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All 64 of the countries where it’s illegal to be LGBTQ+ – and yes, it’s all colonialism’s fault
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this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2024
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I thought the topic was the hate of LGBTQ+, and right now it’s Islam that’s acting with said hate most of all. British colonialism, and homophobia for that matter, ended (to a larger extent, at least) a while ago, and you can’t actively blame dead people for it (well, you can, but they aren’t going to fix anything, and you won’t solve anything by blaming them), while Islam is remaining anti-LGBTQ+ right in this very moment. Isn’t it more productive to oppose whatever’s present right now?
lol. lmao, even. British homophobia has not ended. Britain is a modern hotbed for anti-queer bullshit. the consequences and effects of British colonial rule have not magically been wiped clean. we aren't "blaming dead people", we're talking about the impact that colonial and imperial oppression had on the cultures of oppressed peoples. the structure and politics of the British Empire are inextricably linked to the world we live in today, and attributing modern queerphobia to the oppressive and cruel politics of the one of the largest imperial powers the world has ever seen, who directly imposed anti-queer laws onto the people they oppressed, is not about "fixing" things. its about recognizing how the past has shaped our present.
its funny, i think, how willing Islamophobes are to bring up the present anti-queer stances of religious nation-states as reflecting upon the religion of Islam itself, with all its 2 billion adherents spread over every continent and nation in the world, while failing to recognize the role of the Christian church in both the historical and modern anti-queerness of the British empire and the modern european state. somehow, you see clearly the monstrous power of religious authority in one hand, and dismiss it in the other. you propose anti-queerness as an essential quality of Islam, and seperate it from the essential qualities of european nation-states.
somehow, Muslim homophobia is special in its qualities, rather than a modern trait that arose in the same period of the 19th century under which the Christian hegemony was exported throughout the world by the British empire and its contemporaries. somehow, it is always the case that the religion that is foreign to you is the true danger, what should be the focus of our attention.
it is important to "oppose" whatever's present now. but Islamophobes diagnosis for whats "present now" so often fails to acknowledge the immense influence and power that european religious institutions have had and continue to have over the anti-queer policy of their former colonial projects (like Uganda, for example), and their prescription for what "opposition" looks like happens to look a lot like religious and racial discrimination. funny how that works. singling out Islam as the true danger to queer people does nothing to help queer people. in fact, the mechanism by which Islamophobes identify a whole fourth of the world's population as uniquely dangerous, violent, and backwards is exactly the same mechanism by which queer people are identified as perverse, deviant, and predatory. prejudice.
the acronym LGBTQ+ arose out of solidarity. people with different experiences, extremely different in some cases, coming together because they recognized that their struggle was alike. that they were together subjected to the violence of prejudice and discrimination, and that they were stronger together than alone. that is what needs opposing in the modern day. the violence of states. the violence of hegemony, dictating to us what we ought to be and what we cannot be, wherever it is found. not a diverse religious tradition that contains the same number of queer people as any other population of humans.
Thank you for a well-written response. I think I am just starting from the different position, having experienced more positive effects from English influence than negative ones, in my country at least.
My experience on social media mostly skewed my view towards “anyone can say anything, and it looks like there’s a lot of hateful things people want to say” for Britain or any other democratic country. As a result, I see the anti-queer sentiment, but know from what I see daily in real life it could be much worse.
In my experience, the Christian (well, orthodox for that matter) church is right now very reluctant to accept LGBTQ+ people, with state-wide position being non-tolerant, and individual priests being accepting, if you are lucky. This is wrong. This must be better. The same, I think, can be said about Catholic Church, yet I didn’t have direct experience with that. Still, it’s better (again, for my region) than Muslim-majority regions being in a murderous position about the same group of people. It’s a lousy choice, but still, in a choice between “you are a disgusting sinner” and “you don’t deserve to exist, and your own family will murder you” the latter looks much worse.
Maybe I am not opposing Islam per se, maybe I just think that Islam is inextricably linked with “non-secular form of governance”, and that alone is enough for me to condemn such states more than any form of British influence.
British colonialism spread queerphobia. Islamic-governed nations currently push queerphobia. Both are bad, both are regressive, and both have lasting impacts on us today. We can talk about both being bad at once. We can walk and chew gum. We can discuss all of the impacts on queerphobia simultaneously, if we allow ourselves to understand that all issues of humanity are multi-faceted and that blaming a single concept or source for an issue is usually farcical.
See, I am of position that in developing countries British colonialism (or whatever you prefer to call it it) right now seems to push pro-queer rhetoric, at least that was my experience. And I can’t accept opposing statements “Britain pushes homophobia” and “Britain pushes LGBTQ+ people acceptance”; at least if there is something of the former, the latter has larger effect it seems.
LMAO. Anglo colonialism continues to this day. Oil companies, NGOs and missionaries all do their part to spread Anglo dominance in yhe developing world
As for British homophobia having "ended", wtf are you talking about. Look up the very recent history of section 28. Look up the cass report. While most Brits are lovely, trans people like to call it TERF island for a reason.
Where are you living that British Colonialism and Homophobia are over?
In Russia. I think it’s the perspective that matters but I’d take British colonialism any day over the genocidal shitshow we have here, even putting Ukraine aside and focusing on LGBTQ+ for the sake of the argument. In comparison, the homophobia in the UK/US, while problematic, is relatively tame, e.g., it does not call all the LGBTQ+ people terrorists and extremists as official government rhetoric. And as for pre-2022, number 1 rule for an LGBTQ+ person living in an Islamic regionin Russia would be “don’t you even try to suggest that you are queer if you want to live”.
I kind of get the grievances towards the British colonialism and homophobia of the past (which incidentally gets a lot of whataboutism from some Russians I know: “What about Alan Turing! What about India!”), but for the present the British/American media is THE BEST thing that has happened in Russia to stop vilifying and demonizing LGBTQ+, and I just can’t wrap my head around the reverse situation.
Gotcha. Yeah. I would definitely consider Russian imperialism very evil and engrained with the systems of power governing the country. I hope for your sake, and for all of your brethren, that someday everyone under the historic influence of an imperial power can someday be free