Baylan, Asog, Transvestism, and Sodomy: Gender, Sexuality and the Sacred in Early Colonial Philippines
The importance of women to the spiritual wellbeing of the inhabitants of the Philippine archipelago was a recurrent theme in the reports emanating from the quills of missionaries, explorers and administrators alike from the first European contact with Magellan in 1521 and subsequently during the decades following Legaspi’s arrival in 1565. However the reports contained…