Amazing article, just wanted to share an experience I had in Jordan, a relatively (RELATIVELY) progressive country in the Middle East last year. I met a man who is one of the premier gay activists in the country through a study abroad program I was on. He definitely had to monitor his words for the audience (a bunch of 19-24 year old American university students) but he expressed a lot of frustration with Western activists trying to help the poor MENA gays by tacking rainbows onto everything and parading drag queens. Homosexuality has actually never been illegal in the HKJ (they adapted the British penal code after independence) but it is certainly not socially acceptable, and gay people frequently get arrested on public indecency laws. Things had actually been improving a lot in Jordan until pretty recently; they even had a well-known gay bar in the capital city, Amman (which this man owned). Unfortunately, during the World Cup in Qatar, a lot of Western LGBTQRSTUV activists decided to publicly demonstrate against homophobic laws in the MENA region. This cause a lot of local conservative religious attention to fall on the gay activists in the region, accusing them of subverting their culture and (crucially) transing their children. Where before they had been making slow but steady improvement, changing hearts and minds, there was suddenly a major crackdown across the region against these activists and homosexuals in general. He also (vaguely—remember the audience) referenced the difficulty he and other gay activists were having working with NGOs. Transing children is understandably deeply unpopular in Jordan, but these activists cannot get any foreign aid or funding for their efforts unless they sign on to that, publicly, loudly. I think about him a lot. For how “decolonialist” these Western activists claim to be, they certainly act in chauvinistic, completely unresearched ways.
Greetings from Serbia to you, where a similar proces is happening and MORE GAYS than not are the same as the guy you described. It is weaponizing "human rights" (Clinton era) to advance the cause of "deconstructing" people's natural groups into "individuals" vulnerable to be targeted by anything under the sun. By anything I mean the God of Profit.
This is why in my own language (South Slavic) we have a saying that "peder" (gay) still means "traitor to his own gender". And by Gender we mean "family" as Gender Relations are Family relations, not "minority sexualities" or "women's rights" or any other deconstruction. How do I know this: intuitively - by actually learning the mother tongue I use every day.
So, yeah, glad to see the Far West is catching up with why there's so much TERFs in Serbia and places similarly affected by contemporary situation of getting regime changed for profit via minority status.
Thank you for this breakdown. The great irony is in your title--the result of all this self-satisfied "good intention" to support gay men who are being exploited is more homophobia. As we battle-worn, and weary TERFs well know, the erasure of sex in law and cultural norms results--at least in some ways--in the erasure of protections for same-sex attracted people and of course protections for all women. As you imply, it is also the connected and almost comical irony that it's the same colonial savior complex from the same rich, Western, still predominantly white countries that exploited so viciously "undeveloped" countries for hundreds of years. We are witnessing Manifest Destiny, so thoroughly discredited by not only social justice warriors but by any moral person alive, brightly repackaged with the latest rainbow flag. As with the original exploitation of these places and peoples, the pious sanctity--which I have no doubt is sincere in the hearts of some of the lower foot soldiers, just as it was in the hearts of those who really believed that Christianizing heathens was a noble and wonderful thing to do--masks the greed of the wealthiest individuals on the planet. LGBTQ+ is big, big business.
Thank you for writing this post. I am going to translate it to Serbian and re-publish it to my blog because it's touching the issue no one is talking about, except rarely: "Imperial Gender Justice" soft regime change strategy across the world. I figured this thing 10 years ago in Serbia and that's why I was talking to women across the Western world about it.
In my opinion, much of the Western women don't understand how (gay) 'human rights' are weaponized against countries targeted for "regime change" where the goal is NOT to bring "freedom and justice and dignity" to sexual minorities or sex majority (women) but to dismantle the structure of society to easily target the individuals and introduce them slavery under corporate profit rule.
That process is underway a for decades, only it's not evenly distributed yet.
Also this is why it's forbidden to advertise anything "gay" in Russia.
The Russians know it's a regime change operation of the "Far West".
No, but I will show you several interesting historical texts that made up my mind on how "human rights" are more connected to the waging war, profit and economic and cultural subjugation of people than it's about "raising" anyone's status.
They are on my Substack. I saw you subscribed I will send.
Chile is super woke and there are some posh men in academia posing as women and spreading the cult from the top. Here, it’s a middle class problem, together with the poorer men you mention. The left wing intellectual world is totally in love with the trans agenda and it’s bloody upsetting.
Fascinating. I’ve worked in some of the most homophobic countries in the world which paradoxically were the gayest. In countries where women are the most repressed, it was very hard for me to tell the difference between say Riyadh at 9pm at a gym or mall and Castro Street San Francisco 9pm Friday night 1982. Lots of bearded and moustached men kissing each other as a greeting - check. Men holding hands walking down the street? Check. Nonstop gossip among men about who is having sex with whom? Check. Cruising at the gym? Check. Cruising in the mall? Check. And in an update, cruising on Scruff and similar apps? Nonstop - except no face photos. No women present anywhere? Check. It’s like an open-air men’s prison - and women’s prison. A friend of mine from Cairo observed that 30 men said they had sex with me the week I was in Riyadh, which I pointed out meant an encounter every 30 minutes every evening until midnight with no men running into each other. Not happening. Good laugh.
That was the “punishable by death” country.
Egypt was mind-blowing, the least fun was UAE (Dubai) mostly because I don’t enjoy cruising on the beach in 110 degree weather.
Turkey (Istanbul) Romania (Bucharest), Montenegro, Georgia, Hungary, are wonderful areas and I love the people; I sensed nothing particularly homophobic any more than Italy or Greece (Turkey/Istanbul is much gayer than Athens or Rome). The men in the region (except Turkey) were so tall it was unnerving.
It’s hard for me to imagine any UN group making inroads on any of these areas for gays or lesbians - does anyone care there? What would be the purpose?
They will get around to gay marriage perhaps. They have to work more on the basics of men in bed with men and women in bed with women first.
These groups in an India and Southeast Asia would be a joke.
I think any “trans” coming into any of these areas will get a big “forget it”. Amal’s coming anywhere near children will be a death knell
Each of these developed countries should put its own house in order first before going abroad. They betray their chauvinism when they lump LGBTQ+ people all in one group. The 'T' harms not only women and children but also the 'LGB'. It's only those that wish to appear to care (as opposed to genuinely caring) that see them as somehow as 'all the same' both in their own culture and abroad. Bad actors, grifters and naïfs are doing exactly what homophobes do in erasing the distinction between being a member of a minority worthy of respect and being a sexual deviant.
Isn't ILGA the same group that sponsored pedophile groups like NAMBLA, Project Truth etc. for U.N. membership as a persecuted minority until ILGA was forced to separate itself from advocating for those groups?
Yeah, but this is the bigger frame story: it's about Western hegemonic EXTERNAL POLICIES not the internal ones. It's about collnial soft power and regime change thrusted upon societies OUTSIDE the Far West, in the name of Human Rights. Who started doing that? Go back to the era of economic neoliberalization and globalization and the peak of those kinds of policies in the freaking end of the 80's and beginning of the 90's.
People are just catching up to the damage this has done across the world, and to the fact it's not much better for anyone under the sexual minorities class. Anywhere.
Amazing article, just wanted to share an experience I had in Jordan, a relatively (RELATIVELY) progressive country in the Middle East last year. I met a man who is one of the premier gay activists in the country through a study abroad program I was on. He definitely had to monitor his words for the audience (a bunch of 19-24 year old American university students) but he expressed a lot of frustration with Western activists trying to help the poor MENA gays by tacking rainbows onto everything and parading drag queens. Homosexuality has actually never been illegal in the HKJ (they adapted the British penal code after independence) but it is certainly not socially acceptable, and gay people frequently get arrested on public indecency laws. Things had actually been improving a lot in Jordan until pretty recently; they even had a well-known gay bar in the capital city, Amman (which this man owned). Unfortunately, during the World Cup in Qatar, a lot of Western LGBTQRSTUV activists decided to publicly demonstrate against homophobic laws in the MENA region. This cause a lot of local conservative religious attention to fall on the gay activists in the region, accusing them of subverting their culture and (crucially) transing their children. Where before they had been making slow but steady improvement, changing hearts and minds, there was suddenly a major crackdown across the region against these activists and homosexuals in general. He also (vaguely—remember the audience) referenced the difficulty he and other gay activists were having working with NGOs. Transing children is understandably deeply unpopular in Jordan, but these activists cannot get any foreign aid or funding for their efforts unless they sign on to that, publicly, loudly. I think about him a lot. For how “decolonialist” these Western activists claim to be, they certainly act in chauvinistic, completely unresearched ways.
Greetings from Serbia to you, where a similar proces is happening and MORE GAYS than not are the same as the guy you described. It is weaponizing "human rights" (Clinton era) to advance the cause of "deconstructing" people's natural groups into "individuals" vulnerable to be targeted by anything under the sun. By anything I mean the God of Profit.
This is why in my own language (South Slavic) we have a saying that "peder" (gay) still means "traitor to his own gender". And by Gender we mean "family" as Gender Relations are Family relations, not "minority sexualities" or "women's rights" or any other deconstruction. How do I know this: intuitively - by actually learning the mother tongue I use every day.
So, yeah, glad to see the Far West is catching up with why there's so much TERFs in Serbia and places similarly affected by contemporary situation of getting regime changed for profit via minority status.
Thank you for this breakdown. The great irony is in your title--the result of all this self-satisfied "good intention" to support gay men who are being exploited is more homophobia. As we battle-worn, and weary TERFs well know, the erasure of sex in law and cultural norms results--at least in some ways--in the erasure of protections for same-sex attracted people and of course protections for all women. As you imply, it is also the connected and almost comical irony that it's the same colonial savior complex from the same rich, Western, still predominantly white countries that exploited so viciously "undeveloped" countries for hundreds of years. We are witnessing Manifest Destiny, so thoroughly discredited by not only social justice warriors but by any moral person alive, brightly repackaged with the latest rainbow flag. As with the original exploitation of these places and peoples, the pious sanctity--which I have no doubt is sincere in the hearts of some of the lower foot soldiers, just as it was in the hearts of those who really believed that Christianizing heathens was a noble and wonderful thing to do--masks the greed of the wealthiest individuals on the planet. LGBTQ+ is big, big business.
Manifest Destiny repackaged with a rainbow flag, fueled by pious sanctity. Great comment.
Thank you for writing this post. I am going to translate it to Serbian and re-publish it to my blog because it's touching the issue no one is talking about, except rarely: "Imperial Gender Justice" soft regime change strategy across the world. I figured this thing 10 years ago in Serbia and that's why I was talking to women across the Western world about it.
In my opinion, much of the Western women don't understand how (gay) 'human rights' are weaponized against countries targeted for "regime change" where the goal is NOT to bring "freedom and justice and dignity" to sexual minorities or sex majority (women) but to dismantle the structure of society to easily target the individuals and introduce them slavery under corporate profit rule.
That process is underway a for decades, only it's not evenly distributed yet.
Also this is why it's forbidden to advertise anything "gay" in Russia.
The Russians know it's a regime change operation of the "Far West".
This is very interesting. Do you have any articles on this subject?
No, but I will show you several interesting historical texts that made up my mind on how "human rights" are more connected to the waging war, profit and economic and cultural subjugation of people than it's about "raising" anyone's status.
They are on my Substack. I saw you subscribed I will send.
Chile is super woke and there are some posh men in academia posing as women and spreading the cult from the top. Here, it’s a middle class problem, together with the poorer men you mention. The left wing intellectual world is totally in love with the trans agenda and it’s bloody upsetting.
"In the Days of Tito and Allende, Yugoslavia Helped Define Chilean Socialism"
I can understand what happened to Chile.
So informative!
Thank you Roisin
Fascinating. I’ve worked in some of the most homophobic countries in the world which paradoxically were the gayest. In countries where women are the most repressed, it was very hard for me to tell the difference between say Riyadh at 9pm at a gym or mall and Castro Street San Francisco 9pm Friday night 1982. Lots of bearded and moustached men kissing each other as a greeting - check. Men holding hands walking down the street? Check. Nonstop gossip among men about who is having sex with whom? Check. Cruising at the gym? Check. Cruising in the mall? Check. And in an update, cruising on Scruff and similar apps? Nonstop - except no face photos. No women present anywhere? Check. It’s like an open-air men’s prison - and women’s prison. A friend of mine from Cairo observed that 30 men said they had sex with me the week I was in Riyadh, which I pointed out meant an encounter every 30 minutes every evening until midnight with no men running into each other. Not happening. Good laugh.
That was the “punishable by death” country.
Egypt was mind-blowing, the least fun was UAE (Dubai) mostly because I don’t enjoy cruising on the beach in 110 degree weather.
Turkey (Istanbul) Romania (Bucharest), Montenegro, Georgia, Hungary, are wonderful areas and I love the people; I sensed nothing particularly homophobic any more than Italy or Greece (Turkey/Istanbul is much gayer than Athens or Rome). The men in the region (except Turkey) were so tall it was unnerving.
It’s hard for me to imagine any UN group making inroads on any of these areas for gays or lesbians - does anyone care there? What would be the purpose?
They will get around to gay marriage perhaps. They have to work more on the basics of men in bed with men and women in bed with women first.
These groups in an India and Southeast Asia would be a joke.
I think any “trans” coming into any of these areas will get a big “forget it”. Amal’s coming anywhere near children will be a death knell
No doubt they are very well paid.
What can be done about debunking the idea that there is an LGBTQI community?
There is no such thing.
Each of these developed countries should put its own house in order first before going abroad. They betray their chauvinism when they lump LGBTQ+ people all in one group. The 'T' harms not only women and children but also the 'LGB'. It's only those that wish to appear to care (as opposed to genuinely caring) that see them as somehow as 'all the same' both in their own culture and abroad. Bad actors, grifters and naïfs are doing exactly what homophobes do in erasing the distinction between being a member of a minority worthy of respect and being a sexual deviant.
Isn't ILGA the same group that sponsored pedophile groups like NAMBLA, Project Truth etc. for U.N. membership as a persecuted minority until ILGA was forced to separate itself from advocating for those groups?
Yeah, but this is the bigger frame story: it's about Western hegemonic EXTERNAL POLICIES not the internal ones. It's about collnial soft power and regime change thrusted upon societies OUTSIDE the Far West, in the name of Human Rights. Who started doing that? Go back to the era of economic neoliberalization and globalization and the peak of those kinds of policies in the freaking end of the 80's and beginning of the 90's.
People are just catching up to the damage this has done across the world, and to the fact it's not much better for anyone under the sexual minorities class. Anywhere.