Bakla

Bakla is a Filipino term for a person assigned male at birth whose gender expression is feminine. The single most important thing about it is grammatical rather than cultural: bakla is a category of gender, not of sexual orientation. Translating it as "gay" therefore loses the exact thing the word exists to say.

How ordinary the category is in the Philippines can be measured by a children's rhyme, in which girl, boy, bakla, tomboy appear as four parallel options — a folk taxonomy with four slots rather than two, learned before school and carried into adulthood.

Definition & scope

Because bakla describes expression and social position rather than attraction, sexual orientation varies within it. Many bakla are attracted to men; some are attracted to women or to both, and this does not put their status in question. The category is best understood as gender non-conforming, effeminate and third-gender at once, with sexual attraction as a correlate rather than a criterion.

It is also not the same thing as being a trans woman, though the two are constantly conflated in Philippine public discussion. In 2008 the Society of Transsexual Women of the Philippines proposed transpinay and transpinoy precisely to force the distinction into the language; the coinages have not displaced everyday usage. Nor is bakla the same as transfeminine in the Anglophone sense, which presumes the gender-versus-orientation split that bakla predates.

The scholar J. Neil Garcia places bakla within what is called the inversion pattern — a way of construing sexual difference as gender inversion rather than as object choice — which is what makes it structurally comparable to South Asian hijra and, at a distance, to Two-Spirit. Comparable, not equivalent: none of these terms translates into any of the others.

History & origins

• Before 1521: feminised men called bayog or bayok in Luzon and asog in the Visayas hold high standing, most often as babaylan — shamans, healers, oral historians and spirit mediums in a role otherwise held by women.
• 1521 onward: Spanish arrival. In Tracy Mae Ildefonso's genealogy of the shift, published in the Humanities Bulletin in 2022, the Spanish chroniclers record confusion — Pedro Chirino in 1604 comparing a male shaman's braided hair to a woman's, Francisco Alcina reporting missionaries unable to tell which of a group of babaylan were men.
• 1564-1565: Spanish possession is consolidated and Catholicism enforced; the babaylan are demonised, their ritual instruments confiscated, and their authority transferred to missionary priests.
• 17th-18th centuries: same-sex acts are punished, in some cases capitally; asog-led resistance movements including the Tamblot uprising of 1621-22 are put down.
• Mid-20th century: bakla is in use as an insult meaning fearful or weakened.
• 1979: the hit song "Bongga Ka, 'Day" carries swardspeak, the bakla argot, into the mainstream.
• 1990s onward: the term loses much of its pejorative charge and is widely reclaimed.

In practice

Bakla identity has long been anchored in occupational niches — above all the beauty parlour, which functioned as workplace, meeting place and training ground — and in the pageant circuit, which operates from barangay level up to national scale. That visibility is real but uneven: an essay published by Yale's Modern Southeast Asia programme argues that bakla prominence in Philippine media can work as self-tokenisation, securing a place for one recognisable figure while marginalising trans and non-bakla queer Filipinos.

Legally the position is static. Same-sex marriage is not recognised, and while private consensual conduct between adults is not criminalised, the Revised Penal Code's "grave scandal" provision reaches public conduct. A 2004 ordinance in Marawi banned bakla from wearing women's clothing, make-up or earrings in public — a local measure, but an instructive one about how uneven the picture is across the archipelago.

Psychology

No diagnostic category applies. The DSM-5 addresses distress rather than identity, and the ICD-11 removed gender incongruence from its mental-disorders chapter in 2019.

The mental-health literature that concerns bakla concerns families and churches rather than gender. In a country where the great majority is Roman Catholic and church teaching describes homosexual acts as intrinsically disordered, the documented risks to bakla young people track parental acceptance — the same finding reported for sexual and gender minority youth generally, and one that locates the problem in the environment rather than in the person.

Prevalence & culture

How common is bakla?

No survey isolates the term, and the figure here is a derivation.

The nearest usable anchor is Ipsos's LGBT+ Pride survey of 22,514 adults across 30 countries in 2023, which found an average of 9% identifying as LGBT+ and, on gender, about 3% in total describing themselves as other than plainly male or female — 1% transgender, 1% non-binary, gender non-conforming or gender fluid, and 1% in some further way that is neither. The Philippines is not among the thirty countries, so the figure is imported rather than measured. Taking that gender-diverse share as a ceiling and halving it — bakla is specifically an assigned-male, feminine-presenting category, and so cannot be the whole of it — gives roughly 1.5% of Filipino adults. The confidence attached is low, and the number should be read as an order of magnitude rather than a count.

What is measured is the reception. Pew Research Center's 39-country survey of 37,653 respondents in 2013 found 73% of Filipino adults agreeing that homosexuality should be accepted by society — among the highest figures anywhere in Asia and far above the regional pattern. That combination, of high social visibility and acceptance alongside an unchanged legal position, is the defining feature of the Philippine case and the thing most often misread from outside.