I once watched a video where someone who had openly identified as part of the LGBTQIA+ community smiled at the camera, whispered, “Para sa lalaki lang ako,” and then cut to a girlfriend, bright sunlight behind them and Moira Dela Torre’s “Titibo-tibo” swelling in the background. I paused, thinking I had stumbled into a commercial for conformity disguised as love, a production in which queerness was temporary, heteronormativity inevitable, and the past erased as if it were an error in software. This video, like hundreds before it, did not serve its purpose of entertainment, bur rather normalized a worldview that has no scientific or social justification, yet somehow feels familiar because it is repeated so frequently.

These videos are called “factory resets,” and the phrase itself tells us everything we need to know about the ideology behind the joke. They suggest that queerness is a temporary misalignment that can be corrected with the proper heterosexual experience, and that happiness or authenticity is only available through a cisgender, opposite-sex partner. Still, this narrative is entirely false. Sexual orientation is not a developmental hiccup to be fixed, and gender identity is not a phase to be “corrected.” The American Psychological Association, along with every major medical and mental health organization in the world, has consistently stated that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender identities are normal variations of human experience, fully valid, and not inherently changeable by external influence. There is no evidence that attraction functions like a light switch that flips on exposure to the “right” person, and the idea that queerness is a mistake awaiting correction is a dangerous cultural myth that has been empirically debunked.

The myth, however, persists because comfort is more contagious than truth. The audience of these videos is not the LGBTQIA+ community. It is everyone else, the parents who still whisper “phase lang yan,” the friends who hope this story proves their assumptions, and the society that still measures lives by how quickly they can be restored to normal. Every trending clip reinforces a message that queerness is provisional and heterosexuality is the ultimate solution, and that social approval depends on returning to the preordained script.

Some will argue that personal attraction evolves, and that is true. Sexual fluidity exists for some, particularly in women, yet fluidity does not mean correction, and it does not mean queerness is invalid. Fluidity is variation, not hierarchy. It does not rank heterosexuality as the final form of authenticity, and it does not transform lived queerness into a temporary error. When these personal journeys are framed publicly as a “reset,” however, they stop being private and become a cultural argument against the legitimacy of everyone else whose life does not conform to the expected endpoint.

As Paulo Ballesteros once said in Panti Sisters, “Ang mga bakla, kahit tanggalin mo pa ang make-up, tanggalin mo pa ang wig, at hindi mag-ganyan ganyan, ay bakla pa rin.” Identity does not disappear because a video frames it as a problem solved. The trend reveals how uncomfortable society remains with lives that do not resolve neatly and love that refuses to conform to expectation. Until we recognize that being LGBTQIA+ is a reality, not a phase or a punchline, every “reset” will continue to teach the same lie, and the people who live that lie will pay the cost long after the screen goes dark.

The Frontman