What is Bahaghari?
“Bahaghari. Patuloy lang sa pagniningning.”
Equal work rights and opportunities for the LGBTQ+ community.
The Bahaghari is a campaign created by Prism around gender equality; specifically, queers in the workplace. According to Patricia Angela Luzano Enriquez’s research paper, “How Discrimination Happens Being LGBT and the Experience of Discrimination in Access to Employment, and the Labour Market in the Philippines”, 25 percent of LGBTQ+ workers been harassed by their superiors, 33 percent were harassed by their co-workers, and 60 percent became targets or topics for jokes inside the workplace. The discrimination happening to them isn’t because of their capability to do work, but because of the gender they identify themselves with.
This campaign aims to stop this unjust treatment of queers by acknowledging the problem and suggesting ways of how to prevent it. Everyone is entitled to respect and just treatment whatever gender you may identify yourself with.The first step is to recognize the problem, and from there is helping to the best of your ability to contribute to solving it. Nothing should be impossible if everyone will cooperate and decide to be on the same and right page.
Why Prism and Bahaghari?
Prism in optics is an object capable of separating white light into the colors of the rainbow. The campaign group was named before it, for the members wanted to become a prism for the unjustly treated people of the LGBTQ+ community. The Prism will serve as an instrument for their colors and potentials to be seen and not ignored.
Bahaghari is the Tagalog word for rainbow. Rainbow is not only what comes after the rain but also the color that signifies the LGBTQ+ community. Prism used the word Bahaghari to symbolize queers that are equally deserving of legal work rights and opportunities like everybody else does.
Some people are still ignorant of the diversity in the gender identities of people. To prevent this ignorance, Prism will gladly refract the monochromatic white light that other people see and show them the colors of the Bahaghari that are great contributors to the economy that runs in our world.