Towards a bakla ↔ nonbinary epistemology

This essay examines the connections and divergences between bakla and nonbinary by asking: What can we engender when we place the bakla and nonbinary alongside each other? Drawing on autotheoretical methods, I reflect on my own experiences navigating these identities across transnational contexts (Philippines and settler-colonial Australia), alongside encounters with other bakla/nonbinary individuals, to explore how bakla and nonbinary contaminate and reorient each other. I argue that engaging them in dialogue generates a bakla ↔ nonbinary epistemology – or the ways of knowing and being that arises from a bakla who identifies too as nonbinary. When placed together, bakla ↔ nonbinary open us towards generative sites of thought, and attends to how bakla and nonbinary mutually contaminate each other. My suggestions here are threefold: the bakla critiques nonbinary’s whiteness and universality by insisting on the entanglements of race, class, gender, sexuality; bakla and nonbinary exposes each other’s vulnerability to domestication; and bakla and nonbinary should work alongside each other to pivot away from being self-determined labels and return to relationality.