First of all, this has almost nothing to do with religion, almost all of us are hardcore communists/socialists, and completely anti-imperialist/west, it has more to do with places where we come from in general, this also doesn’t have anything to do with my conservative ‘‘father’’ and his family from which we severed ties long ago. Me, my mother, brother and sister are from Balkans btw. All of this also doesn’t apply to asexuals.
To start with my mother, she’s pretty Yugonostalgic and communist ever since she was a kid and in Tito’s Pioneers, she’s staunchly anti-west and anti-imperialist and (with an exception of western white people) loves and supports all people, nations and minorities equally, even though she’s pretty much agnostic, she still respects all religions and cultures, critically supports governments like Putin’s etc, pretty much every based opinion you can think of except, about LGBT… She says that while there have always been gay people(i.e. Caesar, Alexander the Great etc), they kept it ‘‘to themselves’’ and didn’t bother anyone about it until ‘‘Westoids started pushing it with parades after Sexual Revolution’’, that everyone should keep that stuff private now that they have rights and don’t make parades where they go almost naked and make their sexual orientation their entire personality. She’s alright with gay people if they don’t talk about their orientation and she doesn’t see it in movies, same thing with straights tho since she’s also against showing sexuality in public in general and is especially against it ‘showing it to children’. She also by far tolerates gay and bi men a lot more than gay women, because she had an experience where colleague of her friend abroad needed to remind everyone on job that she has a wife and talk about her sexual orientation constantly every day, along with experience of meeting some sexist women and thinks that everyone is like that because of them.
Then most of all, about trans people, she said this exactly, quote word for word: ‘‘if someone started walking on all fours on the street and howling on full moon, is he a Werewolf? Maybe he thinks he’s a Werewolf and feels like a Werewolf, but the fact is that he is not a Werewolf. Same thing for people who think they’re different gender’’ Her stance is basically that people are either born male or female and gender and anatomy can’t be changed because ‘‘people aren’t frogs’’ and males can’t get pregnant etc. She supports Kadyrov about this stuff and laughed her ass off while she watched his interviews with westoids where they talked about LGBT in Chechnya and Muslim countries. And she likes asexuals and not only because I am one, but she liked us in general even before, so basically only 2 acceptable orientations for her are straight and asexual, same thing stands for other family members.
Her husband(my stepfather) is from an Arab country from North Africa, pretty self explanatory, he’s literally the nicest person you could meet and be around until LGBT is brought up and he’s also an Islamic socialist.
My older sister literally gets pissed and hates words ‘‘cis’’, tbf I myself didn’t know what that means until recently, but she said that she’ll strangle anyone who calls her like that on street if it happens(it won’t, we’re on Balkans) and why should anyone who’s not trans call themselves ‘cis’ just because of 1% population. She can literally go from treating me and my twin like small brothers to this. She also made a joke about ‘‘2 girls doing stuff’’, like said it in the same way my friend would say it in 5th grade, before spitting on ground in disgust.
My twin brother literally doesn’t give a shit until someone bothers him but he’s like that in general for a lot of stuff so nothing different.
Our cousin from Russia supports CPRF and other communist parties(even if they’re not perfect) which of course explicitly includes their stance about this.
The thing is, everyone from my family I mentioned is the best person you could meet in terms of hospitality, friendliness, based political opinions etc, all of that while you’re either straight or asexual and until LGBT is mentioned. The change of personality and stance out of the blue is legitimately insane.
So how do you deal with this and do you have similar experience?
Well there is also this mentality against parades of 'that’s too much keep it to yourself ’ based on, I guess, stories. I participate in the yearly Pride Parade every year and while you have some figures that seem a bit bizarre to many you also have the vast majority of the participants being ‘normal’ so to say. It’s not the fetish party people make it out to be. And even if it were it’s not like you have puppy slaves with leather doms roaming the street every day of the year either.
What’s interesting is that our party manages to combine both more culturally conservative groups with the progressive LGBTQ+ crowd perfectly fine. We have a lot of gay Muslim figures for example and you can really so how they lead by example for their community and find ways how to incorporate LGBTQ+ activism in their own culturally relevant ways. That’s why I, like I said above, believe that every culture has the possibility to find out on their own how to deal with this in a positive way.
I think these types of parades are mostly from Germany and USA where they quite literally have fetish parades and stuff, the problem is many people equal all parades to those.
As for Muslims, they unfortunately always have to go in more LGBT friendly countries, happened in Bosnia but especially in North Africa since there really isn’t any hope unless you’re asexual. And again, even socialism didn’t fix it in many countries so idk what will at this point.