Meanwhile, more than 30 years after reunification, Germany still has worse name change laws for trans people than the DDR. West Germany made sterilization a mandatory step for a legal name change until 2011. Gay sex was also legalized in the DDR before the west followed suit. Socialist societies are atheist societies, they therefore lack the entire part of the anti-LGBT bias that is motivated by Christian dogma. We see the same in regards to abortion, where Germany also still has worse laws than the DDR used to have. The corrupting, reactionary influence the churches have on German politics in spite of constantly dwindling public support was, in the East, mercilessly weeded out in the transformation to already existing socialism - practicing Christianity in AES is a personal choice, not something that can influence and impair the development of an entire society.

Similar things can be said for a lot of other socialist nations. They often were or are flawed in their view on LGBT issues, women’s rights and the liberation of BiPoC, but these are regrettable holdovers from pre-revolutionary societies that should be - and frequently are - pushed back against from the party. Stalin or Mao had awful views on LGBT issues, but they were in no way worse than what came before them. No socialist state was ever worse on LGBT rights than the bourgeois nations that preceded them.

That doesn’t mean today’s AES states are shining beacons of LGBT rights, it just means that there is nothing about communism that speaks against LGBT rights and a lot of things that speak for them. If any of today’s western democracies would become socialist, their treatment of LGBT people would, without a doubt, improve massively. Anybody who claims otherwise takes CIA propaganda about “authoritarian leftists” at face value. We are not authoritarian in the way that fascists are authoritarian. We are authoritarian in our support for all oppressed peoples. We are authoritarian in our fight against reactionaries. We are authoritarian in our desire to abolish both the fascist Republican party and the Democrat party that plays controlled opposition even when it is governing. And we are authoritarian in our demand to mercilessly purge the likes of Caleb Maupin from our ranks.