Philippines, Rod Fleming's World, Page 6

10/06/2025

Bakla: explaining the transwoman of the Philippines

Originally posted 2022-03-28 19:50:38.

All humans, with the exceptions of a tiny minority with disorders of sexual development (DSDs) or Intersex, are either male or female. So there are two sexes.

We are not tilapia, frogs or molluscs, and these sexes are fixed for life. Sex can never be changed. The nonsense that biological sex has no basis in reality and can be changed from male to female is just that, nonsense. It derives from Post-Modernism; a rotten, toxic ideology. But that means we must explain the phenomenon of transsexualism, and to do that we’ll focus on the form found in Luzon in the Philippines, the bakla.

The explanation hinges on the critical difference between sex and gender. These are not the same.

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10/06/2025

Palawan, Philippines, 2012

Originally posted 2013-06-28 23:08:00.

Palawan is an island in the west of the Mimaropa Admistrative region of the Philippines. The Phils is divided colloquially into three regions, Luzon in the north, Visayas in the centre and Mindanao in the south. Palawan is on the far west of Visayas.

It forms the northern boundary of the Sulu Sea and is only some 70 kilometres from Malaysia at its southern extremity. It is served by two airports, the larger being at Puerto Princesa, the main town on the island.

I had come to the Philippines because I had met, on-line, a transpinay called Crissy José and I wanted to meet her in real. At the time I was still recovering from the end of my marriage and a brief and failed affair with a women close to my age. (Which was an unmitigated disaster.) I’d been chatting to a couple of women but here was a click with Crissy that I didn’t get with the others. So I booked my ticket.

Spring and summer of 2012 I had passed sailing my yacht Misty around the coast of Scotland. She was sold in September and I wanted something I hadn’t had in a long time — a good chillout holiday and plenty of sex. Well, the Philippines trip got me one of those.

That first visit to the Phils was only three weeks — back then you only got 21 days on the automatic tourist visa. I had made my base at the Oasis Paco Park hotel in Ermita, Manila, and Palawan was the second exploration trip. The first was to Boracay, which I write about here.

(As an aside, I again highly recommend the Oasis Paco Park. It’s reasonably priced, clean and the staff are super-friendly. It also has a really good, if a tad pricey, Italian restaurant.)

We had booked our tickets for the Palawan tour through TravelTeam, and found ourselves on a Zest Airlines flight out of NAIA at 0700.

Palawan Gallery

10/06/2025

Bakla to Kabaklaan: the way of beauty

Originally posted 2021-09-30 07:42:37.

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.

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’. You are an unmasculine male. In Luzon, the most popular local term is ‘bakla’. Their lifestyle is called ‘kabaklaan’.

bakla-beginners — A bakla starts on the life of kabaklaan when she is young, perhaps five or six. This type is called the ‘batang bakla’. Girls who ‘come out’ in later adolescence are known as ‘late bloomers’.

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