I had the joy last week of
attending the Beijing LGBT Center.
Unlike similar centres in Los Angeles and San Francisco, for example,
this centre is a lot smaller. Its
director whose nickname is Little Iron
but whose formal name is Ying Xin, holds a Master of Public Administration who
decided that rather than going into government or banking, she would be better
off serving the community and therefore took up the role with the Beijing LGBT
Center.
Little Iron is one of those people
that you meet in life who are truly inspirational. She inspires by her leadership – for which
the very simple response is that LGBTIQ people are entitled under law to be
treated equally and therefore should be treated equally.
The Center provides outreach
services, including counselling. It has
recently taken on a full-time transgender employee. It works with law associations across China
to train up lawyers about dealing with LGBTIQ clients and issues in LGBTI
law.
It does this while operating out of
a converted apartment in a hospital complex.
It operates on the smell of an oily rag.
Way back in 1948, Alfred Kinsey in
writing Sexual Behaviour in the Human
Male, said that 10% of the male population is gay. More recently, the Gallup poll after carrying
out polling of Americans said that at least every fifth person in the US is
gay. The current population of China is
estimated to be 1.371 billion people. If
the Gallup estimate is accurate for China and one in five Chinese are gay or
lesbian, the numbers are staggering and the work ahead of the Beijing LGBT
Center can’t begin to be measured. If
that number is correct, then 274,200,000 Chinese are gay or lesbian. That is
over ten times the population of Australia or 50,000,000 less than the entire
population of the United States.
The Chinese Constitution does not
explicitly deal with sexual orientation or gender identity discrimination. According to Wikipedia, there is no
anti-discrimination provision for sexual orientation or gender identity under
the Chinese Labour Law. The Labour Law
specifically protects workers against discrimination on the basis of a person’s
ethnicity, gender or religion.
Only in 1997 was homosexual sex
legalised in the Peoples Republic. Only
in 2001 was homosexuality removed from the official list of mental illnesses in
China. Conversion therapy – where
therapists try to convert people from being gay or lesbian to straight – a
therapy that has been widely condemned by western psychological and psychiatric
associations and criminalised in California – continues in China.
In 2014 a Beijing Court ruled in favour of Yang Teng, a gay man, in a case against a conversion therapy
clinic. In Chongqing in which the clinic
was ordered to pay compensation after it told the man it could treat his
homosexuality with electric shock therapy.
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