We push away the unimaginable

As a child, I noticed girls the same way I noticed boys. I admired them, thought about them, wanted their attention. Long before I learned the words for how I felt, my heart had already figured itself out. The world around me had not.

When I spoke too openly about finding girls beautiful, I was corrected. When I questioned why queer people were treated differently, I was reprimanded. The lesson was always the same: there were acceptable ways to be a girl, and loving another girl was not one of them.

So I dated men. Not because my attraction to them was false; it was and is real. Yet dating men came with its own peculiar burden. They joked about threesomes, fantasized about cheating scenarios, and asked invasive questions that turned intimacy into performance. What was, to me, a personal truth was, to others, a category of sexual entertainment.

There was one girl in high school. For a brief time, I allowed myself to imagine what choosing her might look like. We sat beside each other often enough that ordinary moments began to feel charged with possibility. But possibility is difficult to nurture when the future has already been scripted for you. From childhood, I had been taught to imagine marriage. A husband. Children. Family gatherings where nobody questioned the legitimacy of my relationship. I was raised to see these things not merely as options but as milestones. And this future I had been taught to desire seemed unavailable if I chose a woman.

A decade later, I am in law school, and the country has changed, but not quite enough.

There have been victories worth celebrating. The Right to Care ordinance in Quezon City recognized the right of queer partners to make health-care decisions for one another. The Supreme Court’s recognition of same-sex couples’ rights to co-own property signaled another step toward acknowledging relationships that have long existed despite legal invisibility.

Yet, while these wins deserve to be lauded, they also remind me how much remains unfinished, because recognition in fragments is not the same as equality in full.

The Sogie (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, and Expression) Equality Bill has still not become law. Same-sex marriage is still not honored. The queer couples who are courageous enough to continue building lives together, live without the legal recognition routinely granted to straight couples.

Class also shapes the ways these limitations are experienced and, for some, temporarily bypassed. More privileged queer couples have the option to leave the country to marry abroad, pursue adoption processes through jurisdictions that allow joint parenthood, or explore surrogacy arrangements that remain out of reach for most people. In these cases, love is not only mediated by law but also by income. What is framed as personal freedom is often, in practice, a question of who can afford to move through systems that others are locked out of.

For bisexual people, this reality creates a unique tension. We are often told that we have a choice. But what kind of choice is it when one path is protected and the other is punished at worst and treated as a spectacle at best? The idea of “choice” assumes symmetry, as if both options exist on equal footing. But in practice, they do not. One path is socially reinforced. The other is negotiated, questioned, and sometimes erased altogether.

This asymmetry does something subtle over time. It teaches us to anticipate inconvenience. To estimate risk not only in terms of emotion but in terms of legality, family acceptance, workplace dynamics, and public perception. It teaches us that love is not just private; it is institutionally mediated.

In law school, I study doctrines that promise neutrality: equal protection, due process. I learn the language through which rights are articulated and constrained. But I also see the gaps between legal principle and lived experience. The law can recognize dignity in abstract terms while still failing to protect the conditions that make dignity possible. It can affirm equality while preserving structures that make some relationships easier to sustain than others.

I think about that girl from high school sometimes. I wonder how many bisexual Filipinos have stood at similar crossroads, weighing affection against practicality, love against legality, desire against the architecture of a society that still struggles to understand it. Some may have chosen invisibility. Others may have chosen visibility at a cost. Many likely learned to live somewhere in between, adjusting the expression of their identities depending on what felt safest in a given room, a given year, a given stage of life.

I wonder when queer Filipinos will no longer have to calculate the cost of loving openly.

Most of all, I wonder what becomes possible when the future finally belongs to all of us.

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Angela Maree Encomienda, 26, is a second-year law student at the University of the Philippines College of Law.