Ask Lemmygrad

I think there's 3 major factors here:

1. Religion dominates in the global south in a way that it doesn't so much in the west anymore (perhaps excepting the US and maybe UK and Germany to an extent). Religions generally promote traditionalism and conservatism through various means, especially when the religion is Christianity. This might sound as idealism, but consider that religious proselytisation was used both as a tool of colonialism for hundreds of years, and for indigenous and oppressed people it often became the only legal/tolerated way of maintaining a semblance of community/governance/connection to their pre-colonial past. Also, religion acts as a gateway of relief for poor and oppressed people, as observed by Marx and others. As a result, religious institutions are deeply entrenched in global south societies, and as a consequence, people who don't conform with the ideal view of a pious person get heavily persecuted. There are obvious exceptions to this that should be mentioned, like Iran (last I heard) offering transition surgeries and support paid by the state.

2. Besides religion, inciting hatred between various minorities has always been used as a tool of colonialism, as part of a divide and conquer doctrine. For example, the British empire would regularly provide special privileges to ethnic minorities in its colonies, and then use them as a military, political and economic force to control the area and suppress everyone else. When the British empire ended, the animosity between different ethnic groups remained (and sometimes actively stoked by the West afterwards), creating further divisions and conflict and maintaining post-colonial devastation, thus dependency on the former colonizers. More specifically, take a look at how Israel utilizes homophobia as a form of control in Gaza. Israel regularly monitors all civilian communications in Gaza and when they identify a sexually divergent person, they will blackmail them and force them to turn into an informant. When they are found out and killed, then Israel will promote it as an instance of why Hamas (for example) is a backwards and homophobic organization.

3. The wave of US-branded identity politics in recent years has been utilized as a major tool for destroying the left globally by Western psy-ops. Terms popularized by conservatives such as "the gay/feminist/SJW agenda" have been very successfully conflated with what the left stands for. And in particular, at the eyes of a lay-person (especially westerners), a communist and a liberal have become identical in the last 15 years or so, in large part due to this fearmongering by conservatives (but obviously this false equivalency is also fueled by US internal politics and other factors). By many peoples, this is now seen as the latest way in which the US utilizes culture as a way to influence other societies and their politics, as well as to conduct wars and sanctions using "humanitarian reasons" as excuses. The tragedy is that this view is both correct and false. For example look at Russia and the Soviet Union. The USSR experienced an intense wave of cultural warfare from the 60s onwards, which eventually contributed to the loss of societal cohesion. Pessimism replaced revolutionary optimism and people became disillusioned by the socialist system. After the fall of the USSR, many Russian citizens suffered from some sort of inferiority complex, where they wanted to become as westernized as possible. Putin's Russia had to try and fight this, by heavily promoting religion and history worship as a way to restoke Russian patriotism and break western influence on Russian politics. As a result, homophobia has become rampant in Russia, eventually becoming state policy. One can say this is an overreaction and a mistake, or that it was necessary for Russia to be able to fight the West. Regardless, Russia's policy on homophobia has also been used by the West as a propaganda tool against them. Russia thus fell in a sort of Catch 22.