Last year’s Tokyo Olympics featured more out LGBTQ+ participants than any known previous Olympics.
Of the 11,000 Olympians competing in Tokyo, at least 186 identified as LGBTQ, according to the SB Nation blog Outsports — a groundbreaking moment in the history of the representation of marginalized sexualities and gender identities in the sporting world.
Outsports reports that the Beijing Games will have a record number of publicly out athletes for the Winter Games — yet, it looks like those Olympians may be performing in the shadow of growing challenges faced by sexual minorities and their supporters in China.
Growing pressure in China: Although the nation removed homosexuality from its official list of mental disorders in 2001, the LGBTQ community in China continues to face official harassment and same-sex marriage remains illegal across the country.
In recent years, the Chinese government has accelerated its pressure on LGBTQ+ rights and spaces. In 2017, Chinese authorities banned online video platforms from sharing content that contained the depiction of “abnormal sexual behaviors” — which, according to those authorities, included same-sex relationships.
Steady crackdown: In July 2021, WeChat — a popular messaging app in the country — shut down more than a dozen of LGBTQ+ accounts run by university students and sparked widespread concern over the censorship of gender and sexual minorities.
The year before, Shanghai Pride — China’s longest-running Pride event usually attended by thousands of LGBTQ+ people from across the nation — abruptly canceled all their scheduled activities due to mounting pressure from local authorities, according to a source with knowledge of the situation that spoke to CNN at the time.
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