LITERARY
November 2020 Issue
On Why Being Who You Are Matters written byJay Fernando
I would never have imagined that lying in bed with my eyes closed and listening to my all time favorite songs could become a source of deep anxiety. It should have been one of the things I love doing, but at that moment fear was slowly creeping in – more and more people were getting sick, as the government scrambles trying to figure out how to abate the rising infection rate, and the economy is shut down. In what usually is a moment of rest, I felt restless. When you’re in social isolation, you start asking questions. Perhaps because you were accustomed to talking to people, you start talking to yourself more. You start with the small easy questions: Like if you’re going to be stuck for a long time at home, will you be able to just subsist on canned sardines? or How am I going to wash my clothes without a laudrymat operating? Inevitably you move on to the harder ones: If you get laid off, are your savings enough til the economy stabilizes and get re-hired? Are the relationships you’re tending dying? Then you move on to more existential questions, to questions about your identity and basically how you’ve lived your life thus far. You ask about what you think you have control over and what you do not. For some LGBT people, that includes your gender identity and presentation. Like perhaps – is my gender identity of importance when most of our pressing questions are about surviving a pandemic? I’ve never felt comfortable with how society sees me as I am obviously coded male. And though my gender dysphoria hasn’t made me completely transition to a more female-coded body or presentation, it is enough to make me question if my gender identity is something I do have control over. It has made me ask these questions years ago, and came to the conclusion that I am nonbinary. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been much talk or representation for nonbinary people in the country. I myself, after years of identifying as nonbinary have a hard time explaining what it is to my friends and family. I just tell them that I do not associate with being male or female, that I question gender roles in society, and that’s that. Ive always asked why being nonbinary is not as popular in the Philippines, and I could only surmise an answer. We as a people are not accustomed to asking questions, and more and more nowadays to ask questions against authority is something discouraged, if not completely shot down by the perpetuated culture of fearing authority for your life because of the Duterte regime and its tagging of people pushing back against power. This is more apparent during this time of the pandemic. But the capacity to ask and search for answers are fundamental to freedom. And freedom is crucial to our most human endeavor of making sense of our lives. Servitude and obedience have been how we are perceived to be as a people, and to actualize is something that is contrary to what our society has prevented to do. A country of slaves, made to put things in tidy small boxes, understandable and not conflicting. In times of economic suffering caused by the pandemic, in a poor country like the Philippines, it seems as if gender identity is a non-essential concern. It will be easier if you just accept things “as is” and not something you question or make a big deal about. Being nonbinary seems to be, at least to most people, is something hard to explain and moreso “be” when questioning the gender binary is an activity we could just not do.
And this is why I think it is perhaps important for me to be who I am, and know myself more than anybody else who could lay claim to that privilege. In times of the pandemic, I realized how deeply important this is – being who you are, truly and without reservations. Questions like this about gender identity are not questions most people have when faced with the reality of survival. But it is an essential question, if not one of the most important ones about our identity.
8 8
