EXPLAINER | We’re not just a spectrum, we’re a constellation

Pride Month returns, accompanied by familiar metaphors: sexuality as spectrum, gender as gradient, identity as liminal blur.  Comforting, comprehensible — lines drawn with infinite in-betweens. 

Even fluid lines confine.

Queer lives often defy such traces. 

What if queerness — not plotted, but constellated?

The spectrum, once metaphor, served — widening the aperture past rigid binaries; granting grammar to gradients, motion, multiplicity. From Kinsey’s numerals to Genderbread's pedagogic whimsy, models proliferated — not to place us within, but between.

But here lies the trap: a spectrum still assumes opposites.

It implies a default — and queerness as distance from it.

In a 2022 Pew study, among adults who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, 62% identify as bisexual — an indication of fluidity that challenges rigid categories but still within a binary framework.

It asks: Where do you fall?

Never: What constellations made you?

One does not rank in queerness—neither in degree nor legitimacy. Rather, one is contoured by intersectional entanglements: the neurodivergent mind, the inherited god, the skin’s history, the coordinates of origin, the fracture of memory, the weight of wage, the mother tongue. These are not linear inputs but compounding variables—overlapping, dissonant, disfiguring.

Though statistical articulations of identity plurality in the Philippines remain sparse, local ethnographies gesture toward a more intricate terrain: queerness here emerges not as fixed form but as layering—fluid, unfolding, irreducible to Western taxonomies. A 2020 UP Center for Women and Gender's Study found  LGBTQIA+ youth in poor urban communities use hybrid terms like baklang tomboy or paminta to express experiences shaped by class, kinship, and culture — not deviations, but declarations borne of inheritance and improvisation.

As Kimberlé Crenshaw reminds us, identity is not one thread pulled taut.

It is a weave — a collision of systems that co-construct the self.

Spectrums, in their tidiness, collapse selves into gradients: masc to femme, straight to queer — a utility for systems that prefer data to depth. Efficient, yes — for governance, for curriculum, for code. But the human — immeasurable — resists reduction.

A mixed-methods study involving 66 sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) minority adolescents in British Columbia, Minnesota, and Massachusetts found about one-third used nontraditional sexual orientation identity labels. This usage aligned with trans identities and nonnormative gender lexicons, foregrounding terms not imposed but claimed — language rendered significant by, and for, the youth it names.

Real queerness resists coherence. Some trans bodies find kin not in pronouns but in photosynthesis. Some asexuals love deeply, absent of desire. Some rename themselves, mid-breath. Some abandon the need to be named at all.

Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model shows identity is shaped through nested, relational systems — microsystems like family, mesosystems like school, macrosystems like religion.

A spectrum flattens all that.

A constellation holds it.

Before colonial erasure, our islands knew — an understanding unspoken, but woven through the soil.

The babaylan were spiritual leaders who defied gender. They weren’t considered deviations, but thresholds — sacred precisely in that they stood between binaries. Not male. Not female. Not man. Not a woman. Just kapangyarihan.

Today, Filipino LGBTQIA+ youth inhabit an ever-shifting spectrum: bisexual, bakla, pansexual, tomboy, asexual, queer, and beyond.

These are not mere linguistic clutter, but survival syntax — terms forged in the crucible of class, Catholicism, karaoke, and kinship.

In The Trevor Project’s 2024 Philippines national survey, 13% identified as pansexual, 10% as tomboy, 5% as queer, and 3% as sexually fluid — reflecting the growing presence of hybrid, self-fashioned identities that defy rigid categories.'

The West gave us closets.

Our ancestors gave us the sky.

To say “we are a constellation” is not to romanticize.

It is to resist simplification.

A spectrum can be plotted, quantified, legislated. A constellation must be interpreted — like poetry, like scripture, like the language queerness crafted when none was given.

And still, over 40% of LGBTQIA+ youth feel pressure to define themselves in ways digestible to others as per Human Rights Campaign. To be clear. To make sense. To pick a point.

But you don’t owe anyone coherence.

You don’t have to fit.

You are not here to be measured.

You are here to be seen — as stars are seen.

Not in straight lines.

But in stories.