Chapter 6:

Sarah; Entrepreneur

Undergoing gender reassignment was the start of a whole new chapter in my life—but sadly one where I had to fight hard for the recognition of my new identity. Through parting with my male form, I was given a new life and I saw no reason why I should be forced to keep the ‘Mr’ title since it belonged to my former self. I wanted to be legally recognised as ‘Ms’.

I was born into an affluent Chinese family in the Nakhon Sawan province, otherwise known as the Heavenly City, in the central region of Thailand. My parents called me Suchat, a very traditional male name, but my life was to contain very little in the way of either tradition or masculinity. For a long time, I struggled to pinpoint when my femininity first manifested itself, but a few years ago I stumbled upon an old black and white photograph of me that finally answered my question. It was taken by my aunt when I was only two years old. I’m dressed in a polka-dot skirt and have a bandana loosely wrapped around my head, to substitute for the hair I had yet to grow. My aunt dressed me up on a whim believing, as I’m sure you’ll agree, that all infants are adorable regardless of their gender. She didn’t mean any harm; she was just having some fun, and she certainly didn’t intend to nurture my feminine side.

I was the first grandson in my clan, a position that holds significant status and responsibility in the Chinese culture. As the eldest son, I was expected to set a good example for my younger siblings and cousins. My parents expected me to do great things with my life, and most importantly, to give them grandchildren who would keep the family name alive.

While men are revered in Chinese culture, women are treated like second-class citizens. Parents invest a lot of money in their sons’ education, ensuring that they are given every possible opportunity to succeed in life, but daughters often conclude their education after primary school. Once married, Chinese women are considered the property of their husbands’ families. Bearing all this in mind, you might begin to question why any Chinese man in his right mind would want to become a woman.

I didn’t choose to express my female side so that I could lead a more difficult life. That would be insane. Why would I want to walk away from a privileged existence and embark on such an obstacle-strewn path? My answer is simple. For as long as I can remember, I have felt that I should rightfully have been born a woman, and to live a lie and try to pretend otherwise, would be no kind of life at all in my eyes.

When I was a young boy and my family first began to notice signs of my emerging femininity, they paid little heed. They probably thought that it was just a phase that I would eventually grow out of. I was such a model child in every other way and gave them very little cause for complaint—I was obedient and diligent, always eager to help out with the household chores, and at school I achieved straight As.

But from an early age, I didn’t feel like I belonged in the male body I had been given. I developed a profound dislike for my genitals and when I urinated I handled my penis with only the tips of my thumb and my index finger. I had no interest in toys that were considered boyish, preferring to play with plastic dolls instead. While other boys my age thought nothing of running around the fields in their bare feet, I insisted on wearing shoes at all times so that I wouldn’t get my delicate feet dirty. I preferred to be neat like I thought all girls ought to be. I also took good care of my fingernails and hair and the thought of going out in public with creased clothes horrified me. My mother was not always free to iron my clothes so I learned how to do it myself. It wasn’t easy though because back then we used a charcoal iron, which had to be filled and heated, and no matter how careful I was, the heavy, unwieldy instrument would inevitably spit out sparks and burn my clothes.

According to Chinese culture, the first boy born to the eldest son in the family is also considered the youngest child of his grandparents. As a result, my agong and ama were especially fond and protective of me. My family were major shareholders in the private primary school that I attended, and upon my grandfather’s orders the staff treated me like a little prince. Agong told them not to let me kick balls with the other boys, lift heavy things, or carry out any other kind of labour. I became known as the khun nu —the ‘little master’.

One day, when I was feeling particularly adventurous, I volunteered to help move bricks to the construction site of a new building on the school grounds. I stacked several bricks into a small pile and raised them above my head, but as I stepped forward one of them tumbled to the ground, hitting the side of my head on its way. I was left with a small gash on my scalp but it was enough to convince agong that I needed a personal attendant to watch over me. From then on, my attendant rarely left my side. Once at a Boy Scout camp, he accompanied me on a two-kilometre-long walk, carrying a basket full of snacks just in case I felt peckish. Needless to say, I was the only boy scout with a personal attendant.

As sheltered as my upbringing undoubtedly was, I don’t believe it contributed in any way to my burgeoning femininity. The way I see it is that I am innately female—it is not something that was ever dictated by my circumstances or the people around me. I believe that our basic framework has been determined long before people and places begin to influence us.

When puberty kicked in, my femininity became more pronounced. Throughout higher primary and secondary level, friends at school had always teased me about how effeminate I was, and with good reason. At school, our uniform consisted of a white, short-sleeved shirt and a pair of shorts, but thanks to tailoring tips I had learned from my mother, I managed to adapt mine more to my liking. I shortened the legs and added extra pleats to the ends so that the shorts actually looked more like a skirt. While my school friends made fun of my attire, my teachers tried to dissuade me from wearing the shorts, claiming that they were too short and too feminine, but I wasn’t actually violating any school regulations so I continued wearing them.

Whenever photographs were taken of our class, I always assumed a ladylike pose, joining my hands together modestly in front of me and beaming brightly at the camera. Even without the aid of hormones, I looked like a girl. In one particular portrait, taken when I was ten years old, I’m wearing a crisp, leaf-patterned shirt and sitting on a circular rattan chair, holding a puppy in my hands, and were it not for my short hair, no one would ever suspect that I was really a boy.

As a teenager I never missed a single extracurricular activity. They provided me with an opportunity to unveil my femininity, and to hopefully earn the acceptance of my peers. Traditional Thai dances were one of my favourite pastimes and I always pleaded to be allowed play female roles, such as that of the nymph, which allowed me to wear an elaborate golden chada on my head.

On National Teacher’s Day, a boy and a girl from each grade presented what are called phans to their teachers as a display of gratitude. Phans are chalice-like vessels which contain flower arrangements. I obviously wasn’t allowed to represent my class as a female, but I arranged the flowers myself and made sure that I got the final say in how each phan looked.

One of the highlights of my self-expression during my childhood was when I marched as a drum majorette on the school sports day. It took all my powers of persuasion to convince the teachers to allow me to wear the majorette attire. Some of the teachers suggested that I should take my conduct down a notch or two, but they were always very tactful and never discriminated against me. They appreciated that I channelled my outgoing personality in a positive way, and found me a welcome relief to the timidity and reserve of the other students.

My father was the one who opposed my identity the most, although he never showed his disapproval when I was young. Before moving to Bangkok, I cross-dressed only on the rare occasions when school activities afforded me the opportunity. It wasn’t until I became a teenager that my father and the rest of my family began to worry about my penchant for women’s clothing. That was when it became clear to them that this wasn’t just a phase. Tia felt humiliated at having such an effeminate son; it suggested to the rest of the world that he had failed in his duty as a parent. His repressed disapproval only found its way to the surface years later.

My grandmother was the one member of my family who stuck by me. She loved me dearly. She regularly defended me against the scathing comments of other relatives, and she refused to partake in gossip about the possibility of me being a kathoey and wreaking shame upon the family. I spent a lot of time with ama , happy to be able to dispense with pretences in her company and just be myself. After she died, I felt like I had lost my best friend. Reduced to an army of just one, I felt exposed and vulnerable in the company of my relatives, and I was relieved when the time came for me to move to Bangkok to further my studies.

When I first arrived in Bangkok in 1973, kathoeys weren’t very common. I lived with my uncle in a place called Sukhumvit Soi 71, that was unfortunately also home to a gang of rough degenerates. They gathered in the area to drink together and generally harass innocent passers-by. They teased me mercilessly whenever I walked past them. The term ‘ kathoey ’ would be hurled at me to the accompaniment of shrieks of laughter. They seemed somewhat confused by my identity, however, and I would often hear them arguing over whether I was a ‘ tom ’ or a kathoey. Tom is short for tomboy and is used in reference to manly lesbians, while their more feminine partner is referred to as a ‘ dee ’, as in ‘lady’. Nowadays, the more acceptable term for a tom is a sao lor , meaning a handsome woman. I tried to ignore the degenerates in the hope that they would eventually grow bored by my lack of response, but the harassment continued day in, day out. Kathoey is considered a derogatory term and having it regularly hurled at me in public caused me a great deal of embarrassment. I worried that my sexuality would eventually become the talk of my uncle’s neighbourhood and be a source of embarrassment to him. So I devised a charade to minimise the gossip. Given the fact that many people had already mistaken me for a tom since my arrival in Bangkok, I decided I may as well assume that identity. In Thai society, a woman wishing to pass for a man is considered understandable—admirable even. But a man playing the part of a woman is considered disgraceful.

I discussed my plan with my uncle and he readily agreed to it. From then on, I wore shirts with folded-up sleeves, trousers, sported a Twiggy-inspired hairstyle and rode a large motorcycle, all in an effort to pass for a tom . It clearly worked because men stopped harassing me and, ironically, the challenge of seducing a lesbian proved too much for many men to resist and I was being hit on more than ever before.

It was around this time that my family’s once-sound finances began to rapidly deteriorate. I resolved to help them out in any way I could so I asked my teachers at Nitipon Vocational College, where I was studying hotel management, to let me know if they knew of a vacancy in any hotel. Six months later I found work as a bellboy in the Peninsula Hotel in Surawong. I worked from 6.00 a.m. to 3.00 p.m. and earned a flat rate of 200 baht a month, but with tips I could take home as much as 1,000 baht, which was quite a large sum of money back then. After work, I made my way to college and spent from 5.00 p.m. to 7.00 p.m. studying. I was a very diligent worker and paid great attention to detail—qualities I owe to my Chinese upbringing. Once I was in control of my income, I began sending money home to help pay for my siblings’ education.

One day, as I was passing by a travel agency on the second floor of the hotel, I overheard a tour guide speaking to Chinese tourists in the Taechew dialect. My ancestors hail from a small region in the southern Kwangtung province so when I was a child my grandfather made it his mission to teach me the language. I initially put up some resistance but he persisted and I eventually reached a level of fluency. Thanks to agong , I secured a job with the travel agency on the merit of speaking Taechew. I was a little rusty at first but with all the practice I was getting I limbered up in no time. I also learned to speak Mandarin and Cantonese dialects while working for the travel agency.

It was around this time that I met my first boyfriend. He was a boxer named Yom and he came from the Phetchaburi province. I was upfront with him from the very beginning about the fact that I was a kathoey. When news of our blossoming relationship reached my mother, she came running from Nakhon Sawan. Ma beseeched Yom to walk away from me—she still thought that I could be rescued from ‘this lifestyle’ as she put it. Yom and I hadn’t been seeing each other very long at the time and I feared that my mother’s interference would send him running for the hills but, to my surprise, he replied, ‘When your son is no longer a kathoey , I’ll walk away.’ Ma was speechless. Yom’s answer confirmed for her the great unmentionable—that I really was a kathoey and this wasn’t just a phase.

I lived with Yom for several years after that, but the spark between us eventually fizzled out. I was busy with my tour-guide schedule and Yom was living and working in Phetchaburi, so we rarely got to see one another. I also felt that although Yom was in love with the female me, my body was still very much male and I secretly thought that this confused him. Had we stayed together, it would have been only a matter of time before a natural woman would have tempted him away from me.

When I was 20, I decided to grow my hair long in an effort to enhance my femininity. I had grown a considerable mane by the time I took a trip home to Nakhon Sawan to visit my family. My father’s expression crumpled into a look of disgust the moment he saw me. My heart fell. It was just hair after all—I was still the same person underneath it. My father managed to bite his tongue, and I tried to relax and convince myself that maybe his attitude had thawed a little since we’d last met.

Later that day, I was asleep in my bed, exhausted from the long bus journey, when a loud buzzing noise jolted me awake. My first thought was that some sort of insect was hovering near my ear and, without looking up, I tried to swat it away. Suddenly I felt something tugging on my hair and I jerked around to see my father looming over me, holding a hair trimmer in one hand and my shiny locks in the other. He was shaving my head. I pleaded with him to stop but his eyes were glazed over with a look of cold resolve and I knew he wasn’t listening. When he was finished, and the ground was covered in a shiny black carpet of hair, tia dragged me outside and tied me to a tree with wire. He produced a gooseberry branch and proceeded to whip me until my back was covered in scratches and rivulets of blood were streaming down it. He then threw a container of salt water over my wounds. I thought I was going to pass out from the pain. Clearly not yet satisfied with his punishment, my father gathered as many ants as he could find and threw them onto my back so that they would bite me.

‘Are you going to stop being a kathoey ? Or do I have to beat it out of you?’ he screamed over and over again.

As the pain increased, my desperate pleas reduced to a low whimper. It’s the innate desire of most children to want to please their parents and make them proud, but I knew in my heart that there was nothing I could do to change the one thing standing between me and my father.

Later that afternoon tia finally tired himself out and retreated into the house, leaving me still tied to the tree. In the evening, ma sneaked out and untied me. As soon as she released me, with what little energy I had left I clambered up onto the zinc roof of our house and wrapped my hands around the antenna, hoping that lightening would strike and put an end to my miserable life. Ma frantically pointed at the ominous rain clouds hovering overhead and pleaded with me to come down. I told her that I would come down when tia accepted that I was a kathoey. As the clouds overhead began to look increasingly ominous, my father finally relented. But on one condition—I had to agree to undergo treatment for my ‘condition’, and if it failed then he would just have to learn to accept me.

My father told ma to bring me to a doctor in Bangkok to get a prescription for testosterone pills that would apparently enhance my masculinity. I met with the female doctor alone and she seemed surprised by my appearance.

‘You look very womanly,’ she said, ‘Do you actually want to be made look more like a man?’

I was petite, with a delicate frame, no visible hair on my arms and legs and my voice had never broken. Even without my long mane of hair, I was still distinctively female in appearance.

‘My mother brought me here against my will,’ I replied, ‘If you have anything that can make me more manly, then just give it to me. I couldn’t care less anymore.’

After a long pause, the doctor opened a drawer and removed a packet of pills.

‘Here, take these,’ she said, ‘They’re oestrogen pills and they’ll have the exact opposite effect to the testosterone.’

I was moved to tears by the fact that a complete stranger could be so open-minded and compassionate.

When tia realised that the hormones were having far from the desired effect, he decided to send me to a Chinese doctor who he believed would be able to cure me with a potion. My father was under the impression that being a kathoey was something physical and directly related to my soft voice and fine hair. He thought that if I grew a beard and some hair on my legs then I would magically transform into the son he yearned for.

The Chinese doctor boiled a collection of herbs in water, and handed me a large bottle to take home with me. Over the next few weeks I drank this potion regularly. But, unsurprisingly, I didn’t suddenly start sprouting coarse hair on my chin, my voice didn’t deepen, and my inner kathoey didn’t evaporate into thin air, never to be seen again. Aside from a slight feeling of nausea caused by the foul-tasting concoction, nothing whatsoever happened. My father was grudgingly forced to concede defeat. It would take him a long time to fully accept me but at least I wouldn’t have to go through any further kathoey exorcisms, and for that alone I was grateful.

Back in Bangkok, I applied for a job as a receptionist at the Mandarin Hotel. My CV stated that I was male and upon starting the job I was duly assigned an ID card. However, after two days of work, Songphon, the personnel manager, called me into his office.

‘I want an honest answer from you,’ he began, ‘your ID card says you’re a man, yet you look like a woman. Which are you?’

‘What seems to be the problem ha ?’ I asked. I intentionally emphasised the ‘ ha ’ at the end of my question. This Thai word is commonly used by toms and is believed to have originated in soap operas where leading ladies are sometimes forced to disguise themselves as men. In contrast, the Thai word ‘ khrap ’ is considered a masculine ending to a sentence.

‘My mother was in earlier this morning,’ Songphon continued, ‘and we spoke about your gender. She insisted that you must be a woman but couldn’t understand why you would then wear a male uniform. I think you should start wearing the female uniform so there’ll be no further confusion. If you’re not happy with this, then I’m afraid you’ll have to find another job.’

The Mandarin Hotel didn’t allow its female employees to wear trousers or ride a motorcycle to work. They wanted their staff to represent the hotel in a proper, ladylike manner. This posed a problem for me as I didn’t want to go back to being harassed in my neighbourhood for dressing as a woman. Thinking on my feet, I lied to my manager.

‘I was born the first niece of my clan,’ I told him, ‘but my family had hoped for the first grandchild to be a boy, so my grandfather made a strange promise to the deities back home that if the second grandchild was born a man, then I would have to dress like a man for 21 years to please them.’

Songphon believed my excuse and we came to an agreement whereby I would travel to the hotel on my motorbike, wearing my shirt and trousers, and then change into the female uniform before starting work.

I worked at the Mandarin for four years and managed to save a substantial amount of money. The tourist industry in Thailand was booming and I planned on investing my savings in a travel-agent counter. Most of the big hotels offered such a service, but it could be difficult to rent space as there was fierce competition amongst the various counters. I eventually managed to acquire a small corner in a hotel called Rose, on Surawong Road. It was a happy coincidence that this hotel catered exclusively to gay clients. By this time I had changed my name to Tina to match my new dress code. My travel counter was a great success, and for the next nine years I was a one-man operation, bringing in an average of 30,000 baht a month.

As much as I enjoyed owning my own travel counter, I soon grew restless and began to look about me for a fresh challenge. I decided to rent a premises and turn it into a gay bar. I named it Katrina. It was situated across the road from the Rome Club, a well-known gay bar on Silom Road at the time, which was famed for its female impersonation shows. I converted the second floor of Katrina into a makeshift cinema where X-rated movies, which had been bought on the black market, were screened. These movies attracted many patrons, and the neighbouring gay bar quickly became jealous of my success. While their business was empty most nights of the week, my bar teemed with customers. They repeatedly sought to be let in on the secret to my success, but I refused to breathe a word about the illegal movies. They clearly suspected what was going on though because they eventually phoned the police and I was arrested on charges of showing pornography on a public premises. By the time the whole sordid ordeal was over—my incarceration, the lawyer’s fee and the trial—I was left with practically nothing. As it was a criminal case, I was lucky to escape imprisonment with two years’ probation. I certainly wasn’t feeling very lucky though. I had lost nearly all my money and earned myself a criminal record in the process. If I’d just had myself to support, things wouldn’t have been as bad, but my family still relied on me for money so I knew I had to reassemble the pieces of my shattered finances as fast as I could.

I decided to move to England and start afresh. I had only 20,000 baht to my name; 8,000 of this went towards my flight, while a minimum of 10,000 baht was required by immigration on admittance to the country. The only person I knew in England was a man named Ian whom I had met briefly when I was still managing my counter in the Rose Hotel. He was heterosexual and thought that I was a woman, but I had no idea whether or not he was attracted to me. He told me to look him up if I ever came to England and he gave me detailed directions to his apartment in Gypsy Hill in London. I travelled to England as a man so when I finally arrived on Ian’s doorstep I had to try to convince him that I was Tina’s male twin and that she had told me to go to him for help. He looked a little dubious at first, remarking that we were uncannily alike. He let me stay with him for two days though, and he even showed me around the city.

On my second day in London I was sitting on a bus, staring vacantly out the window, when a Thai restaurant called Siam caught my eye. I had yet to gather my bearings in this new city, so I quickly asked the driver where we were. The following day I got up early and was waiting outside the restaurant before it had even opened. I had been there a half hour when two middle-aged women came along. They introduced themselves as Somporn and Lhim and said that they worked as cooks in the restaurant. I would later come to affectionately nickname these two women ‘grannies’. They asked me why I was waiting and I told them that I had recently arrived from Bangkok and was desperately seeking employment. I told them I hadn’t eaten rice in a whole two days and that I wasn’t sure if I could stomach yet another hamburger. They kindly invited me into the kitchen of the restaurant where they gave me a delicious plate of white rice, topped with fried chicken skin. Even though the dish was just leftovers, since the chicken skin would normally be thrown away, it tasted as good as any gourmet meal to my famished taste buds. Later that day, I was introduced to the manager of the restaurant and he offered me employment on a food-and-lodging pay basis. It didn’t seem like a wonderful deal, but I was desperate, and I figured that I could save on accommodation and food while I looked around for something better.

In addition to serving and cleaning duties, I also performed traditional Thai dances, always in male roles. I wore make-up during these performances and channelled all my enthusiasm and passion into the dance in an effort to attract extra business into the restaurant. However, most of the customers looked puzzled by my routine. They couldn’t understand why the management had a woman dressing and dancing as a man.

The staff at the restaurant all thought of me as a tom which didn’t bother me too much. In fact, I found myself trying to fit into this role. After all, I knew that I could more than likely expect respect from people as a tom . As a kathoey , I never knew what to expect, from one person to another, and from one day to the next.

One of the grannies in the restaurant recommended me for another job in a Thai restaurant called Chao Phraya, named after the well-known river in Bangkok. The conditions were much better here; I worked two shifts, from 11.00 a.m. until 3.00 p.m., and from 6.00 p.m. until 11.00 p.m. I also managed to secure a second job as a barista in a coffee shop where I worked from 7.00 a.m. to 9.00 a.m. In total I earned £250 and, when converted into baht, that was a lot of money and I saved as much of it as I could.

While leafing through a newspaper in the restaurant one day, I came across an interesting advertisement that had been placed by the Faculty of Medicine in Kensington. They were offering free sex changes to male volunteers willing to participate in a case study. At that time, over 30 years ago now, I had never even heard of a sex change before. The possibility of being physically transformed into a woman seemed to me the most marvellous prospect ever.

When I turned up at the hospital I was met by one hundred other hopefuls. I was the only one from Thailand, and one of only three from Asia. When we were all assembled a doctor came to speak to us. He announced that a mere seven of us would be selected for the operation. We were instructed to choose a time that would be most convenient for our daily visits to the hospital. I settled on 3.00 p.m. to 6.00 p.m.

I arrived at the hospital every day as arranged and took my seat in the waiting room, in anticipation of further instructions. But none were given. I was left sitting there for three long hours every day, with nothing but my knitting needles to kill the time and alleviate my frustration. After one month I was finally called to see the doctor. On entering his surgery, he shook my hands in congratulations, telling me that the group had been whittled down to 40, and I had made it to the next round. Apparently, a group of doctors had been observing us through surveillance cameras for the past few weeks, and my quiet, peaceful knitting and lack of awareness of the other candidates had seen me through to the next round.

The doctors took two weeks to interview the 40 of us who remained. I was bombarded with personal questions, and shown ambiguous-looking pictures and asked to describe the feelings they stirred in me. In a similar vein, I was asked to draw six pictures and describe how each of them made me feel. I also had to give a written interview in English. Out of 40 candidates, I was one of only 10 to proceed to the next round. The doctors tested our hormone levels and gave us hormone prescriptions that we had to take over a two-month period. During that time, my arms shrunk in size, my breasts got bigger and my body hair became even less visible.

Towards the end of the study, one candidate pulled out altogether and two others were disqualified on account of their height. I couldn’t believe I had made it to the final seven.

Tears streamed down my face as they wheeled me into the operating room. The doctor patted me reassuringly on the shoulder, promising me that I would be fully anaesthetised during the operation and wouldn’t feel a thing. But in between my sobs I tried to explain to him that I wasn’t crying out of fear but rather out of joy. I couldn’t wait to get rid of the organ between my legs that I had hated for as long as I could remember.

The operation took a total of 14 hours. The doctors decided to kill two birds with the one stone and give me breast implants at the same time as my genital reassignment.

Normally kathoeys get breast implants first because the procedure can be reversed if they have second thoughts. But there wasn’t even a trace of doubt in my mind—I had never been so sure of anything in my life.

I spent the first few days of my recovery completely disorientated. Nobody came to visit me—none of my friends or co-workers even knew I was having surgery. My upper and lower body were completely mummified in bandages and the excruciating pain left me bedridden for several days. The worst part of the whole ordeal was having dilators pushed up into my new vagina on a regular basis to reinforce the cavity wall and prevent it from closing up. I clenched my fists and ground my teeth during this process, conjuring up images of what my new body would look like in an effort to block out the pain.

After seven days, the bandages were slowly peeled away and my new body was unveiled. Its beauty made me catch my breath. It was still a little bruised and tender looking but my eyes did laps around the shapely contours of my new breasts before moving south to my new vagina. I had spent my whole life staring enviously at the bodies of other women; I was like an adolescent yearning for the onset of puberty, only to wake up one morning with the transformation miraculously complete.

After my operation, I worked in the restaurant for another year and a half before my visa expired and I decided to return to Thailand. My family came to meet me at the airport but when I walked through the arrival gate they stared straight past me, their eyes searching the crowd for the old me. I walked up to them and formally introduced the new me, their eyes widening like saucers as they took in my breasts, long hair and female attire. While the rest of the family gingerly hugged me and tried to carry on as normal, tia refused to even look at me. The so-called freedom of expression he’d allowed me several years earlier had been riddled with boundaries, and in his eyes I’d overstepped them by a long shot. I felt saddened to have disappointed him so gravely, but at the same time I felt hurt that he couldn’t recognise how happy I was and take even a nugget of pleasure from that.

I experienced a great deal of discomfort for months after the operation. It burned when I urinated and I had no control over my bladder. I also had to regularly force dilators up into my body to keep the cavity open. Three months after my operation I slept with a man for the first time, but I experienced no sexual pleasure whatsoever—if a thunderbolt had struck me down there I wouldn’t have felt a thing. I had prepared myself for this though. Prior to the operation, when I had been intimate with men, I had found it difficult to focus on anything other than the disgust I felt for my penis. Now, I was happy to forsake orgasms if it meant that I had a body I was proud of and which I was comfortable revealing to others.

I settled back into life in Bangkok with little difficulty and got back in contact with my old friends. The owner of the Rose Hotel, whom I had befriended several years earlier, told me about another hotel he owned in Pattaya. It was an old, deserted, 18-room building in the Naklua area. I suggested that he should open it up as a gay establishment since the Rose Hotel had been so successful. He liked the idea but his workload was already too heavy so he asked if I would be interested in managing it for him for a wage of 10,000 baht a month. I declined his offer but brazenly suggested that I rent it from him instead. After giving my proposal some thought, he agreed on the condition that I pay him 50,000 baht in rent a month. This was an enormous sum of money but, never one to miss out on a challenge, I paid him a two-month deposit and dived into the venture head first.

I named the hotel the Homax Inn and catered for the gay and transgender market. I opened the doors to the public in 1985. Both the mayor of Pattaya and Dr Seri Wongmonta, a famous figure in the gay community, were present at the inauguration ceremony. Reporters from the Matichon newspaper and Channel 3 were also in attendance. Their questions were laced with criticism. Was I concerned that the hotel would become a breeding place for AIDS and STDs? Wouldn’t the hotel further isolate gay people? I simply retorted that my hotel would offer gay people a refuge from ignorant, narrow-minded people.

Over the next six years the hotel was so popular that I had to expand from 18 rooms to 25. In Thailand, each day of the week is associated with a different colour and I decorated the seven suites in the hotel accordingly: in the Sunday suite everything was red, in the Monday suite everything was yellow, and so on. The hotel had a coffee shop, a go-go bar and a swimming pool. We hosted regular poolside parties that drew clients out of their rooms and generated a great communal atmosphere, in contrast with the reserved and impersonal nature of most hotels.

The success of Homax came at a high price though, as I found the hours increasingly long and stressful. I had started a new relationship and, fearful that my workload might jeopardise what had the potential to be something really great, I made the decision to sell the hotel. My boyfriend and I planned to move to Switzerland where we would both marry Swiss citizens in order to obtain citizenship. This meant that I would have to travel to Switzerland with a passport that listed me as ‘Ms’ instead of ‘Mr’. I obtained a fake passport easily enough and sold the hotel for an impressive seven million baht.

My boyfriend and I intended to divorce our respective spouses after a certain length of time so that we could then legally marry one another and remain in Switzerland. A friend of mine found me a willing accomplice. He was a painter, and for the princely sum of 500,000 baht he agreed to marry me. Meanwhile, a Thai woman agreed to marry my boyfriend. She had previously been a prostitute and had obtained citizenship by marrying a Swiss. Our plan seemed perfect except for one unforeseen glitch. In the past, citizenship was given to non-Swiss the day after you were married, however, three days before my nuptials a new law became effective, requiring me to stay in the country for a total of five years before citizenship would be given to me through simplified naturalisation. And every six months my husband would have to give me a letter enabling me to remain in the country.

As a foreigner, it seemed like every corner I turned in Switzerland I came face to face with yet more red tape. When I decided to open up my own Thai restaurant, the authorities treated me with nothing but suspicion and, rather than encouraging my entrepreneurial skills, the stringent regulations made life very difficult for me. The wages in Switzerland were too high so I couldn’t afford to hire Swiss employees, and I was forbidden from hiring Thai people who didn’t have work permits. I ended up having to shoulder the bulk of the workload alone. I was on my feet cooking from early morning until 9.00 p.m. every night, when I would change into a Thai costume and dance ram thai for two songs on a stage in front of the bar. After that I returned to the kitchen. Around this time, my husband started to get greedy and tried to extract further money from me by threatening to expose our fake marriage. I gave him about 600,000 baht altogether over the course of two years before I finally realised that his greed was insatiable. I called his bluff and stopped paying him, but he went straight to the police and I was deported back to Thailand soon after. If the distance between us hadn’t been so great, I would have hired someone to kill him. Buddha would surely have forgiven me for ridding the world of such a terrible person.

A month after returning to Thailand I discovered that my boyfriend, who had moved to Switzerland with me, had fallen in love with another woman and remarried. I had been in a relationship with him for seven years and we had planned on getting married. The news that he was now with someone else left me reeling. I tried to ease my heartbreak by concentrating on getting back on my feet financially. At a friend’s suggestion, I began buying dollars. My friend claimed that he could easily make as much as a million baht in profit every three months by trading in currencies. I bought a large sum of dollars with the millions of baht I had saved. The rate was 36 baht to a dollar at the time, but within a month the baht had risen to a value of 37 against the dollar. I made over one hundred thousand baht in just one month. I couldn’t believe how easy it had been. But rather than quit while I was ahead, greed got the better of me and I decided to re-mortgage one of my houses so that I could borrow from the bank. I combined my savings with the loan and invested the small fortune in dollars. A month later, the baht plummeted from a value of 37 baht to the dollar to 34, taking my fortunes with it.

I received the bad news over the phone and as I hung up the receiver in a daze, I suddenly felt the muscles in my body begin to spasm uncontrollably. One of my arms was rendered limp and immobile by my side, and with each spasm the skin on my face expanded, until it felt like I was wearing a tough, leather mask. I knew instinctively that I’d suffered a stroke. I called a doctor to come treat me in my house. He urged me to go to the hospital but I couldn’t bear the thought of going out in public when my face was so contorted by involuntary muscle spasms. Not knowing what else to do, I eventually phoned my mother and told her what had happened. She came straight to see me and insisted on bringing me to Payathai Hospital.

My recovery was a long, uphill battle. I was hospitalised for two months and given a botox-like substance every day to relax my facial muscles. I couldn’t even chew my food so I had to use my good hand to try and move my jaw and grind my food that way. However, I couldn’t coordinate my sight with my movements so even though I could identify where an object was, when I reached out to touch it my hand would go in the wrong direction. I eventually came up with a way of outwitting my senses. Instead of focussing on the desired object, I would look away from it and rely on my peripheral vision to guide me. The first time I succeeded in picking something up off my nightstand, I cried so hard I nearly choked on my sobs.

My sex change had given me the body I’d always dreamed of, so after the stroke I felt the old shame and disgust with my physicality creep back up on me. My limp arm became symbolic of my male genitalia, and the old sense of being trapped in the wrong body returned. Nowadays, I’m almost fully recovered, but occasionally, when I’m feeling stressed, my face still twitches. This is the only remaining physical evidence of my stroke, but the memories haven’t faded quite so well.

When I was well enough to go back to work, I decided to open a karaoke/ballroom bar called Puchong in Saphan Khwai. I hired a young man called Nop for the position of bar manager. At first, I didn’t fancy him. I was too preoccupied with getting the business off the ground and ironing out the thousand and one creases. But Nop gradually became my chauffeur, bodyguard and personal assistant, and the more time we spent together, the more I found myself falling for him. When we first got together, I was concerned by the age gap. He is 20 years my junior and although I’m very youthful-looking for a 53-year-old, it’s hard not to care about what other people think. Sensing my concern, Nop began dressing differently and even grew a beard in an effort to make himself look more mature.

When we first started going out, I was only just recovering from the lowest ebb of my life—my face was still distorted from the stroke and my confidence was in tatters—so I wouldn’t blame people for being suspicious of Nop’s motives. In fact, I worried myself in the beginning, but I told him upfront that I didn’t own the bar and was only renting it. I even showed him my accounts. Little by little, Nop managed to convince me that his motives were pure and that he really did love me for who I was. He had already been in several relationships with women but none of them had ever developed into anything serious. He asked me once if the fact that he was attracted to me meant that he was gay, but I said no, because he is attracted to my female form. I sometimes have to pinch myself to make sure that I’m not dreaming and that my relationship with Nop is in fact real. I still can’t believe that I managed to find someone so completely accepting of me. He doesn’t even mind being seen in public with me, a known kathoey , which is very unusual for a Thai man.

Nop admitted that when we have sex it’s not quite like sleeping with a woman. He can tell that my body isn’t 100% natural. But I like to think that what we share goes beyond the physical. I know that our love more than compensates for any shortcomings in my female form.

We had a small wedding in Thailand after we had been together for a year. The ceremony took place on my birthday and was the best present I could have asked for. The service was purely for sentimental reasons because Thai law does not recognise same-sex marriages. We saw the day as a way of cementing our commitment to one another, and it also allowed us to celebrate with our friends and family.

A year after the wedding, Nop suggested we move to New Zealand and start afresh there. I still owed a great deal of money to the bank following my adventures with the dollar so I decided to settle my debts by selling all my assets; I was left with 300,000 baht. With that money, we flew to New Zealand and were able to rent a small house. My entrepreneurial spirit was still very much alive and well, so Nop and I set about trying to introduce a Thai dessert called dokchok into the country. Dokchok is a fried, crispy, flower-shaped dessert that is made from a variety of flours, sugar, salt, sesame seeds, and in some cases, coconut cream. At first, the natives and resident Chinese were reluctant to try it and they eyed the dessert with suspicion. I began handing out countless free tasters to anyone willing to sample it and eventually the locals lowered their guards. The business soon snowballed and I expanded our product range to include other Thai desserts.

I became widely known as Jhim Wan by other Thais living in New Zealand. Jhim is a slang term for vagina and many Thai women adopt it as their nickname. Wan means sweet, and I earned this name on account of the various Thai desserts I introduced to New Zealand.

In 2000 my visa expired and I decided to petition for residency status. I argued that I couldn’t return to Thailand as Thai society condemned kathoeys. I put a lot of emphasis on the fact that having undergone sexual reassignment and having lived as a woman for so many years, I did not want to return to a society that would force me to reinstate ‘Mr’ in my title. I sent a six-page petition to the New Zealand Immigration Service, laying bare the minute details of my life to date.

The law in New Zealand requires anyone wishing to change their gender title to that of the opposite sex to have undergone a sex change a minimum of 10 years previously. For this reason I was summoned to a family court in Otahu to testify. Three gynaecologists, from different hospitals, were called on to examine me to confirm that I had indeed been surgically reconstructed.

It took two long years for my application to be processed. The waiting period was made all the more difficult when my father fell ill. I knew I couldn’t go home to see him because if I left the country before being granted residency I would have to start the process all over again. Tia died one month before the court granted me residency and my new title. Four years later, I was granted citizenship.

Nop and I were legally married on 21 December 2006. I was only obliged to produce my New Zealand ID card, but Nop had to go through a seemingly never-ending amount of paperwork. He was probed on everything from the number of siblings he has to his medical background. We even had to produce photographs from our Thai wedding.

My marriage to Nop represented a validation of our commitment to one another. I’m proud of our relationship and I don’t think that the love we share is any less strong just because I was born a man. My achievements have earned me a degree of notoriety in the gay and transgender community in Thailand, and I try to utilise this status to help abused sao praphet songs and to obtain the feminine title for those who have completed their sex change. I am confident that it is only a matter of time before the Thailand National Legislative Assembly accepts our petition. It seems ridiculous that such legislation has not already been passed considering Thailand is one of the top destinations in the world for foreigners seeking expert sexual reassignment surgery (SRS). Whilst on the surface Thailand appears to embrace diversity, deep-rooted prejudices simmer beneath the surface. Kathoeys are considered freaks of nature by many people and are openly mocked. In a perfect world, people would realise that gender and sexual preference are really irrelevant because beneath it all we are all just human beings.

Countless kathoeys have sought my advice on the sex-change operation down through the years. I never lie to them. I tell them that it will take their bodies a long time to heal afterwards and that they will feel nothing but pain during sex for years to come. For those with a high sex drive, the inability to orgasm may become a greater distress to them than their penis ever was. The discomfort will slowly lessen with the passage of time though, and sexual pleasure can still be experienced, just to a lesser degree.

Many of my friends have undergone the operation only to later regret it. They rushed into getting a sex change without first being aware of the repercussions. But there is no going back. I recommend that anyone contemplating the procedure attends a hospital and undergoes a full psychological examination before getting a legally certified operation. There are far too many hospitals that neglect the psychological side of the procedure, treating the operation as though it were merely plastic surgery for the purpose of beautification alone.

There are also many side effects to consider. Even after a successful operation, complications can still arise. Two years after my own surgery, one of my labia, which used to be my scrotum, dropped, and I had to pay 5,000 baht to get it fixed. I haven’t had any problems since, but who knows what the future holds for me.

People seem infinitely eager to label kathoeys and to pinpoint the cause of our so-called condition. I have heard all sorts of psychological disorders being assigned to us—gender identity disorder being the most common. People tend to feel threatened by anything they don’t understand and the natural instinct is to try and make sense of it. But for many it’s simply easier to bury their heads in textbooks and come up with various hypotheses than actually talk to a kathoey and treat her like a human being rather than just a case study. I acknowledge that I was a woman trapped in a man’s body, so to some extent I was experiencing an identity disorder, but as far as I’m concerned I’m now fully cured of my condition. I feel 100% comfortable with my new female identity.

I lead quite a contented life these days. Nop and I moved back to Thailand, and I’ve started up yet another business—this time distributing electric fans that release an air freshener. I also occasionally perform in cabaret gigs in foreign countries such as China and England. I am known as Jhim Sarah in Thailand and it is my stage name. My father and mother passed away in recent years, but I made peace with them long before they died. It took me a long time to make them see that being a kathoey doesn’t change who I am on the inside. I think my tia was still mourning the son he felt he’d lost, but he eventually let go of the old me and was able to accept me as a woman.

Tia was a musician and shortly before he died he invited me to sing with him and his band at several gigs. I knew that performing with me in front of a room full of people was his way of saying that he was proud to be my father. When I think of my parents now, I remember only the happy times. There are many kathoeys whose parents never learn to accept them so I abide by the saying ‘Better late than never’.

I am happy to say that my relationship with Nop is as solid as ever. Occasionally I worry about the fact that I can’t give him children but I’ve told him that if he ever wants to have a child with another woman he is free to do so, as long as he is honest and upfront with me. I’m not possessive because I don’t feel like I have the right to deny anyone’s basic instincts. I try to be as open-minded and tolerant with other people as I hope they will be with me in return. For now, I couldn’t be happier with Nop. The fact that he accepted me as I am from day one is just one of the many things I love about him. A kathoey can have all the operations in the world and wear the most feminine clothes available, but at the end of the day, if the people around you refuse to accept you as a woman, then it’s very difficult to feel like one.