Dear Anita

It is difficult when my parents were born in the 1960s and their traditional Asian culture didn’t acknowledge LGBTQ people, so they likely adopted the values of their culture. Same-sex marriage was just legalized in 1997 in Beijing (wikipedia) and LGBTQ people still have struggles in China. Although LGBTQ people have been around and documented since the Qing Dynasty (around 1644 and the first written record of the beginning of the Chinese empire), the LGBTQ community has been largely ignored by Chinese officials and many of them face persecution so they didn’t come out to anyone and it was largely hidden. According to wikipedia, the current Chinese president Xi Jinping isn’t really for the LGBTQ community either and although currently the situation has become better with more people tolerating LGBTQ people, Beijing is making progress but there is still a lot of opposition. I think that I read in an online article that the LGB community is gaining ground in acceptance because Beijing created the LGBTQ center around 2003. LGB people  are likely to be more readily accepted by people because lesbian, gay and bisexual deals with sexual attraction and people seem okay with the fact that people can be attracted to different people, but when it comes to gender people are more reluctant to realize that there are genders outside the binary of male and female because it seems like such a large concept.

Even though the LGB people  are gaining ground in China because of the new LGBTQ center in Beijing, there are still struggles and the transgender community has the most struggle since they are still largely opressed because many Asian cultures are Confucius which talks about family relationships and the higher status of the male so transgender people are looked down upon because they feel as if they don’t fit into a specific role for them.