The West is a purveyor of liberal democracy, which is somehow what the Philippines has inherited from decades of American colonization. But there are influences from our pre-colonial past that have made our kind of liberal democracy unique. Much as we would like to copy what the West is doing, we could never go all out without considering our native culture.
Years ago, my late uncle, whose family had migrated to the US, complained about how he could no longer discipline his children like he used to do when they were in the Philippines. Lawmakers have made sure that their brand of raising children would be reflected in the laws that they enacted.
I could just imagine how he would have reacted to what the Democrats and the current US president, Joe Biden, are promoting. These are no longer just about disciplining children but have extended to other aspects of parenting as well. Children in the US nowadays are allowed to choose what gender they identify with no matter what biological sex they were born with.
Children who are born biologically male can now identify as a woman and proceed to change their physical makeup. Some medical practitioners are making money from this new gender ideology, providing medical and psychiatric help to transitioning children. Sadly, these are often irreversible, like girls having their breasts lopped off to make them look like boys and boys imbibing puberty blockers that would make them grow up to feel like they are women.
I doubt, though, if our politicians would be able to enact laws that would make the Philippines become all-out liberal like in the West. I remember our own Hidilyn Diaz expressing her opposition to the trend of allowing biological males to compete as women in sports. Imagine having a biological male compete with Diaz, a biological woman, in weightlifting. These biological males have inherent physical advantages over biological females.
Some Filipinos, except when they are steeped in western influences and culture, may accept such drastic changes in viewpoints and rules. But I am sure that enacting similar rules in the country would never be accepted by the majority of Filipinos, who are conservatives. Would they agree to, say, using the pronouns that transitioners in the west are using?
A trans woman, who is biologically a man, would want to be called “she” instead of “he.” Or a trans woman can go ungrammatical, referring to himself as “they,” which is actually, in English grammar, the plural of the singular “he” or “she.”
This situation has actually generated a conservative backlash in the West. In the US, conservatives are speaking out against the trend that they accuse the progressives or the “Left” (also referred to as “woke”) of promoting. I once considered myself a progressive, but on this issue I have aligned myself with conservatives. I am a father, and I simply don’t like this gender ideology to reach our shores and upset the status quo.