Bakla

What bacla used to mean

The word is centuries old in a different sense. Bacla in Old Tagalog carried the sense of indecision, of a mind that will not settle. The poet Francisco Balagtas used it that way, for nerve that fails for a moment, in Florante at Laura and in Orosman at Zafira, and the same reading appears in the seventeenth-century Tagalog Pasyon chanted through Holy Week: the verse on Christ in the garden runs Si Cristo'y nabacla, which is to say that he was confused.

By the Second World War the word had shifted to fearful or weakened, and had become a slur for effeminate men, with pusong babae, female-hearted, as the polite alternative. The insult only wore off in the 1990s, once warmer public talk about queer and gay life had reached the mainstream. The Filipino anthropologist Martin F. Manalansan has set out two possible derivations for the modern sense: a portmanteau of babae, woman, and lalaki, man, or a descent from babaylan, the word for the precolonial shamaness. Nothing consulted here dates the first use in that sense.

How asog became bakla

Effeminate men were called something else entirely before the Spanish came. Early Spanish records describe men who wore women's clothing, did women's work and were treated by their communities as women, some of them married to men and some to women. Luzon called them bayog, bayok or bayogin; the Visayas called them asog; each word connotes infertility. Visayan men carried dense tattoos, and bare skin on a grown man was read as a failure to have done anything worth marking, yet an asog could stay puraw, unmarked, without that judgement.

Because they stood on the feminine side, asog were held to reach the anito, the ancestral and nature spirits, more readily than other men, and they commonly became babaylan, shamans, in what was otherwise a woman's office. A shaman healed, kept the oral history and spoke for the spirits, ranked below only the nobility, and could stand in as leader of a community whose datu was away. Francisco Ignacio Alcina's Historia de las islas e indios de Bisayas of 1668 records that asog became shamans simply by being asog, needing neither selection nor initiation, unlike their female colleagues. Castano recorded in 1895 a Bicolano thanksgiving ritual, the atang, presided over by an asog, with a baliana assisting and leading the women in song. Island Southeast Asia held comparable offices: the Bugis bissu, the Javanese warok, the Iban manang bali. Across three hundred years of Spanish rule, from 1565 to 1898, the Catholic Church moved hard against shamans of either kind.

Nobody has dated bakla in its current sense. The dated records on file, Alcina in 1668 and Castano in 1895, document asog, which is the older role rather than the modern word, and no source gives a first recorded use of bakla as a term for a person. The continuity between the two is argued rather than documented.

Why bakla is not gay

A De La Salle University study concluded that bakla is the closest Filipino rendering of male homosexual, and the fit still fails. Sexuality is not what the word tracks, and it is not an orientation at all. What it names is a man taking up feminine expression, in mannerism, speech, make-up, dress and hair, the whole of which Filipino groups under kabaklaán. Most bakla are attracted to men, some are heterosexual or bisexual, and masculine gay men are traditionally not called bakla at all, though globalisation has blurred that boundary until bakla is used loosely for gay men in general.

J. Neil Garcia reads bakla through what the psychobiologist James D. Weinrich called the inversion pattern, in which same-sex desire is understood as the sex and gender binary turned inside out rather than as a question of who is desired. In the Philippine setting the relevant binary is loób and labás, the inner self and the physical form. That places bakla closer to Hijra than to the Western category of the gay man, and it is why the word does not follow the English one.

Why transpinay was proposed

Bakla is also applied to trans women, which Filipino organisations discourage. The cause is partly an absence: the Philippines has had no widely used local term for transgender people, so an existing word gets stretched, and the stretch carries a widespread error with it, that a trans woman is a bakla who has had surgery and a trans man a tomboy who has. In 2008 the Society of Transsexual Women of the Philippines put forward two words built on the endonym pinoy: transpinay, for a trans woman, and transpinoy, for a trans man. Neither has yet been widely adopted.

Writing in the journal Alon in 2022, the transpinay scholar Brenda Rodriguez Alegre traced the line from asog to bakla to transpinay as a history in which the precolonial roles were decimated and silenced, the bakla became the narrative of postcolonial queerness, and the transpinay then claimed visibility in spaces that as often harmed her as recognised her.

What the parlorista stereotype hides

The stock image is the parlorista, a camp cross-dresser working in a beauty parlour. Bakla in fact work across every sector, and the stereotype does the usual work of standing in for the visible minority of a group. A minority of Filipinos reject non-binary identities on Christian or Islamic grounds; bakla are otherwise socially and economically integrated, and were accepted before colonisation.

The vocabulary is regional and large. Cebuano has bayot, binabáye, bayen-on and dalopapa; Hiligaynon has agî; Waray has dampog; Tausug and Sinama have bantut; Subanen has labia. Swardspeak, the Filipino gay argot, has added a further set whose acceptance varies, beki and badíng among the commonest, with judíng, vaklúsh, shokì and badáf alongside them. Filing all of these under Third gender is an outsider's convenience rather than a description of how they are used.