Student leaders and gender advocates logged in online on Monday, July 20, for “IN-QUEER-Y: A Student’s Guide to Queering the Campus,” a webinar-workshop that laid out, step by step, how to build a formally recognized LGBTQIA+ student organization.
The session was organized by the University of the Philippines Center for Women’s and Gender Studies (UPCWGS) in collaboration with the MSU-IIT Gender and Development Center (GADC), the MSU-IIT Council of Organizations (COO), and the Kataas-taasang Sanggunian ng mga Mag-aaral (KASAMA).
Dr. Frances Antoinette C. Cruz, UPCWGS Deputy Director for Research, Publication, and Resource Collection, opened the program by tying it to an earlier discussion her center held on “queering the curriculum,” a conversation, she noted, that was dominated by faculty. This time, she said, it was the students’ turn to be heard.
Three “pillars” made up the rest of the program. Kaya Alcantara, UPCWGS training coordinator, led the first with a crash course on SOGIESC (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, Gender Expression, and Sex Characteristics), reminding participants that everyone has a SOGIESC, not only LGBTQIA+ people, and that gender identity and sexual orientation are not choices.
“If it was a choice, they would not choose to be trans women in the Philippines,” she said. “It’s very hard to live in your truth in the Philippines.”
She also walked participants through intersectionality, the framework coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw describing how overlapping identities, such as gender, class, disability, and others, shape a person’s distinct experience of privilege or discrimination.
Saira Pambid, Babaylanes, Inc. Executive Director, took the second pillar, tracing the Quezon City-based group’s roots to UP Babaylan alumni and its current network of more than 25 school-based LGBTQIA+ organizations under its Student Advocates for Rights and Inclusion (SARI) program.
She pointed to UP Babaylan’s founding in 1992, after a gay student was assaulted by fraternity members, and Bulacan State University’s Bahaghari, organized in 2016 after a transgender student was barred from wearing the female uniform, as examples of how one incident can grow into a lasting organization.
“Organizing is the process of transforming individual experiences into collective care, collective voice, and collective action,” Pambid said.
Her advice for MSU-IIT: start with three to five committed people, not a headcount, and follow a 30-60-90-day plan: listen and gather, define a purpose, then do one visible activity.
Russell S. Maaniquez Jr., Empress MSU president, closed the pillars with the recognition process itself, drawing on their group’s standing as the only recognized LGBTQIA+ peer organization in the MSU System, based in General Santos City.
The university’s administration, they said, processed Empress MSU’s application like any other student organization; the harder resistance came from within the community, from students afraid of being publicly associated with an LGBT group because of stigma and family expectations.
Maaniquez urged MSU-IIT students to build ties with the student leaders and offices that shape the student handbook. “Recognition is not the finish line,” they said. “It’s just the beginning of the journey as an LGBTQIA-plus student organization.”
During the open forum session, Pambid addressed the question of whether LGBTQIA+ students should set aside their self-expression out of respect for a school’s “dominant culture.” She said respect has to run both ways, wherein asking a minority to become invisible is not the same as asking them to engage respectfully.
On how to address homophobia, she described a shift in advocacy strategy, away from simply providing information and toward what she called value-based communication: finding a value, such as family, that both sides already share, and showing that supporting an LGBTQIA+ family member strengthens rather than threatens the family.
Closing the program, Assoc. Prof. Yasmira Moner, MSU-IIT GADC focal person, referenced the hate comments the university received online over its Pride Month rainbow pedestrian display and described the webinar as a step toward treating MSU-IIT as a “social laboratory” for inclusion.
She said the GADC hopes to continue the partnership with UPCWGS beyond advocacy work into research and curriculum development.
Written by Maan Deuda
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