Before the galleons arrived, the babaylan stood at the center of her village and spoke to the dead. She might have been born male. Her community did not care. What mattered was the work she did, the spirits she moved, the sick she healed with hands that carried both kinds of power. Lakapati, a deity of the Tagalog people, held male and female in one body. The Visayan asog dressed as women and no one thought to write a law about it. Gender, in the world that colonization came to destroy, was a matter of what you could do and how the spirits moved through you, not which body you occupied.
That world is gone. What replaced it took 333 years to install and has never fully left. Spain brought the cross and the sword together, and the cross did the slower, quieter damage. America followed with schoolbooks. And the Philippines today, its broken schools, its dynasties, its Congress still refusing to protect queer Filipinos, its voters who keep electing the same families back to power, carries all of it, unexamined, the way a body carries old injuries in the way it walks.
333 Years in the Convent: What Spain Did
Miguel López de Legazpi reached Cebu in 1565 and by 1571 Manila was a Spanish city. The Christianization that followed was, as Britannica records it, thorough in aspiration and selective in fact: the cultural goal of the Spanish clergy was nothing less than the full Christianization and Hispanization of the Filipino. In the first decades, local religions were aggressively suppressed; old practices were not tolerated. The babaylan got pushed to the margins. Her rituals were reclassified as devil-worship. Her gender fluidity became sodomy under Spanish law, and in the 17th and 18th centuries, Spanish administrators burned people accused of it.
What Spain introduced in place of those practices was not merely religion. It was a full reordering of personhood. The encomienda system handed Filipinos over to Spanish encomenderos who collected tribute in exchange for supposed protection. Polo y servicios demanded forced labor. The Catholic Church ran schools, but the schools existed to produce obedience, to God and to the Crown, in that order. The priests outnumbered civil officials in the provinces and served as the real local government, which is why 333 years of Spanish rule left something more durable than any political structure: it left a posture. The posture of the supplicant. The instinct to defer to authority, to wait for a patron, to petition rather than demand.
Spanish surnames replaced indigenous names by decree in 1849. The Catálogo Alfabético de Apellidos handed out European family names to Filipinos who had no ancestral connection to them. The pre-colonial kinship-based identity was replaced with an administrative one, assigned from outside. Even the name of the country, Las Islas Filipinas, named for King Philip II of Spain, was somebody else's act of naming. A people renamed carry, in the very fact of their renaming, the record of who held power over them.
Fifty Years of Schoolbooks: What America Did
Spain sold the Philippines to the United States for twenty million dollars in the Treaty of Paris, 1898. America arrived claiming liberation and proceeded to fight a colonial war that killed between 200,000 and 600,000 Filipino civilians, depending on which estimate you trust. Then it built schools.
Those schools were, as the academic record shows, explicitly designed not just to teach reading but to produce a specific kind of person. Filipino historian Renato Constantino wrote with precision about what that meant: with American education, the Filipinos were not only learning a new language; they were not only forgetting their own language; they were starting to become a new type of American. The 1,074 teachers known as the Thomasites arrived in 1901. English became the sole medium of instruction. American history was taught as history. The Pensionado Act of 1903 sent selected Filipinos to study in the United States, explicitly to bind future Filipino leaders to the colonial administration.
What this produced was a country that learned to measure its own worth in a borrowed tongue. English became the marker of intelligence, of mobility, of civilization. Filipino children learned to be ashamed of speaking their own languages in class. The colonial curriculum cast good citizenship in terms of economic self-sufficiency and non-violence, which meant, practically, that anti-colonial nationalism was quietly framed as bad citizenship. You were taught to be productive within the system, not to question the system. That lesson has not been retracted.
Philippine public education today ranks low in every international measure it participates in. The 2018 PISA results placed Filipino students last in reading comprehension and second to last in mathematics among 79 countries tested. The educational architecture built on colonial foundations was never redesigned from the ground up. It was inherited, maintained, and slowly underfunded. The problem is not only money. It is the unbroken line between a system designed to produce compliant subjects and a system that still has not been asked to produce critical citizens.
The Patron and the Vote: Why the Same Families Keep Winning
By 2025, more than 80% of congressional seats in the Philippines are controlled by dynastic politicians, according to the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. All 80 provinces have political families. The BTI 2026 Country Report on the Philippines describes governance as constrained by political dynasties, institutional veto players, and informal power brokers including warlords, private armies, and the military.
This is not a failure of democracy. It is democracy functioning exactly as the colonial system trained it to function. The encomienda taught Filipinos that the powerful man provides and the community owes him. The Spanish friar was both spiritual father and local administrator. The American period formalized patron-client networks through the cacique class it chose to govern through. What the voter does every election season, accepting cash the night before, choosing the family name they know, returning the Marcoses to Malacañang, is the rational behavior of someone who has learned, over generations, that institutions are unreliable and that personal loyalty to a patron is the only protection that works.
Sociologist Nicole Curato has described this with clarity: elections technically legitimize political dynasties by giving the illusion that the public has the power to choose its leaders, even though the pool of electable candidates is generally limited to members of elite families. The 2013 Pork Barrel Scam, in which billions from the Priority Development Assistance Fund were stolen through fake NGOs, implicated senators from multiple powerful dynasties. Several of them staged political comebacks. Bong Revilla won a Senate seat again. Jinggoy Estrada returned. The voters who returned them were not stupid. They were operating inside a system that offers no credible alternative and punishes those who try to build one.
What Constantino identified as the miseducated Filipino, a person taught loyalty to a colonial state rather than critical consciousness of it, votes in every election. Not because Filipinos are uniquely credulous or uniquely corrupt, but because the educational system designed to suppress anti-colonial nationalism never produced its replacement. No sustained, compulsory civic education that teaches how to read a platform, interrogate a policy, or demand accountability from an official. What gets taught instead is national pride as feeling, not as practice.
The Cross That Stayed: Catholicism and the Conservative Reflex
The SOGIE Equality Bill was first proposed in the Philippine House of Representatives in 2000. It has been re-filed multiple times since. It has never passed. As of 2023, nineteen senators signed a letter seeking to remand the bill back to committee. The Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines, which says it opposes discrimination in principle, has consistently applied pressure against the bill's passage, framing protection of LGBTQ+ Filipinos as a threat to the family and to religious freedom.
The irony the CBCP has never publicly addressed: Christianity is not indigenous to the Philippines. The gender diversity the Church calls foreign ideology was here before the Spanish arrived. The babaylan who held male and female in one body was not an import. Lakapati was not imported. The asog who served as shamans in the Visayas were not an innovation. They were the original culture. What was imported, on ships, enforced by inquisition, with people burned for sodomy, was the binary. The conservative position in the Philippines is, in the most precise historical sense, the colonial position.
Open Table Metropolitan Community Church made the point directly in their published position on the SOGIE bill: Christianity and our major denominations in the Philippines are all western and colonial. Christianity is not indigenous to the Philippines. The CBCP's claim that protecting queer Filipinos represents ideological colonization is, by any honest reading of history, backwards. The colonization happened in 1565. Its most durable product is the church the CBCP represents.
Over 86% of Filipinos identify as Catholic, making the Philippines the third largest Catholic population in the world. That number is also a colonial census. A faith introduced through force and maintained through five centuries of institutional presence now polices the moral boundaries of a sovereign country in a way that directly contradicts that country's own pre-colonial beliefs. Philippine conservatism on gender and sexuality is not the preservation of Filipino culture. It is the preservation of someone else's culture, mistaken for the original.
The Celebrity Politician and the Devotional Fan
Ferdinand Marcos Jr. won the 2022 Philippine presidential election with 31 million votes, the largest mandate in Philippine electoral history. His father declared martial law in 1972, ruled as a dictator until 1986, oversaw the torture and disappearance of thousands of political prisoners, and plundered an estimated five to ten billion dollars from the state. The Marcos family was never made to give most of it back. The educational system produced generations of Filipinos who learned this history incompletely, contested, or not at all.
Political celebrity in the Philippines functions along lines that were laid down under Spanish rule and never fully dismantled. The datu commanded loyalty through personal authority, not institutional accountability. The friar commanded devotion through charisma and spiritual access. The American period added the celebrity element, the radio voice, the movie star. Joseph Estrada, Lito Lapid, Nora Aunor, Manny Pacquiao, the trajectory from entertainment to elected office is shorter in the Philippines than anywhere else because the gap between devotion to a performer and devotion to a patron was always narrow.
What this produces in practice is a voter who follows a person, not a position. Who defends their chosen politician the way a devotee defends a saint, not because the saint has delivered measurable results but because the relationship is affective, identity-forming, tribal. Criticism of the politician registers as an attack on the self. This is not a character flaw particular to Filipinos. It is what happens when civic education is replaced with loyalty training across four centuries.
Third World by Design: What Was Never Rebuilt
The Philippines holds some of the most fertile land in Southeast Asia, a position along shipping routes that has generated wealth for every colonial power that occupied it, and a population whose labor drives remittance flows that constitute nearly 10% of GDP annually. It is not poor because of geography or natural shortage. The PhilArchive paper by Angelito Malicse identifies the direct line between colonial suppression of indigenous knowledge systems and governance structures and the country's present developmental position. What colonization did was not merely extract wealth. It reorganized the entire system of value, accountability, and collective action so that wealth accumulated at the top and devolved nowhere.
The hacienda system Spain installed concentrated land in the hands of the Church and a small ilustrado elite. American rule maintained that concentration. Independence in 1946 transferred power from American administrators to Filipino elites who had been educated and selected by the colonial system to run it. The people at the top of Philippine society in 1946 were, in most cases, the families who had cooperated most thoroughly with the colonial system. They had the land, the education, the connections. They wrote the constitution. Their descendants, by and large, are the 80% of congressional seats the dynasties hold today.
Poverty in the Philippines is not an accident or an absence of resources. It is a structure. It was built carefully over 400 years and has been maintained, with modifications, by each successive governing class since. The Filipino who works abroad and sends money home because there is no dignified work at home is not a symbol of Filipino resilience, though that is the story told about him. He is a symptom of an extractive system that exported colonialism's labor logic into its own citizens.
The Empathy Problem: What Disappears When Community Is Replaced by Hierarchy
Pre-colonial Philippine society was not a utopia. But the barangay was a community with reciprocal obligations. The babaylan's role was collective: she healed the sick, mediated between worlds, held the community's grief. The colonial church replaced collective spiritual practice with individual salvation administered through a priest. The datu's communal accountability was replaced with the encomendero's extraction rights. The pre-colonial ethic of mutual obligation, utang na loob in its original sense, a debt of inner gratitude between equals, was rewired into a vertical relationship: you owe the patron, always, and the patron owes you nothing that cannot be revoked.
What that rewiring produced over generations is a society where empathy runs strongly along family lines and weakens sharply past them. The Filipino will give everything for his family. For the stranger in the next city, for the Lumad community being displaced from its ancestral land, for the trans woman being refused a bathroom, the connection is much harder to feel. Not because Filipinos are cold, but because the colonial system systematically dismantled every institution that built solidarity across the lines of kinship. Church, school, and political patron all competed to replace the horizontal community with a vertical one.
The queer Filipino asking for legal protection against discrimination is asking precisely this: extend the circle of obligation past the family, past the patron, past the tribe. The resistance to that ask comes from multiple directions, the Church, the conservative legislator, the voter who considers the bill too foreign or too abstract for his immediate life. All of them are, in different ways, people whose capacity for civic solidarity was compressed over four centuries into something smaller than it used to be.
What Was Burned Is Still Burning
The Spanish burned the pre-colonial writing systems they found. The baybayin script survives in fragments. Most of the oral literature was never written down, and the people who carried it were converted, suppressed, or killed. The babaylan was driven into hiding. What survives of the pre-colonial world comes to us through the accounts of the colonizers, which is to say it comes to us through the records of people who were trying to destroy it.
And yet the Lumad babaylan still leads her community in Mindanao. The Igorot communities in the Cordillera have kept practices the lowland Philippines long abandoned. The people who study pre-colonial history and feel, reading it, something like recognition, not nostalgia, which is sentimental, but the specific shock of finding out that what you were told was foreign to you was actually yours, those people are everywhere in the country now, and they are young.
The question the Philippines has never fully answered is whether it can build a post-colonial civic identity, one that draws on what the babaylan actually was, that teaches history as a record of power rather than a pageant of heroes, that extends legal protection to gender identities that existed here long before Christianity did, that holds a dynasty politician to account the way a barangay held its datu. This would require dismantling systems built over four centuries with intention.
The Philippines is not trapped. No country is. But the trap has a shape, and it has a history, and you cannot walk out of it without first seeing it clearly. The babaylan is still there, inside the culture that tried to erase her. The question is whether the country will let her back in.
Britannica. "Philippines: The Spanish Period." Encyclopaedia Britannica. Accessed May 2026. https://www.britannica.com/place/Philippines/The-Spanish-period
BTI Project. "BTI 2026 Philippines Country Report." Bertelsmann Transformation Index, 2026. https://bti-project.org/en/reports/country-report/PHL
Davis, D.B., Mendoza, R.U., & Yap, J.K. "Corruption Risk and Political Dynasties: Exploring the Links Using Public Procurement Data in the Philippines." Economics and Governance 25 (2024): 81-109. https://archium.ateneo.edu/asog-pubs/273/
Democratic Erosion. "The Ruling Family: How Political Dynasties Are Destroying Democracy in the Philippines." May 2025. https://democratic-erosion.org/2025/05/01/the-ruling-family-how-political-dynasties-are-destroying-democracy-in-the-philippines/
Francisco, Adrianne. "From Subjects to Citizens: American Colonial Education and Philippine Nation-Making, 1900-1934." University of California, Berkeley Dissertation, 2016. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/01x8n57g
GMA News Online. "Religious Groups' Opposition Puts Senate's SOGIE Bill in Limbo." February 8, 2023. https://www.gmanetwork.com/news/topstories/nation/860107/religious-groups-opposition-puts-senate-s-sogie-bill-in-limbo/story/
Lowy Institute. "Keeping Up with the Dutertes, a Model Philippine Political Dynasty." 2025. https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/keeping-dutertes-model-philippine-political-dynasty
Imperial College Union. "LGBTQ+ History Month: Queer Culture in Pre-colonial Philippines." February 2024. https://www.imperialcollegeunion.org/blogs/lgbtq-officer/lgbtq-history-month-queer-culture-pre-colonial-philippines
Malicse, Angelito. "The Hindrances to Development in the Philippines: A Legacy of Colonization and Religion." PhilArchive. https://philarchive.org/rec/MALTHT
Open Table Metropolitan Community Church. "Position on the SOGIE Equality Bill." February 2023. https://opentablemcc.ph/blog/position-or-rationale-of-open-table-metropolitan-community-church-in-supporting-and-calling-for-the-passage-of-the-sogie-equality-bill-into-law/
Positively Filipino. "333 Years in the Convent." March 2021. https://www.positivelyfilipino.com/magazine/333-years-in-the-convent
Positively Filipino. "After Two Decades, LGBT Rights Still Bogged Down in Philippine Congress." June 2024. https://www.positivelyfilipino.com/magazine/after-two-decades-lgbt-rights-still-bogged-down-in-philippine-congress
Sinaunang Panahon. "Language and Education Reforms in the Philippines Under American Rule." April 2025. https://sinaunangpanahon.com/language-and-education-reforms-in-the-philippines-under-american-rule/
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The Aswang Project. "Let's Discuss Transgender People in the Pre-Colonial Philippines." June 2022. https://www.aswangproject.com/lets-discuss-transgender-pre-colonial-philippines/
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