I’m at the local motorcycle repair shop where Sherwyn, a most competent mechanic and pleasant cove, is replacing a brake master cylinder on the Blaze. He first thought to replace only the seals, but he can’t find the right size. A new cylinder is 400 pesos, just under six quid, an unwell encephalopod. I just tell him to get on with it. Sherwyn works in the open space outside a motorcycle parts shop, where he seems to buy most of his stuff, although, as today, sometimes he has to go further afield. While I wait I sit on a wooden bench in the shade and observe the street life. Baklas soon begin to appear; it’s like they’re in the woodwork.
Transwomen in the Philippines are classified locally as ‘gay’. The specific word used might be ‘bakla’, ‘beki’, ‘bayot’, ‘bading’ or any one of several others, depending on location and dialect.
Note that here, ‘gay’ does not mean what it does in the West. It means you are male but not a man; that you have ‘green blood’. In Luzon, the most popular local term is ‘bakla’. Their lifestyle is called ‘kabaklaan’ and it is centred on the performance of beauty.
‘Gently but firmly’ is the manner in which parents of children manifesting sex non-conforming behaviour are adjured to make those children desist.
Professors J Michael Bailey and Ray Blanchard penned an open letter to the Fourth Wave Now website in 2017. It is as relevant today as it was then. In it they made many valuable points. The article is long but the most concerning part is here:
If you want your childhood-onset gender dysphoric child to desist, and if your child is still well below the age of puberty (which varies, but let’s say, younger than 11 years), you should firmly (but kindly and patiently) insist that your child is a member of his/her birth sex…You should not allow your child to engage in behaviors such as cross dressing and fantasy play as the other sex. Above all else, you should not let your child socially transition to the other sex.
At the same time, you should recognize that despite your best efforts, your child may ultimately need to transition to be happy. If your child’s gender dysphoria persists well into adolescence (again, the ages vary by child, but let’s say age 14 or so), s/he is much more likely to transition. At that point, in our opinion, parents should consider supporting transition.
(my italics)
Bailey and Blanchard are both highly respected and here they are simply restating what we might call the ‘establishment position’. However, there are significant problems with the above statement and I will deal with these. I am aware that they do not use the phrase ‘gently but firmly’ here, but that is a reasonable rendering of the phrase they do use.
I’m uploading this here because i have been asked by a follower to elaborate on the various types of Trans expression found here. I have covered this ground before but not in this form. So these are the types of ladyboys found in the Philippines.
Classifying the types of ladyboys in the Philippines is complicated because they are in part influenced by individual sexuality but also by the culture they appear in. The Philippines is similar to but not the same as other south-east Asian countries and markedly different, in significant ways, from the Anglo-West. It has a good deal in common with cultures found in both Latin America and Southern Europe but is not identical to either.
The Philippines itself does not have a homogeneous culture. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that the country is a huge archipelago of over seven thousand islands. In fact, new islands are being discovered all the time. Although many are not populated by humans, most are and this has led to significant cultural diversity between them. It has a population of approximately 120 million souls.
Although she works in Thailand, Yuki is Filipina. Pic courtesy of Cine de Rose Ladyboys
The second cause is the location, on two major navigation routes: east-west and north-south. For hundreds if not thousands of years, visitors have been coming to the islands and implanting both their genes and their cultures. But these implantations have not been uniform; they have varied in effect greatly, say from Mindanao in the south to Luzon in the north.
The cover picture shows me with two ladyboys, just so you know its all real; one of them is Homosexual, the other Autogynephilic, but can you tell which is which?
A unique culture
Today, Filipino culture remains essentially Malay, which is part of the Austronesian language family, but on top of that are European/Christian influences, especially through Spain, as well as Arabic/Muslim, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and of course, US American ones. All of these have had an effect on the overall culture of the Philippines and the precise flavour of the mix is unique. There is no other country in the world quite like it.
Gays in Manila
Ladyboys and gays
In Asian Culture, the terms ladyboy and gay are the standard English translations for a plethora of local terms such as bakla, kathoey, waria, nuhafu and many others, which all describe the same thing: an unmasculine male. Not all of these present as girls by any means but all consider themselves to be ‘girls inside.’ The dichotomy of gender identity here is not man and woman, but man and not-man. (Professor Don Kulick explains this well.) One is either a man or a not-man; that’s it. All the ridiculous made-up ‘genders’ that are so fashionable in the West are subsumed into one: not-man. To be a man, one must be male, masculine and a penetrator, in sexual terms. Everyone else is a not-man. I belabour this point because in the first place it is crucial to understanding gender in Southeast Asia, indeed anywhere outside the West and also because so many Westerners seem incapable of understanding it.
Essentially, ladyboys and their equivalents are unmasculine males who either pursue sexual and romantic relations with masculine men (not others like themselves,) or make a show of doing so. Note again, the Platonic notion of ‘like goes with like’ is regarded as absurd here; opposites attract, as is logical. Although some ladyboys do have sex with each other, this is situational: they can’t find men to do the honours. Ladyboys in relationships like this will typically identify as Bisexuals, of which more below.
In Asia, South America and elsewhere, boys are likely to become sexually active with older boys and men while in late childhood or adolescence. Where is the evidence that there is harm in sex like this?
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Their activity will almost always be as recipients in anal sex. It should go without saying that in cultures where male femininity is tolerated and even admired, the number who turn out to be ‘regular straight folks’ is approximately zero. So is there any harm in sex like this?
There are several sexual nexuses which affect gender in those born male. These depend on the three sets of parameters which underlie it. In turn these are: sex itself, that is our biological sex following whether we are male (XY) or female (XX) and all those entail; sexuality, which is either male (active, the desire to penetrate) or female (passive, the desire to be penetrated) and gender, our outward expression, masculine or feminine.
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The First Sexual Nexus
These are to some extent variable. At the first nexus, a male might, in a small number of cases, have female sexuality. This we call congenital Sexual Inversion. However, Homosexuality can also be acquired, in a number of ways, most of which depend on successful experiment — they tried receptive sex and liked it. Both these classes of people desire to be penetrated and will therefore seek partners who can do this. Mostly those will be masculine men, so the subject here becomes completely feminine, in order to attract them. Note that Homosexuals only reluctantly partner other Hmosexuals; in general they far prefer masculine men. Similarly, some females are sexually Inverted and have male sexuality. They become as masculine as they can, the classic butch lesbian.
Homosexual Gender Dysphoria occurs in both males and females and is always signalled by childhood Sex Non-Conforming behaviours.
Homosexual Gender Dysphoria leads to Homosexual Transsexualism and is relatively rare. Since it ONLY affects those who are uniquely homosexual, from their earliest experiences, there is a clear upper bound on the numbers.
Numerous studies have been carried out which suggest that the total number of Sexual Inverts, that is, genuine homosexuals, is probably not more than 5% of population, although this again is subject to the definition of ‘homosexual’ being used. We use it to mean ‘an unmasculine male’ and nothing else. Homosexual transsexuals, being a subset of these, must necessarily be fewer.
The acceptance of Homosexuals in the Philippines is a subject over which there remains significant disagreement. Partly this is to do with a truly exasperating refusal, on the part of Academics, to adopt common terminologies and taxonomies, a fault which is certainly political in origin. We argue that there is no room for politics in science. Adding to this is the confusion introduced by such things as ‘Queer Theory,’ Philosophical Postmodernism and Identity Politics. These make it hard to dig down and find accuracy in the published literature; indeed, one often suspects that the authors working in this field are guilty of deliberate obfuscation.
All the girls featured in this post are males. Yet you, if you are a man being honest, find them attractive. That is because attraction is to gender, not sex.
It has become fashionable, in the West, to ascribe certain meanings to the word homosexual that were not intended when it was coined. This began with the publication of the Kinsey Reports in 1948. Originally, the term meant ‘an unmasculine male who is receptive in sex with other males’ and so conformed exactly to Asian terms like bakla and kathoey, and to similar terms globally, for example travesti in Brazil. It also was a direct equivalent to terms like catamite, as well as others. Today we might usefully use the word bottom in the vernacular.
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It was coined in the late 19th century by an Austrian-born Hungarian psychologist, Karoly Maria Benkert and was quickly adopted by others. The term applied exclusively to a type of person. It did not refer to a set of acts, as there were already terms for those, such as sodomy and buggery. Indeed, many homosexuals did not even engage in these acts, as Freud noted. The crucial issues were the subjects’ rejection of masculinity in themselves and their unreserved attraction to it in others.
This is what a Homosexual should look like. Cute bulge, pet.
![[kofi]](https://www.rodfleming.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/support-me-on-[kofi]-300x81.png)
