushi? The story I always hear is that the CCP banned the webcomic because they showed the characters kiss.
2: I noticed some Chinese webcomics (specifically Straight Girl Trap and I Got a Girlfriend From a Shooting Star), whenever the characters kiss, would draw white spots/ have convenient light rays covering where the lips touch. For me it feels weird since these stories already have the characters in an official romantic relationship. Why do kisses get covered even when they have no issue showing a same-sex relationship in the same comic?

XHS is infested with terfs though.

I think when they say "don't really care/it's not important" they actually mean it, as opposed to Westerners who just use this as a smokescreen to hide their anti-queer sentiments.