Screenshot from BBC YouTube channel show ‘ ‘How colonialism killed my culture’s gender fluidity’ Colonized by Spain and the US , and later occupied by Japan, the Philippines has a long history of discourses imposed on its own traditions, including the ones related to gender identity and fluidity. To understand the impact of that process, Global Voices interviewed Alton Melvar M Dapanas, essayist, poet, and translator from the southern Philippines. They are the author of “In the Name of the Body: Lyric Essays” (Wrong Publishing, 2023) and “Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems” (Newcomer Press, 2021). Their work has also appeared in “World Literature Today” and BBC Radio 4 and they serve as editor-at-large at “Asymptote Journal.” They have been published in South Africa, Japan, France, and Australia and translated into Mandarin Chinese and Swedish. Alton Melvar M Dapanas, photo used with permission Filip Noubel (FN): In your collection, “In the Name of the Body: Lyric Essays,” you share your experience of growing up as a non-binary person — a bayot — in the predominantly Christian Philippines. What were you facing in such an environment, and what gave you resources to overcome prevailing homophobia and transphobia? Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): The bayot originates from a lineage of politico-religious indigene leaders in what is now the modern-day ‘southern Philippines,’ and the nomenclatures vary depending on the ethnolinguistic group — the Binisaya bayot, the Sinamadnda-dnda, the Tagalog bakla, the Tausug bantut, the Ilonggo agi, and in so many ways, the Teduray mentefuwaley. Filipinx theorist Bobby Benedicto is particularly instructive in defining these identities as a ‘local sexual formation often read as a conflation of homosexuality, transvestism, and lower-class status.’ Scholar Francis Luis Torres, positions the bayot as an ‘oscillat[ion] between the “male homosexual” and a “feminized man.”‘ And that is what sets the bayot (and the bakla, among other permutations in the Filipino imaginary) apart from the Western(ised) cisgender gay man. When I was digging through Stanford University’s archives of Southeast Asian periodicals, I came across (blatantly homophobic) opinion-editorial articles and short prose in Binisaya, my native tongue, published before WWII equating the bayot with ‘babayen on’ or ‘babayin on,’ woman-like or effeminate. It’s vital to centre conversations like this towards unlearning what colonisation and its lingering aftermaths have done to the colonised. Among the colonial projects of biopolitics was, after all, queerphobia — white Christian Europe’s man-woman dualism was largely irreconcilable with the presence of transgender/nonbinary Natives when the colonisers first set foot in our lands. Today, the SOGIE (sexual orientation and gender identity and expression) Equality Bill — the law that is supposed to protect everyone but most especially the sexual/gender minorities — has been pending in the congress and senate since 2000 thanks to religious lobbyists, the pundits who amplify hate, and the politicians who seem to answer to the conservative base. The Filipino Christian majority is one of the culprits — they will invoke the name of God in issues like gender equality and reproductive rights but never in extrajudicial killings or genocide. FN: Part of your writing unpacks the concepts of “straight-passing” and heteronormative patterns among certain gays. Could you explain those concepts, and why they seem to resist a true acceptance of gender diversity? AMMD: Queer culture has always had a troubled relationship with the idea of passing — almost like a fixation to appear and be perceived as cisgender and heterosexual. The heteronormativity behind this cissexism trivialises the value of a queer/trans person to their mere appearance and expression. Back in 2021, I did an (unofficial) ethnographic fieldwork among cis femme gays — in other words, the textbook bayot — of the older generation from my hometown. As I was already writing the essays in ‘In the Name of the Body‘ then, I’ve read queer theorists Naomi Tucker, Jack Parlett, C. Winter Han, Tom Roach, and Sharif Mowlabocus who discussed body image fascisms so compellingly. I confirmed what I should’ve long acknowledged: the many prevailing misconceptions even within the LGBTQ+ community, e.g. that bisexuals are tops and are therefore masculine (notice the erasure of bisexual women/femme here), while gays are bottoms and are therefore effeminate. A lot to unpack in these prevailing fallacies confined within outdated binaries.