I’m not sure what’s going on over there, but half the time I see a post from there or go into a comment section and it’s just…bad. Like old reddit the_donald bad. Constant trolling, etc. You TS just really bad vibes. I’ve been blocking the communities as they come up, but I’m not sure what else I can do.
The problem is that they are in support of regimes which are currently or historically anti LGBT+. There is no further discussion to be had. Even if they claim to be whatever, they are against us. Their ideology is incompatible with our freedom and possibly our lives.
You cannot be pro Soviet, pro Russia, pro China or whatever else and LGBT+. You would fight against that for the same reason you fight against Nazis. The ecological politics or so are irrelevant at this point. Even if you agree with that, don’t forget that they want us gone.
This is so close to the Nazi bar problem and I fully understand why defederation might be the best course of action. Personally I don’t know what the right call is, but I blocked the instance using the Connect app anyway.
I actually view the rainbow-washing of us foreign policy as a big part of the problem- It allows reactionaries and conservatives to express bigotry and persecute LGBT people under the guise of being “anti-imperialist” or resisting western influences.
Fuck corporate pride and rainbow raytheon shit, America has historically been extremely shitty to gay and trans people and it makes me sick even being associated with their ‘foreign policy’. Just because they ‘legalized gay marriage’ via decree 8 years ago, doesn’t mean they’ve not done real genocides in the past to LGBT people, and aren’t laying the groundwork for doing it again in the future (eg Florida).
Allies marched gay people right back into the concentration camps when they liberated them, for example:
I don’t live in the USA and I am not fond of its politics in any way. It does not matter though. We are trying to survive and flourish with what we have.
What you are saying is that what I am doing is actually just bullshit. I am trying to improve the working environment for other LGBT+ people, I help them with problems they have. I fully support visibility of queer people in their work place and I spend a lot of personal time on that.
You know there are other problems people have which can be solved without a radical and forceful revolution. It is unrealistic and currently a daydream at best. I am actually trying to improve the situation with the cards that were dealt and for some reason you ridicule all of that.
Sorry, but that’s just a bad take. You are barking at the wrong tree.
I am actually trying to improve the situation with the cards that were dealt and for some reason you ridicule all of that.
When the game is rigged, sometimes the only response is to upend the table.
You might not be familiar with queer history in the US, but one of the pivotal moments in it- Stonewall, was an actual riot, with cops beating the shit out of trans girls and everything. It immediately got whitewashed and co-opted by liberal elements to the point where now people routinely have cops at pride!
It’s a convenient fantasy that rights can be won by passively participating and voting. Rights are won by fighting for them, and making people uncomfortable until they give you what you want.
The problem is that they are in support of regimes which are currently or historically anti LGBT+. There is no further discussion to be had. Even if they claim to be whatever, they are against us.
we’re not against you. We are you. We all want a better world and work towards it however we can. Painting us as queerphobic feels pretty disingenuous
I’d urge you to consider the fact that we are explicitly, radically pro-trans. Our mod team is over half trans people and our userbase heavily skews that direction as well. I myself am trans. And I’m a communist, partially because of the experiences I’ve had as a trans person living under neoliberalism. I didn’t start out as a communist, I slowly drifted that way as a result of learning, specifically learning more history. I’ll recommend the podcast Blowback here, I think all 3 seasons are really good, well-researched, informative, and entertaining. They give a lot of context to various US actions abroad and it’s a very approachable podcast. Season 4 is coming out soon and I can’t wait!
Also, check out Cuba’s family code if you want an example of a communist country being extremely socially progressive. It’s cool and good!
I know that the US are not the good guys. They did and they are still doing horrible things. But the world isn’t the USA.
I never will support an authoritarian regime, especially if they are anti LGBT+. Supporting anything like that is such an leopards ate my face take and on the same level as Polish or Jewish Nazis.
Your role models are horrible. Even if the ideology might have its merits there is nothing to discuss as long as there is so much widespread support for hostile regimes and their politics.
Honestly this whole thing is puzzling me for this very reason. I don’t know how a trans person could ever reason themselves into that position. I don’t know how a sane person could be so delighted to see the suffering of others (e.g. Ukraine or Uyghur genocide) as many comments are implying from your server.
Sorry if I have the wrong idea, but it just does not compute.
I never will support an authoritarian regime, especially if they are anti LGBT+. Supporting anything like that is such an leopards ate my face take and on the same level as Polish or Jewish Nazis.
If you’re a trans USian who supports NATO living in for example Florida that exact leopards ate my face take is unfolding in real time.
The US is incredibly authoritarian if you don’t have money- which is a large part of why it has such a high prison and unhoused population. I view trans liberation as a part of every one elses liberation, because there’s a lot of trans people who can’t afford gender affirming care, don’t have access to it, and don’t even have access to a safe place to live, and don’t have resources if their family abandons them.
I don’t know why NATO even matters. Well I know why it is brought up, but seriously I won’t even entertain that.
What makes you think that I even would want to visit the US? I wouldn’t feel safe there for many reasons.
I don’t know what else to tell you. I don’t understand how you can in all seriousness support your position without glossing over all the anti humanistic and anti LGBT+ things going on. I doubt I can say anything to make you understand why that’s a line I like many others won’t ever cross.
Oh, so you are anti NATO then, yes? You are outspoken against every country that has ever had anti LGBT laws? Or are you being disingenuous because you are an anti communist? 🤔
I mean, a lot of us are pro-Cuba, which is AES and has some of the most progressive family policy in the world.
Also, your “historical” thing is just really hard to process. After all, standards change. Hell, within the “West”, LGBTQ+ acceptance is barely 40 years old (and often, as we see, under attack for the gains that have been won). Was the US in the 90’s really that much better for LGBTQ+ folks than the USSR before it collapsed? And while not LGBTQ specifically, the situation of women in the USSR was far superior to the West - especially in STEM..
This doesn’t mean that we can’t (and shouldn’t) judge the lack of LGBTQ+rights in the past – we can and should. However, Cuba’s family policy shows that there’s nothing inherent to communism that’s “incompatible with our freedom and possibly our lives.”
In summary (and here I’ll post my only emoji, since there’s the bug),
Of course I am referring to all the Stalin apologists on your server. Some people really want to argue for the sake of arguing.
So far no one even bothered to justify how they can even pretend to support Russia, the late Soviet Union etc. It’s just a bunch of whataboutism.
It’s context, not whataboutism. Keep in mind that queer interests are working class interests and vice versa.
Support Stalin: which country liberated Auschwitz? What country wrested control of Berlin from the Nazis? The Soviet Union. “Every Party member must raise his revolutionary qualities in every respect to the same level as those of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin” -Nelson Mandela
Support modern Russia- Russia opposes NATO, and anything that hurts the west is good. Also the current Ukraine government was founded by guys who want to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen.” Anyone killing Nazis is good, and Russia is currently doing so. “Russians are Asians. They have a completely different culture, vision. Our key difference from them is humanity” -Aleksy Danilov, head of Ukraine national security and defense council.
In both cases, it’s less of “these guys good” but of “the other guys worse.”
The Soviet Union pioneered many modern trans surgeries and research, particularly modern trans male surgeries. These were done in Riga for trans men with significant dysphoria and the bravery to deal with a largely queerphobic world. Remember to compare two countries from the same time period, gay and trans rights were never even thought of by any society at large in the 50s and 60s.
Also as an anecdote, my grandma was a party official in communist Czechoslovakia for a major union and had a lot of ploy in our region, almost everyone important knew her. She didn’t know what being trans was until I came out to her. She immediately became the most supportive person in my life (outside of my amazing bf) and began advocating for trans and queer issues to her cadre of commie grandmas to great success. I fully believe that if the communists were still in control, LGBT rights would be much better in Eastern Europe. The issue with communists back then was largely ignorance and not knowing that anything LGBT even existed.
You cannot be pro Soviet, pro Russia, pro China or whatever else and LGBT+.
Communist countries generally speaking are better on lgbtq rights for their economic development.
You can’t be a capitalist and be pro-lgbt. Cuba, a marxist leninist democracy, has the most lgbtq rights in the world.
Also the reunification threw back lgbt rights in east Germany decades.
The stasi were assigned to defeat subversion by lgbt activists. Their recommendation, which was followed, was to give the activists all the rights they asked for.
The vast majority of us are queer, I’ve literally never been in a more trans inclusive space on the internet (except for the unofficial invite only trans hexbear user discord), I’m in DMs with like a dozen of the trans users from here pretty frequently and frankly without the amazing support from them I think it would have taken years longer for me to realise I was trans, the mods and admins have shown repeatedly over the last several years that they’re completely committed to the rights of trans people - including “provoking” reactionaries within the early hexbear user base into a massive site splitting argument that ended with one of the mods almost getting doxxed and the site getting ddossed because transphobes were angry at being made to respect trans people (we still have our lovely pronouns to this day and anyone who protested got banned on the spot for a while) and at one point there was a reading group on a book of trans liberationist theory by Leslie feinberg that was pushed as pretty much mandatory by one of the old head mods TransComrade69
historically anti LGBT+.
This strikes me as a silly way to complain about Cuba, since for the other AES states you’d probably just say “currently,” but today Cuba has the most progressive family code in the world, maybe in world history when talking at the national level, along with other merits regarding state support of HRT, etc. We all recognize that the early ban on gay marriage was an error, one for which Fidel Castro himself apologized publicly and encouraged the reversal of!
hi, i live in capitalist florida and my human rights are worth about as much as week-old dogshit. if you’re pro-nato or pro-u.s. then you are anti-lgbt rights
as an interesting note of comparison, china, while historically quite bad on trans issues, has been making pretty impressive strides as of late, even opening their very first gender clinic (for children) a few years back
idk what you’re going on about “their ideology is incompatible with lgbt rights” a plurality of people on hexbear are some variety of gay or trans or both (like me!). i’m pretty sure a solid 70% of our userbase would commit a murder with their bare hands if it could meaningfully improve the station of lgbt people even a single iota
your entire comment is very ignorant. ironically it’s probably closer to propaganda than anything you’ll see on hexbear
I am anti LGBT that’s a new one. I am repeating myself, but NATO is irrelevant for LGBT+ rights and it is just brought up as some form of whataboutism for the 20th time. The world is not the USA, but most of you seem to have a very narrow view. Yes, the US sucks. So far none of you mentioned that you were jailed or killed for being LGBT+ in the USA, even though it is so much worse than the Soviet Union or Russia or anywhere else in the world (lol).
Yes, recently you took many steps backwards especially in Florida and the problems are real, but it is still a better situation than just a few years ago. Get a grip.
Seriously, it is just annoying at this point. It is ridiculous that you believe that you are somehow special and won’t be prosecuted by dictators like Putin, killed by Stalin for “anti communist behavior” etc. I am not saying any of this, because I disagree with communism as a whole, but because the regimes you associate with would never allow us to live and flourish like we do and I don’t want to find out.
Yes, recently you took many steps backwards especially in Florida and the problems are real, but it is still a better situation than just a few years ago.
Seriously, it is just annoying at this point. It is ridiculous that you believe that you are somehow special and won’t be prosecuted by dictators like Putin, killed by Stalin for “anti communist behavior” etc.
Quite literally nobody is saying this. But to be completely fair, Cuba, a communist state, currently has better protections for LGBTQ+ people than any state in the US. ESPECIALLY Florida.
is this your second ever comment or does your profile display incorrectly for me?
hexbear, with a mod team that is 50% trans, a user base that heavily skews trans, has the largest collection of trans emotes I’ve ever seen on any website, and enforces pronoun tags, is anti-trans.
this does not make any sense. you are writing off an entire community based on foolish (and provably false) preconceived notions.
Do people at hexbear ever show support for Russia? China? Soviet Union? Stalin? Mao?
If there is a single yes then explain me how that does compute? All those countries or dictators are known to harshly discriminate, jail or kill LGBT+ people.
Soon I will probably receive another 10 replies explaining why the USA is bad or some unrelated NATO rant, but so far no one gave a clear answer how anyone in their right mind would want to see any of those regimes to succeed or even come back.
Without ignoring this major problem which is incompatible with our lives and our freedom I don’t know how any sane LGBT+ person would ever want that. I am not sure how I am the foolish one and so far with all the replies I have yet to read one single agreeable take which isn’t some form of whataboutism.
China has clinics dedicated specifically for trans people, especially trans youth ( https://www.gingerriver.com/p/story-of-teens-at-a-transgender-clinic ). I believe earlier in the thread someone linked sources regarding LGBT people in the Soviet Union, I don’t have the sources on hand bu,t I can circle back to this comment when I get home from work.
We do not support Russia, even though our comments are frequently misconstrued as such. Please, understand that criticizing politics in the western world does not equate support for Russia. Also, please understand that Hexbear is not a monolith. We have a wide range of users with a focus on left-unity, but we aren’t a hivemind with the same uniform opinions.
We do not shy away from mistakes that past socialist projects made, we attempt learn from those mistakes to build something better. Many socialist revolutionaries (Che and Fidel, to name a couple off the top of my head), recanted their backwards opinions upon learning more about queer issues.
Am I saying that China or the USSR are perfect? Of course not. They’ve both made mistakes. The important thing is to realize the progress that has/had been made regarding minority rights in those nations.
I know you’re mostly going on vibes but I’m curious if you have intel on Mao’s personal stance on homosexuality. It’s surprisingly easy to find solid evidence that Stalin was decidedly personally homophobic (something which I don’t think anyone at Hexbear denies unless they just don’t know the Lore), but I haven’t found information one way or the other on Mao’s personal stance, just the usual concern trolling from neoliberals.
This is a good way to put it and one of the reasons I’m so perplexed about how queer the instance is. I genuinely don’t understand how LGBTQ+ people can simp for regimes that simply want to/wanted to murder them.
And before someone jumps in with “but America/the West/liberals are trying to do the same thing”… if you don’t think it’s easier being queer in the US, even with all the problems, than in Russia or North Korea, I just don’t know what to tell you.
Posting a reply I just wrote elsewhere:
I’m trans and know people that live in China, their conditions are basically the same as the USA, but slightly better these days because they don’t have a hate mob spreading lies about them in the media and trying to genocide them in select states like America does. In general, there is next to zero awareness about transness in China, whereas the opposite is true in America (they are highly aware and full of hate about it), so it is a different flavor of bad in that regard. The emphasis the government has on accessible affordable housing and food makes that aspect of transness easier than in America, though, the trans women I know in China all have their own safe place to live in.
Now Russia… yeah… they’re doing what those American states were doing federally now. But Ukraine does similar too, unfortunately. Source: I’m Czech and can read/speak most slavic languages by virtue of that, I also have been part of an illegal network to help trans/queer refugees leave Russia and Ukraine. In this organization we would typically help people move to Prague, St. Petersburg (for people who cant leave Russia, this is the best choice of city), and in the east, to China, particularly Shanghai and Harbin (large russian community there). Language barrier and cost of living are huge factors in where we’d help people move.
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