Philippines, Gender Categories

In postcolonial societies like the Philippines, trans, as a category of gender identity and expression, coincides with terms like bakla, binabae, bayot, agi, and bantut. Each term embodies particular histories of practice and contexts of experience and has circulated in the archipelago prior to the term trans as a globalizing category of gender-embodied variance and thus the threat and actual displacements by it. For the purposes of this entry, the focus will be on the relations between trans/transvestite/transsexual/transgender identities and bakla and its cognate terms, in their autochthonous (indigenous), colonial, modern, contemporary, and postcolonial/decolonial historicities.