I’d only been in Bangkok for about a week and was waiting for a bus on a street swarming with passersby and cars. Along the sidewalk sashayed a statuesque ladyboy, balancing a rattan tray on her head piled high with jasmine garlands. Not only was she more attractive than any transvestite I’d ever seen in the West, she also walked in a much more feminine way, without the exaggerated wiggle. But the most surprising thing was that none of the Thais at the bus stop even gave her a second glance. Nobody yelled anything rude at her. Nobody gossiped behind her back. Nobody (and I could easily imagine this happening in the West) pushed her so that the tray of garlands spilled all over the ground.
As I spotted more ladyboys around town, eliciting the same non-reaction from Thais and the same snorts of derision, along with the occasional cock-eyed leer from the foreigners, I had to conclude that Thailand was one tolerant country. But many travellers come to these facile conclusions after only a short time in a new place. It took a few years to realise that Thailand is superficially tolerant of the third sex. Behind the face values of Buddhist compassion, bigotry runs much deeper than bad blood.
Seemingly every soap opera or comedy cabaret has some hideous caricature of a shrieking drag queen (kathoey) who is the butt of the jokes and plays a servile role. Strutting around and preening in any of Bangkok’s sex-for-sale zones are a few ladyboys and a gaggle of older grotesques who have not aged well and seem bound for the gutter or a fatal addiction.
Few living kathoey have experienced more of this persecution than ‘Aunty Nong’. Now in her early 70s, still unable to read or write and disowned by her family at a young age, she is not even sure when she was born. Nevertheless, on the first Monday of July, she celebrates her birthday by making merit at a temple. “I pray to the gods to forgive me and to watch over me, because it’s a miracle I’m still alive,” she said.
Aunty Nong (real name: Suwing Nisgonsen) lives in a decrepit one-room tenement off Surawongse Road. The room, stacked high with her belongings, reeked of stale cigarettes and cat urine. She grew up during the Japanese occupation of Bangkok during World War II. As with architect Sumet Jumsai and many others interviewed for this book, the Allied bombing of Bangkok left deep craters in Nong’s reminiscences of adolescence. When recounting the time she carried her young nephew under her arm during one such bombardment, past pulverised bodies, and taking refuge in the Royal Temple of Wat Bowoniwet, her wizened eyes filled with tears. Overcome by a surge of emotions, she brushed the tears away, saying, “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
Bantering with Nong, and the writing duo of Susan Aldous and Pornchai Sereemongkonpol, who were researching a book called Ladyboys: The Secret World of Thailand’s Third Gender, the conversation wound down a series of ever-darker passageways. Like many older people, Nong’s mind has become warped with time, flitting from era to era and episode to episode, in a few short sentences. For the elderly, events of 50 or 60 years ago are often perceived with greater clarity than something that happened last week.
Nong’s father was a combat veteran of the Indochina wars. By the time she was born, the youngest of six siblings (all deceased except for one sister), her Chinese dad was a comatose opium addict. Her mother hawked Thai desserts from a pair of baskets she lugged around on shoulder poles. To make matters worse, her older brother beat her up on a regular basis, because of the feminine mannerisms she displayed even as a youngster. There was barely any money for food. There was none for school.
Her only respite from the drudgery of reality was watching the traditional Thai dances and dramas at Wat Saket and the Golden Mount. “I wanted so badly to be beautiful like the dancers,” she said, kneeling on the floor of her hovel—which had no chairs—clad in a blouse and a flowery sarong. “I wanted to be appreciated.” Besides the temple, her other refuge was the Penang Cinema (which has long since closed) near Khaosan Road, where she liked to watch the handsome matinee idols of the time like Gregory Peck and Tyrone Powers, whenever she could sneak in without buying a ticket.
At the age of 15, Nong’s mother told her that their family was imploding and she could no longer afford to take care of her. So the teenager ended up sleeping on streets and in public bathrooms, doing odd jobs like pulling rickshaws and, finally, with the help of a group of transvestites, she began dressing more effeminately. At first the results were hilarious, she said, laughing. After putting on lipstick for the first time, Nong remembered eating a bowl of noodles only to notice afterwards that her entire mouth and chin had turned scarlet.
But the abuse she suffered was not nearly so amusing. Many people called her and the other kathoey ‘seea chat gert’, or a ‘waste of a reincarnation’. “I couldn’t help it. I was born this way. I can’t change,” she said. At least there was more solidarity amongst the transvestites in those days, she said, and the other ‘girls’ would give her odd jobs like cleaning their apartments in return for free room and board.
She met her first male lover when she was still a teenager. They met by the bridge of Saphan Put, which was a pick-up spot then, and a hyperactive night bazaar now. Although he knew that she was a female imposter, they lived together for a while. But her lover was pathologically jealous—to the point where he used to beat her thighs and legs so she couldn’t leave the house, or barely even walk.
In time, Nong’s looks, flair for fashion and dancing skills allowed her to remake herself as a professional dancer, performing at funerals, ordination ceremonies for novice monks, private parties and temple fairs. Sometimes they would even put on shows in rural areas, riding buffalo-pulled carts through the moonlit rice paddies. She also worked at the old dance halls in Bangkok. Men would buy tickets and then approach a woman they wanted to dance with. Many of them had no idea that their dance partners were not biological women. “All the men were drunk. Sometimes they’d even fight over the girls and shoot their guns in the air,” said Nong, in the craggy voice of a serial smoker. “It was so much fun.”
But as a professional dancer, she was always teetering on the edge of destitution. To supplement her income, she used to work as a street-walker along Silom Road. The hookers feared sadistic clients much less than they did the police corps. Many of her sisters of the night ended up doing long jail terms for soliciting or not giving enough bribes to the bullies in brown. One night Nong was chased down a street by two cops. She ran into a construction site, jumped into a pit and covered herself with mud and dirt so the police could not spot her with their flashlights.
Over the course of her 70-odd years, Nong has seen many positive changes for the third sex, such as the installation of special bathrooms in schools and the formation of various self-help groups and NGOs, but her own progress has been scant. The streets of Silom where she once trawled for customers and the tenement where she now lives with a cat as her sole companion are separated by a few blocks and 40 years. To make ends meet, she walks around the red-light zone of Patpong hawking lighters by night. As befitting her status as the grand dame of Bangkok’s transgendered underworld, some of the sex workers buy her wares and give her handouts.
When we got up to leave, Aunty Nong gave each of us a personal blessing for happiness, good health and prosperity. “Don’t forget about me,” she said. “Please come back and visit whenever you want. Sometimes I’m afraid that if I die here alone nobody would even find my body for days.”
Looking at the roll call of interviewees in Susan and Pornchai’s book—a bank teller, a fashion designer, a PR manager, an economist and even an entire pop group—shows that the Thai transsexuals of today have broader horizons and higher career trajectories than their dead-end ‘sisters’ of Nong’s day.
The first transsexual to break through on a global level was the muay thai star, Parinya Charoenphol, better known by her nickname of Nong (‘Little Sister’) Toom. In 1998, during her first bout at Lumphini Stadium in Bangkok, the 16-year-old—wearing full make up—knocked out a much bigger male fighter. After the fight, she kissed him on the cheek. Soon, the beautiful boxer, whose goal was to make enough money for a sex change and to support her impoverished parents, was notching up knockout after knockout and making money hand over fist. From all over the globe, members of the mass media descended in droves to file features about her. Ever the show-woman, Nong Toom was fond of quips such as, “He was so cute I just hated to knock him out!”
But in 1999 she hung up her gloves and underwent a full sex change. Her singing and acting career rarely got off the ropes. In 2003, the Thai director and Singaporean expat Ekachai Uekrongtham made her story into a powerful film called Beautiful Boxer that picked up a few awards at foreign film festivals.
Susan and Pornchai interviewed her for their book.
“I was thinking here was going to be very a muscular jock and aggressive woman, but she was quite the opposite,” said Susan. “She was very friendly and sweet and beautiful… sexy but in a tasteful way… a very trusting person too. She drove us back into Bangkok in her car and then took us to meet her parents. She even took us out to eat with her at a local street stall. Everyone recognised her, but she was so down to earth. I came away feeling like I’d made a friend.”
The writers found out she’s had a few boyfriends but always practises monogamy. Nong Toom told them she was happy with the biopic and thought it was a fairly accurate depiction of her life. The plot, however, is almost like Rocky: through great determination, a poor kid rises above adversity to beat the odds. Not surprisingly, the film was more popular in the West, where stories of individualism and self-determination appeal much more to the Western mindset.
In early 2006, she returned to the ring for an exhibition match at the training centre, the Nong Toom Fairfax Gym in Pattaya, where many foreigners come to study the martial art of muay thai. She bested the Japanese fighter in that match. In the same year, she starred in the Thai action movie Mercury Man (a critical calamity—with a villain named ‘Osama bin Ali’—that took a serious beating at the box office). Nong Toom’s role in this loony cartoon proved that her fighting prowess was still much stronger than her acting.
The beautiful boxer’s international prominence has broken down the door for other performers, who were usually relegated to lip-synching and vamping it up in cabaret shows for tourists in Bangkok, Phuket and Koh Samui, or competing in the annual Miss Tiffany beauty pageant for transsexuals held in Pattaya every February. Following in the slinky footsteps of the first all-transgendered group, South Korea’s Lady, came Bangkok’s Venus Flytrap, a group of high-society women who wrested the gig from hundreds of wannabes. As you can tell from their stage names like Nok (Posh Venus) and Bobo (Naughty Venus), originality is not their forte. Visa for Love (Sony BMG Thailand, 2006), the group’s debut album of artificially sweetened R&B was not everyone’s cup of treacle. Most of the tunes, videos and dances traversed the same catwalk trodden by the Spice Girls. Declared personae non grata on the pop charts, Visa for Love was a commercial fiasco. The group eventually disbanded.
But that curtain call may be premature. In late 2009, ‘Cool Venus’ (Tay Peeraya), who earned a degree in Textile Design from an Australian university, joined a new ladyboy troupe of singers, actresses and models called Shade of Divas. The leader and founder of the troupe is Teerawat ‘Tina’ Thongmitr. She told the Bangkok Post, “We hope to create a group or an agency for transvestites and transgendered women. For those film or television producers out there, if you are looking for a unique kathoey character, you know where to go.”
One of the contestants for the annual Miss Tiffany Universe Contest held in Pattaya bares her ‘claws’ at the press conference. The four-day event features a number of different awards for the Media Favourite, the Friendship Beauty Queen and Miss Silky Sexy Skin.
Tina, who said she has lost jobs as a graphic designer when clients found out about her ‘sexuality’, said her best offer so far came in early 2010 when a German theatrical director came to Thailand to stage a play called Ministry of Truth at the Patravadi Theatre in Bangkok. The play was based on the reality show Big Brother. “The show centred around a mixed group of Thais and foreigners who shared days and nights together in a house, with one to emerge as the winner. My role was to express my thoughts on being a transgender woman. I found it fascinating for a show to dig deeper into the issues of gender, going far beyond the usual portrayal of ladyboys. As my first professional acting role, it was a great challenge but I was so glad to be part of it,” she said
After a successful run in Bangkok, Tina and the rest of the cast traveled to Berlin where it was restaged under the name On Air. Through her experiences working with the director and foreign cast members, she is hopeful that the third gender will find more mainstream acceptance abroad. “While working on the show, I learnt to appreciate foreigners in the way they respect you for who you are, regardless of your gender. If you have good ideas to share, they will listen to you.”
The high-society domain that the members of Venus Flytrap and Shade of Divas inhabit is a penthouse above the seedy streets where many gender-blenders work. Around areas like Patpong, Nana Plaza, Soi Cowboy and Lumphini Park, they cater to the world’s oldest obsession. Their reputation, however, has been blackened by tales of thievery and violence. Some practice unsavoury tricks such as coating their breasts with sedatives or spiking the drinks of their customers. After the client passes out he is stripped of all his valuables. Even Aunty Nong complained to us that some younger ladyboys who use drugs and steal have given the third gender a bad name.
On the so-called ‘Boys Soi’ off Surawongse Road, rammed with go-go boy bars and fronted by shirtless men pumping iron outside clubs to the tune of cavity-loosening house music, we sat with Bee, a young streetwalker, at the subtly named Dick’s Bangkok Café. Bee often stops by a couple of beauty salons at the end of street where sex workers congregate before their shifts.
Strikingly beautiful with long glossy black hair and skin the colour of bone china, she was dressed for work in tight jeans and a cleavage-revealing top. Like many Thai youth, she wore fashionable braces with traces of pink. When she was growing up in northeast Thailand, Bee said she was a normal boy with no feminine or gay urges whatsoever. The turning point in her life came when she met a gang of cross-dressers who introduced her to Patpong and the gay scene. For her, becoming a ladyboy of the evening was a career move, a step up in the service industry where she had been employed as a waitress. Peer pressure exerted an influence, she admitted, as did what Aunty Nong said about how kathoey have become trendy.
At first, Bee began dressing up at home. Later, she went to work at the King’s Castle 3 go-go bar on Patpong 1, where most of the dancers are transvestites and transsexuals. She began taking hormones to enlarge her breasts, but taped down her penis. It was incredibly painful, she said in a hushed voice that bespoke her fear of sounding too masculine. Many customers still want a sex worker with breasts and a penis, Bee said. At the same time, she figured she could make more money by having gender reassignment surgery. Because she was only 18 then, and Thai law stipulates that someone must be 20, her mother came down to sign the form for her.
The sex change cost 120,000 baht and it was excruciating. Usually, the scars take about two months to heal, but the side effects can be chronic. Commons ailments are difficulty urinating and not being unable to achieve an orgasm. Bee said that she still experiences pleasurable sensations ‘down there’—sometimes she will have a sexy dream and wake up moist—but she cannot fully climax.
Almost every night, the 21-year-old scours the streets around Patpong for customers. At 1,000 baht a shot, she usually makes around 10,000 baht per month. “I don’t have any other opportunities and no education,” she said, reiterating a familiar lament among sex workers, while sweeping her long hair back. “And I don’t think much about the future.”
What are the differences between real women and ladyboys?
“Real women have uteruses,” she said, flashing a metallic grin.
That’s it?
Another grin. “That’s it.”
It was a snappy comment intended to shock and amuse—hardly atypical among the young trying to look cool—but it was revealing on a deeper level: Bee and her friends do not think of themselves as being any emotionally or psychologically different than natural-born women. Sadly, this is generally not the way they are seen by the majority of the straitlaced world.
With a little coaxing, Bee doled out a few blow-by-blow descriptions of her job with all the passion of a secretary talking about spread sheets. Business as usual, nothing to get excited about. More important, she said, after thanking us for speaking with her, was the chance to talk openly about her life for the first time with no judgments levied. For Bee, that opportunity was cathartic.
As politely as Aunty Nong, Bee put her palms together and raised them to the level of her nose to bid us good night and wished us good luck in Thai. She disappeared into a crowd of body-builders, touts and hungry-eyed tourists massing and frothing around the mouth of Boys Soi.
By then it was almost midnight. In an upstairs show bar on Patpong—where the women put on displays of ‘vaginal Olympics’ using props like darts, candles, cigarettes, razor blades and honking horns—we met Joy, a 30-year-old ladyboy. She was the most vivacious dancer in the bar, gyrating to house music with a 40-karat smile and a zest that went far beyond the zombie shuffle that is de rigeur mortis in Bangkok’s go-go bars.
As a young buffalo-herder from rural Thailand, Joy was already trying on dresses and smearing ashes on her face to make mascara at a young age. She knew then she was not really a boy. Yet another exile from a state of poverty and provincial attitudes, she came to Bangkok to earn enough money to study dressmaking and subjects such as accounting so she could start her own fashion business and find a husband to settle down with. But lately, Joy said, she’d been doing some soul-searching by studying Buddhism. She wanted to know why she’d been born this way. Karma was the answer. Joy believed she’d raped or abused some women in her past life, and thus had been reincarnated as a ladyboy to know how women feel, and repent for the errors of her ways.
Over the top of the throbbing dance beats (which is music that never rises above the groin), Joy said she didn’t want to have her sexual organ amputated because she worries about having her sex drive curbed, but in her work she has found a spiritual calling: giving pleasure to others is a good deed not so different from other acts of Buddhist compassion.
Over the course of that hard day’s night, we had encountered a grandmotherly type in her 70s—scarred by memories of World War II and terrified of dying alone, and a striking young streetwalker who claimed ‘ladyboys’ is an oxymoron because, uteruses aside, they are much more feminine than masculine. We’d swapped anecdotes about a gracious celebrity kickboxer and a pop troupe of high-society singers with less ‘balls’ (but more testosterone) than the Spice Girls, and we’d discussed Buddhism and reincarnation with a seamstress-cum-business student-cum-bargirl, whose first experiments in cross-dressing were witnessed only by water buffalo on a rice farm.
All of them were kind and decent folks. Any of the usual labels like ‘tranny’, ‘drag queen’ or ‘ladyboy’ had been stripped of their negative connotations and sleazy merchandising, because it’s always much easier to judge than it is to empathise. That’s what all the people we chatted with were looking for—empathy.
Just like everyone else.