Thanks LTO, But LGBTQ+ People Aren't That Special

Have you ever gotten a gift that you never wanted in the first place? You stand in front of your friend, grinning as he watches you open another one of his art experiments––this time, a ceramic dinosaur sculpture that looks more like a bulul that grew a tail. 

“Happy birthday, do you like it?” You want to say you had already told him three weeks ago that he could instead buy some cake which you and all your friends could eat together as a gift. Okay: you do say it. 

“Oh, but this one is better,” he replies. 

Forgive the tortured metaphor, but the recent misguided move by the Land Transportation Office feels somewhat like this. 

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If you haven’t caught up with the news, the government agency was called out by the LGBTQ+ advocacy group Bahaghari after one of its offices lumped LGBTQ+ people with senior citizens, pregnant women, and people with disabilities in a special priority lane. 

(It’s as if someone in LTO just watched the movie Mean Girls and became convinced “too gay to function” was really a thing.) 

"While perhaps well-meaning, the implication of LTO’s LGBTQ priority lane is dangerous. To this day, many people, including lawmakers, cite the erroneous idea that being LGBTQ+ is a disorder,” said Bahaghari in a statement released online.

LTO responded that the move was part of their gender and development project and wasn’t malicious. “I understand that the region’s leadership merely conceptualized the activity in a desire to recognize the LGBTQ+ community. There was no intention to offend or unnecessarily put them in the spotlight,” the agency’s chief Jay Art Tugade explained.

As many have already pointed out, the problem with this act is that it’s mere window dressing (I just had to use that pun)-–a distraction from the bigger problem: the absence of a SOGIE Equality Law, among the many other things the government could do to help the queer community.

As Bahaghari pointed out: “It would be more productive for government to issue policies that address actual concerns raised by LGBTQ+ Filipinos, such as the SOGIE Equality Bill, marriage equality, and in a time of economic crisis, a family living wage which could be enjoyed by all regardless of SOGIESC.”

But the damage is done. On forums and comment sections, people are criticizing the community for getting more than the usual treatment. A cursory look will show you statements like, “Priority lane, hindi entitlement,” or “Parang dinaig pa nila PWD mas lalong hindi bigyan sila ng priority dapat po senior lang saka PWD!”

And because the community decried this seemingly well-meaning act, inevitably, some people will also think we’re being ungrateful. 

The truth is, any move we make in reaction to LTO’s act will earn us detractors. 

But what the community wants is equality: we wish for nothing but to be included in a society that marginalizes us. We want safe spaces where we can exist without discrimination. We want fair wages and equal employment opportunities, and if and when that doesn’t happen, we want there to be a law that could protect us. 

We want to experience the same things cisgender heterosexual people do: the right to marry, the right to adopt, the right to make medical decisions for our spouse when they get sick, the right to bequeath our properties to our partners in case we die first (without going through the bewildering processes like setting up a business and putting our assets under that business, or such.)

Thank you, LTO, for the effort, but queer people aren’t that special. We don’t want special treatment for being queer; we want you to treat us like everybody else. Every Filipino, not just queer Filipinos, deserve stellar service from you–regardless of their sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, and sex characteristics. 

(By the way, LTO, just in case: there’s also that stereotype that gay people can’t drive, please don’t make us take longer driving classes.) 

Evan Tan is a founding board member of the Philippine LGBT Chamber of Commerce and worked extensively on research on SOGIE diversity & inclusion in the workplace: The Philippine Corporate SOGIE Diversity & Inclusiveness Index. He is also the chief marketing officer and co-founder of the Philippines's pioneering end-to-end tax assistance platform Taxumo.