Liberating and constraining the ‘bakla’

Labels and templates are constraining — even in the context of gay rights.

In the Philippines, if you look around and try to spot people who fall under the nonnormative sexual orientation, gender identity and expression (Sogie) sector, the stereotypical image that most easily comes to view is the swishy, flamboyant male who likes dressing up as a female — the bakla. The identity of the bakla oftentimes ends up representing the whole plethora of identities constituting the community of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, queer, intersex, asexual and other sexualities (LGBTQIA+).

Conversations on the rights of the LGBTQIA+ members typically include one phenomenon: coming out of the closet, loosely translated to the vernacular as paglaladlad. The concept of coming out of the closet is no stranger to Filipinos, especially the middle class. It is accepted wisdom that telling others about one’s sexual orientation is a difficult yet liberating experience that enables people to come to terms with their identity. However, the lived experiences of some LGBTQIA+ members show otherwise.

In April 2019, I was in a rural area in a northern province of the Philippines doing research on the experiences of gay teenagers. One insight that emerged from my interviews is that coming out is a process seemingly concerned more with one’s sexual attraction than with one’s gender expression.

The poor LGBT youth in this rural area did not go through paglaladlad. This is because people had long called them bakla because of the effeminate way they acted when they were young—too young, perhaps, for them to even understand the full gravity of the label thrown at them.

Growing up with the tag of bakla weighs heavily on the shoulders of many due to expectations about who or what the bakla should be. Some of my interviewees, for instance, do not conform with the mainstream conception that the bakla is attracted to another genitally male person. Some of them are bisexuals, and a few of them still have not figured out their sexual orientation. Nonetheless, they are afraid to tell their relatives and friends about such distinctions, because they fear stigmatization and resentment from people who are close to them.

There is a societal expectation that the bakla should be attracted only to biological males, so the bakla who is attracted to other sexual identities is deemed socially deviant. In this respect, the label bakla can closet individuals into the performance of an identity that does not necessarily resonate with what they feel inside.

Labels have power in shaping a person. The rural and poor bakla grow up with an idea of who they are, and this idea can direct the choices they make and the actions they take. In the context of rights, self-concept and identities are important, because they affect what individuals think are crucial for them to live a life of dignity.

All are equal and are entitled to a life without discrimination, and to be protected by the law. Paying attention to which kinds of protection they need, then, significantly depends on the challenges brought about by the identity they and the society recognize.

The lesson here for fellow gender rights advocates is simple: Asserting and exercising human rights are not linear or one-directional. They require retrospection and introspection. They necessitate the scrutiny of the very labels that we use to define ourselves and other people. We need to free ourselves from the limits of defined labels.

Asserting human rights requires us to recognize that labels can be made loose, malleable, which means they can be shaped and reshaped, owned and denounced, constructed and deconstructed by the very people they define.

In the fight for equality, moving forward is looking backward, and in terms of the rights of the LGBTQIA+, we can advance only if we are able to look back and understand how different labels have manifested themselves differently across individuals. When we fight for the rights of the LGBTQIA+, we must also consider that one of the rallying cries or identities we employ may actually be limiting to some.

Finally, it is important to see the constraining dimension of the process of liberation. The more we understand this, the more able we are to push for human rights and assert them in the face of a government that sits on the violations of these rights.

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Athena Charanne “Ash” R. Presto is an instructor and a masteral student at the sociology department of the University of the Philippines Diliman. She tweets at @sosyolohija.