The paper that this is from is the product of a group headed by a self-described “pro-life feminist” and that has retweeted TERFs.
It always sucks when groups with legitimate criticisms of pornography (or anything) dip into bigoted, reactionary bullshit because it poisons whatever valid points they may have made.
Does this imply that socialism is at odds with the liberation of LGBT and neurodiverse people?
Not necessarily, but there are probably about as many difficulties in state socialist governments like that as there are in capitalist ones, yes, the situation is really not that much better. I am personally skeptical of this because I’m horribly burnt out on cishetero-nuerotypicals in general, but in theory under proper stateless communism queer/neurodiverse people should hopefully be able to find each other and make their own communities that are not subject to the rules and arbitrary cultural norms of the cishet-nuerotypical communities around them. For so long as there is a state that is enforcing cultural norms, however, there are still going to be massive problems with achieving the liberation of LGBT and nuerodiverse people, yes, I think that is true.
I do think to some degree individualism, for all it’s many, many, many faults, is better on this one specific issue because of it’s greater focus on the needs and desires of the discrete individuals instead of those of the ‘community’. There is a reason, I think, that the enclaves of greatest queer/nuerodiverse safety are all in the west, and it’s not some myth of progress idea that people just inherently become more socially libertine the richer they are - it is because the West is much more individualistic and atomized, so people are, in a lot of places, much less concerned with whatever the fuck other people are doing and generally less inclined to shunning, for both better and worse. Even these enclaves are obviously under massive threat right now, of course - as said, Capitalist states aren’t really any better, the problems are just different.
I think this all just boils down to the fact that ultimately, there will be no liberation for Queer and Nuerodiverse people for so long as we live under the dominion of cishet and neurotypicals people. Whether that dominion uses red flags or not is irrelevant - we need to be able to have our own autonomous communities without the authority of cishetero-nuerotypicals hanging over our heads for acceptance of our abnormal behavior to be anything but tenuous and conditional on varying degrees of assimilation.
Thank you! This is the kind of in-depth response I was hoping for.
Queer and neurodiverse identities had a range of socially acceptable positions across many societies until the last couple of hundred of years - thanks to the West.
The west literally put gay, trans and neurodiverse people in extermination camps.
Forced sterilisation of people with disabilities is still legal in much of Europe. You can look up the advocacy around the 2020 Spain ban for some awful stories.
I am very much aware of that. I am speaking of the present, I don’t really care about what happened hundreds of years ago on this issue - and frankly people have a habit of being very rosy about those ‘socially acceptable positions’, they still far more often than not forced non-conformative individuals out to the fringes of society, or they provided a few acceptable boxes that one would still be shunned and scorned for acting outside of.
I am interested in liberation, not the expansion in the available amount of ‘socially acceptable positions’, I want the dissolution of the concept of a ‘socially acceptable position’.
That poster has not read any theory
Here is Engels like 150 years ago