Phantom voters, phantom genders

PINOY KASI


Phantom voters, phantom genders
By Michael Tan
Inquirer

Last updated 00:17am (Mla time) 04/13/2007

MANILA, Philippines -- Danton Remoto and thousands of other Filipinos are fuming mad at Ben Abalos and the Commission on Elections (Comelec). Beyond the computer snafus and printing fiascoes, beyond the questions about whether they can count or not, Comelec officials are coming under fire now about the way they accredit party lists. While approving the applications of groups with the most obscure of constituencies (some nothing more than relatives of big shots), the Comelec has turned down the application of Ang Ladlad, which Remoto founded and which wants to give a voice to Filipino LGBTs (lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgendered).

The Comelec claims Ang Ladlad is a party of “phantom voters.” Hmmm, phantom voters? I thought of the comic books of my youth and that hunk running around in skin-tight leotards and an eye mask, but the Comelec means something else: it claims that Ang Ladlad’s constituencies are unreal, are phantasms.

This reminds us that beyond the issue of party-list representation, Philippine society still has serious hang-ups about genders, an issue I’ve brought up in several columns.

Pink vote

The Comelec represents the gender ostriches, the ones who would like to think the world only has two genders and any claims to the contrary can’t be true. The LGBTs are mere phantoms lurking in the night.

Yet, we know there are many Filipinos who do recognize the other genders and are terrified, thinking we face an epidemic of “sexual perverts.” I am not exaggerating the fears here. I have been getting reports about a former Department of Health employee who goes around lecturing in different cities claiming that there is a global conspiracy, headed by the United States, to control population. According to this imaginative woman, this involves imposing family planning—and promoting homosexuality!

We’ll never really have reliable figures about the size of the LGBT constituency. We hear 10 percent cited quite often, based on the Kinsey survey in the United States back in the 1950s but that survey was problematic and only asked about male homosexual experience. Other more recent surveys in different countries give figures hovering between 4 percent and 6 percent. In the last Young Adult Fertility and Sexuality Study of the University of the Philippines, 15.1 percent of males and 3.6 percent of females said they had same-sex sex (sorry for the awkward terminology).

But surveys are always difficult to conduct when it comes to asking people for personal disclosure on sensitive issues, which means the tendency is for the statistics to under-represent reality.

Ang Ladlad has sent out a text message calling for a show of force: “On Friday the 13th (I think that’s supposed to sound ominous), 10 a.m., gays and lesbians will rally in front of the Comelec to show we are not the phantom, but the opera. Pls wear pink, white or come in costume. And join us in a show of the Pink Vote.”

Hidden genders

I’m sure the event will be well attended, but there might be almost as many media people (some themselves LGBT) as “phantom” voters. The problem again is that the rally is public and many LGBTs are not about to come out yet.

We need to go back in history to understand how we’ve progressed -- or regressed with gender rights. In the past, we had “lalaki” [male] and “babae” [female] and an occasional “bakla” [gay] who would get beaten up. But even amid that repression, there were already quite a few courageous “bakla” who were quite open about it. Philippine society responded by allowing certain occupational niches for the “bakla,” particularly hairdressing, dress designing, doing the laundry (yes, “bakla” used to be “lavanderas” [laundrywomen]!). Besides “bakla,” there were other words used, notably “binabae,” “biniboy’’ and “syoki.” All these terms reflected not so much sexual orientation than a concept of an effeminate male, “binabae” meaning “like a woman,” “biniboy” being a contraction of “binibini” [miss] and “boy” while “syoki” came from the Hokkien Chinese word that means weak-spirited.

With time, those terms have become almost extinct, perhaps emblematic of the way the “weak-spirited” stereotype has been challenged. It’s inevitable, as a global movement grows around the rights of sexual minorities. In the 1950s, “gay” was a term used to refer to the underground male homosexual culture; by the 1970s, thousands of women and men were marching in the streets proclaiming Gay Pride and protesting social discrimination. Filipinos were swept up by this growing awareness of the need to fight social prejudice and bigotry.

Pepper Boys

Many gains have been made to advance gender rights, of women, and of the LGBT. By and large though, gender discrimination remains prevalent, forcing many LGBTs to remain in the shadows. There’s a class factor to all this. In the past, the ones who dared to come out -- as captured in the term “ladlad” (to shed one’s cape) -- were mainly from the low-income groups. Now, more upper-class Filipinos are coming out, but still with trepidation because of the fear of being disowned, of bringing “shame” to the family name, of losing one’s job.

The shifts in gender labels actually reflect this paranoia. I hear people differentiating themselves as “discreet gays” from “parloristas” [beauty parlor attendants], a reference made with the kind of derision that accompanies “palengkera,” referring to a loud, lower-class woman market vendor.

The need to be discreet has given rise to the gender category “paminta,” which gives a new meaning to Spice Boys. “Paminta” means pepper, but the word is derived from “pa-mhin.” Further translation: “mhin” means “men” and “pa-mhin” means trying to be masculine, as society requires men to be. To be “paminta” is an attempt to escape society’s homophobic radar screens or sometimes even “gay-dar” (the radar screens of other gay men).

There’s more. Some of the Pepper Boys do a good job of it, and are called “pamintang buo” (whole pepper); others fail miserably and are mocked as “pamintang durog” (ground pepper).

“Discreetness” has become an obsession, sometimes a desperate attempt at camouflage. It’s not surprising then that even the English word “bisexual” has mutated in the Philippines to mean a “discreet gay” who insists on clinging to the last vestiges of acceptable sexuality, meaning having some kind of attraction for women. I once interviewed a Pepper Boy who said he was bisexual, but it turned out that in his 30-plus years of existence he only had one tryst with a woman, way back in his youth, when his macho “barkada” [gang of buddies] forced him to have sex in a brothel.

Filipino hidden gender categories go beyond sexual orientation; they speak of a liminal and, yes, phantom-ic, existence that is always in danger of becoming even more oppressive as religious conservatives go on the offensive like what they are doing now.

Phantom genders, phantom voters: there’s a sizeable constituency out there. And the Comelec, by denying representation to LGBTs, makes a travesty of the party-list system.