November 14, 2025. In a move that barely ripples the global pond, Apple's China App Store has scrubbed two of the country's most popular gay dating apps, Blued, with its 56 million users, and Finka, clocking 2.7 million, on direct orders from Beijing's Cyberspace Administration. This isn't a glitch or a market whim; it's the latest chisel in a systematic demolition of China's LGBT spaces, a purge that's been chipping away since the COVID lockdowns turned the screws on "Western influences." Grindr, the American hook-up app, vanished in 2022 amid broader anti-foreign tech paranoia. Shanghai Pride, once a beacon of cautious exuberance, shuttered in 2020. The Beijing LGBT Center, a 15-year-old lifeline for advocacy and support, closed its doors in 2023. Roxie, Shanghai's last official lesbian bar, folded in June 2024 under unnamed "authorities' pressure." Student queer groups on Weibo and WeChat? Wiped in 2021 for vaguely "violating internet regulations." Even cultural crumbs get cancelled: Viral photos of transgender icon Jin Xing waving a rainbow flag erased in early 2024; her dance troupe's gigs cancelled nationwide in January 2025 without a whisper of why. And for a dash of Hollywood horror, the Chinese cut of the 2025 film "Together" digitally swaps a gay wedding for a straight one. Homosexuality's been legal since 1997, depathologised since 2001, but under Xi Jinping's "Three No's" policy, no approval, no disapproval, no promotion, the space has shrunk to a closet within a closet. Experts like University of Nottingham's Bao Hongwei call it a "seismic change," a chilling signal that pursuing "personal interests and desires" is now a political risk. London School of Economics' Timothy Hildebrandt laments the "chipping away" at openness, tying it to Maoist uniformity and a push for "traditional family values" to goose birth rates amid economic stall. Arctic University's Marc Lanteigne sees the "Western destabiliser" label sticking harder, framing LGBT culture as a foreign virus in the body politic. This isn't organic backlash; it's policy, collateral to Xi's "common prosperity" crusade that equates diversity with decay.
Now we have some sympathy for China's policy but will not argue that point here. Rather, where's the uproar from the Left in the West, who are oh-so-sensitive to even the slightest criticism of the gender agenda? Where are the rainbow-clad marches clogging Fifth Avenue, the viral hashtags trending from Brooklyn to Berlin to Brisbane, the AOC tweets eviscerating autocrats in real time? The Western Left, ever vigilant against "fascist" book bans in Florida or "queerphobic" jokes in the UK, is MIA on China's policies. No celebrity PSAs from Lady Gaga or Swift. No UN resolutions drafted by Sander's acolytes. No corporate boycotts from the rainbow-washing likes of Disney or Nike. A quick scan of the discourse yields crickets: CNN and The Guardian log the app purge with factual frowns, but no firebrand op-eds. Human Rights Watch tut-tuts in reports, but their megaphone's tuned low. Even Amnesty's feeds, usually ablaze with every trans bathroom skirmish stateside, offer only a murmur on Beijing's digital guillotine. X echoes the void, searches for "China LGBT crackdown" since November 1 turn up zilch in the latest chatter, just algorithmic tumbleweeds. The silence isn't accidental; it's architectural.
Why the selective laryngitis? Follow the fault lines of ideology, and the map unmasks itself. The progressive firmament orbits intersectionality like a moth to flame, but only when the villain fits the script. Domestic dragons, Trump's mean tweets, DeSantis' schoolyard spats, get slain with viral fury because they're low-hanging fruit, ripe for domestic point-scoring and donor dollars. China's a tougher mark: An economic juggernaut bankrolling half the West's supply chains, from iPhones to insulin. Rage against the CCP risks "Sinophobia," that cardinal sin of the chattering classes, especially when your Tesla's made in Shanghai and your fast fashion's stitched in Shenzhen. Beijing's not some Bible Belt backwater; it's the future factory, and critiquing its queer purge might sour the "multipolar" worldview that sees America as the real imperialist ogre. Plus, the optics sting: Painting Xi's regime as homophobic undercuts the "authoritarian envy" most Leftists harbour, the envy of a state that actually enforces "equity" without pesky elections or free speech. As Foreign Policy noted in a 2023 dispatch on the Beijing Center's demise, the crackdown feeds narratives of LGBT as "stalking horses for Western ideology," a frame the anti-imperialist crowd quietly nods along to, lest they betray the "global south" solidarity schtick. It's the same dodge that mutes howls over Iran's hangings or Russia's "gay propaganda" laws: Geopolitical realpolitik trumps rainbow realness when the bad guy's not the "right" kind of bad.
This hypocrisy exposes the philosophical rot at progressivism's core: A movement that's less about human dignity (in their terms) than partisan theatre, quick to clutch pearls over pronouns but slow to spotlight real peril if it complicates the narrative.
The Left is not a movement — it's a meme, performative pixels flickering in the safe glow of Western privilege. This example shows once more the moral internal inconsistency of the Left, in terms of their own position.