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Listening to people younger than yourself also keeps you grounded in the present. Too many people get stuck in the past, or get isolated from wider society. I really don’t want to become a detached old person, that’s one of my greatest fear. I don’t ever want to have the feeling that time has passed me by and I’ll never understand the world.
I haven’t had that feeling so far, thankfully. You’re right about younger people needing mentors and stuff, I hadn’t seen it much from that angle. I think older people need to listen to younger folk as well, to keep them grounded in reality. Younger people aren’t aliens out to ruin society and they’re not naive confused toddlers either. They’re people sharing the present and we don’t need to have such a generational gulf or apprehension if we’re all on Earth and alive at the same time.
This is just anecdotal, but I visited southern China in 2019. I don’t have broad knowledge of Chinese society, but I went to a bunch of DIY style punk shows around Shenzhen and there were tons of cool queer folk there. I ended up talking with a trans man for a while with my broken Mandarin and his broken English. Told him I’m an American who greatly admires China and he thought that was cool.
Yeah, there are a bunch of very open trans and gay folk in China, but maybe that depends on where you go and what strata the people belong to, I guess? It’s not at all like what westerners claim, where they say it’s completely illegal to be trans and all trans media is censored. I didn’t see that at all. I met a bunch of trans people who seemed to have very ordinary, normal lives.
There’s probably room for improvement, but that’s everywhere in the world. I don’t live in China though so I don’t fully know what struggles there are