Bakla

The word travels. Palauan has borrowed bakla for a feminine or gay man, and Central Bikol carries the form twice over, once for this sense and once, unrelatedly, for a tank goby.

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. Under Spanish rule the people the modern word describes were called something else, binabaé, like a woman, or bayogin, infertile.

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.

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 and a different word, and no source here gives a first recorded use of bakla as a term for a person. The continuity between the two rests on argument; no document carries it.

How asog became bakla

Feminised men appear throughout the early Spanish records, described as wearing women's clothing, doing women's work and being treated by their communities as women, comparable to other women except in bearing children. Some were married to men and some to women. Luzon called them bayog, bayok or bayogin, spelled bayoc or bayoquin in Spanish; 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. Tracy Mae Ildefonso, writing from Dublin City University, sets out the belief behind the practice: that spirits listened to prayers uttered by women, so spiritual potency depended on identification with the feminine whatever the officiant's sex, and J. Neil Garcia reads the clothing as a mark of respect, with nothing of the costume about it. A shaman healed, kept the oral history and spoke for the spirits, ranked below only the nobility, worked beside the datu on important occasions and could stand in as leader when the datu was away.

Two Spanish sources carry dates. 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 for Gugurang, the supreme deity of Bikol mythology. Alongside them sit the reactions: the Jesuit Pedro Chirino compared a male shaman's long braided hair to a woman's in 1604, and Alcina described missionaries unable to tell which figure in a group of babaylan was male.

Island Southeast Asia held comparable offices, among them the Bugis Bissu, the Javanese warok and 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, and Ildefonso's argument is that Filipino hostility to bakla is a colonial import rather than a survival, culturally embedded and mostly unexamined by the people who hold it.

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, and the question of who is desired does no defining work. In the Philippine setting the relevant binary is loób and labás, the inner self and the physical form. Weinrich's other two patterns are age-structured, as in Greek pederasty, and role-structured, as recorded in parts of the Middle East and Latin America, and bakla belongs to neither. That places bakla closer to Hijra and to Two-Spirit than to the Western category of the gay man, and it is why the word does not follow the English one.

Why tomboy is bakla's counterpart

The rhyme that lists four genders pairs bakla with tomboy, natively lakin-on or binalaki, and the pairing is old enough to be visible in dictionaries. Calderon's English-Spanish-Tagalog dictionary of 1915 glosses tomboy as babaing magaslaw, a woman who behaves immodestly, which carried a sting the near-synonym tibò did not carry at the time. The English word is older than either: Merriam-Webster dates tomboy to 1566, and Skeat's etymological dictionary of 1911 defines it as a rude girl formed from Tom and boy. Filipino dictionaries have since moved it into the lesbian sense, and Lim's dictionary of 2010 lists binalaki, tomboy and lesbya together.

What sits beside bakla in the historical record is an absence. Ildefonso's survey finds essentially no documentation of Filipina lesbian life before the twentieth century, in a record where Spanish chroniclers rarely wrote about women at all: Morga's remark in 1609 that the women of Catanduanes are very masculine is one of the few notices of any kind, and it goes no further. The asog have an archive and their counterparts do not.

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, and the register varies as much as the region.

Wiktionary's thesaurus entry sorts the Tagalog set by usage label instead of by meaning, marking aginging and aklab obsolete, sward and x-men dated, ponce derogatory, and most of the rest simply gay slang, which is a more useful map of the vocabulary than any translation of it. None of these labels files the set under Third gender, which is where Wikipedia says Filipino culture often places bakla.