Yes, the family involved in the situation is terrible and abusive

Did you choose to just ignore this statement and others I wrote to make my position clear? I understand why you’re angry, but you are completely misreading what I am saying to an absurd degree.

I am clearly making an argument that Mei being questioned by the police for kidnapping is not indicative of systematic discrimination.

You can choose to disagree with that statement, vehemently if you prefer. But you’re arguing against a construct where I said that transphobia is a-okay and that Ying’s treatment is acceptable. I didn’t say that so there’s not much for me to object.

As you know, Lemmygrad is an instance where we see LGBT liberation as a core tenet, so I think you’re misreading the room here. We are objecting to Western slander of gay and trans genocide in China. That’s very different from thinking that the state of affairs in China’s acceptable.

Ying’s family – who are not supportive of her trans identity – had been keeping Ying, an adult over 18, under house arrest and cut off from the outside world. In August, they finally allowed her to leave to pursue her studies. She was now at school, but wanted to run away to be with her girlfriend in another city.

Together, they hatched a plan. Mei would take Ying’s phone to prevent her family from tracking her location and try to persuade them not to call the police. But after a month of failed mediation, the family notified the authorities, who traced the phone to Mei’s apartment. The police came and arrested her for kidnapping.

“It was my first time being arrested. They took me to the station and questioned me for 10 hours. They tried to make me confess, but I refused to say anything,” Mei tells the Guardian over an encrypted app. “Eventually, they let me go because there was no evidence.”

In the end, the police found Ying and took her back to her family. The failed rescue attempt is one of more than 10 similar cases Mei knows of where advocates have been arrested and questioned by police since she joined an informal network providing support to the LGBTQ+ community some years ago.

So this is the main anecdote in the article. The police and the family are rather understandable. The police has to respond to potential kidnappings, and the family couldn’t contact their daughter for a month. The only objectionable thing I find is that the daughter was returned to the family without her consent, but the idea of child becoming an absolute adult at the age of 18 is an American idea so it’s also understandable in cultural context to return a 19 year old.

Yes, the family involved in the situation is terrible and abusive. Is it state repression by the Chinese government? No. Are the LGBT+ folks having difficulty surviving as the title says? Also no.

Yes, China should improve on LGBT rights by legalizing gay marriage and allowing gay couples to adopt children. But it’s kind of hard to claim that there is a crackdown on expressing queerness when there’s gay weddings publicly happening across China right now.