Once male, now female, Thailand’s transsexuals and transvestites are still a fringe community discriminated by the authorities.
A techno beat reverberates through the packed Tiffany Cabaret Theater in Pattaya. China dolls float down the catwalk, swaying their hips to the catchy tune, ‘Don’t Touch Me, Baby.’ This is the prestigious Miss Tiffany pageant, one of the most famous transvestite beauty contests in the world.
The paparazzi were out in force. Previous winners have been described by one news agency as being “every bit as feminine” as Miss Thailand. The glamorous live television coverage of such an event may lead one to believe that gender deviation and reassignment and cross-dressing is socially accepted in Thailand.
But that’s far from the truth.
This year’s Miss Tiffany, Piyathida Sakulthai, is a favorite to win the Miss Queen of the Universe title in Los Angeles. Sakulthai was sent to Germany ten years ago by his parents on the pretext of “further studies” when they found out that he preferred to be considered a she.
Although plastic surgery techniques for sex-change operations have been quickly advancing, the rights of transsexuals and transvestites haven’t. For instance, there are no existing laws that allow transvestites to change their gender designation legally in Thailand. This means that if a lady boy is raped, s/he can’t file charges as they are still considered men under the criminal law.
In Thailand, transsexuals and transvestites are known collectively as ‘katoeys’ – the unofficial third sex. Katoeys have long suffered an ambiguous fate in Thai society. While scores of transvestite cabaret shows like Calypso, Mambo, and Tiffany bring in the tourist buck by the truckload, katoeys are still often portrayed in the entertainment industry as one-dimensional comic foils.
The government along with the medical community and national airline have been promoting sun, sand and surgery packages for medical tourists to help fill up the beds of five-star hospitals left empty after the 1997 economic crisis. No ethical dilemmas here.
In 1997, there was also an attempt to ban katoeys from teachers colleges. The attempt failed because the media created a large buzz about it. At that same time, the media censorship board also told television producers to stop using lady boy characters because they were seen as unhealthy role models for Thai children. Again, this attempt to clean up Thai TV failed because it was an unrealistic goal to wash the katoey influence away.
Satree Lex (The Iron Ladies), a movie about a lady boy volleyball team who end up winning the national championship, became the second-highest-grossing film next in Thailand after Nang Nak. It was a surprise because, as its director Yongyooth Thongkongthun says, “it broke every taboo in the business,” and further enforced the katoey culture.
Traditionally, Thai films have always emphasized family and religious values, but this movie addressed issues publicly that had been kept in the Thai closet for too long.
By all accounts, Thailand offers the best sexual reassignment packages in the world: at Yan Hee General Hospital, the operation costs US$3,850, which includes five nights stay, medication, meals, and around-the-clock attention. The hospital will even organize a holiday package for the convalescent if he/she so desires. In America, the same operation would cost about $17,000.
On average, two sex-change operations are performed in Thailand a day, and according to the industry insiders, the number of these operations and related cosmetic procedures are growing at a rate of 30 percent each year.
This growth is facilitated because patients applying for sexual reassignment surgery don’t have to go through the extensive six-month psychological evaluation required in the west. They’re given the green light once they have passed the “real life” test which requires them to dress and behave like women in public for a few months.
The combination of lax laws and competitive rates is making Thailand a mecca for gender reassignment surgery. It has been said through international transsexual grapevine that the kingdom’s surgeons have come closest to perfecting the medical transformation of a man into a woman known in the industry as gender reassignment.
The simple operation of cutting off the penis and carving out an artificial vagina has developed considerably since Dr. Preecha Tiewtranon from Bumrungrad Hospital began these operations in the early 70s. Now 57, the veteran, who has over 1200 male-to-female sex-change operations under his belt, is well known in international transsexual circles for his skill and dexterity – he can execute a sexual overhaul complete with breasts and a shaved Adam’s apple in about three hours. Ironically, he used to dislike transsexuals and transvestites.
Taking the operation a step further is Yan Hee’s Dr Greechart Pornsinsirirak, who is famed for the finer touches of gender reassignment. He developed techniques to create a sensitive clitoris, which is made from a small piece of the penis he removes.
The most recent Thai celebrity to lie under Dr Greechart’s scalpel was Parinya Kiatbusaba, the kick-boxer best remembered for wearing lipstick and mascara in the ring and bewitching his opponents by planting a kiss on their foreheads before the fight.
“I don t know how society thinks about this whole thing, but I’ve never regretted it,” says Parinya, who now goes by the name of Nong Tum. “All I have ever wanted is to be myself.” He has since exchanged his gloves for a frock and is now lip-synching pop songs in Bangkok s cabaret circuit. The 19-year-old has been in Time and Sports Illustrated, and will soon be the subject of Beautiful Boxer, a semi-autobiographical film.
Sex changes are not all gloss and glamour. As the industry is left largely unregulated – although there are only 172 plastic surgeons certified by the medical council, more than 20,000 doctors are permitted to perform sex changes under the law – botch jobs are on the rise.
Nittiya Silp, 27, had dreamed of being a woman ever since he was a little boy playing with dolls. After seeing an advertisement in the local papers in Pattaya, he ploughed his life savings of beauty contest winnings into the operation.
Two weeks after the surgery, Nittiya experienced chest pains and consulted another doctor who discovered that her ruptured implants were actually made from condoms filled with water. The Chonburri backstreet doctor who performed the operation didn’t even have a medical degree; he was sentenced to three years in jail for negligence.
Not only did she have to undergo breast augmentation surgery again, her penis was also badly mutilated. “She was a mess,” says Dr Greechart who performed the corrective surgery on Nittiya. “The person who performed the [earlier] procedure left about a two-centimeter stump which had to be removed.”
In Thai history, lady boys are considered ‘sao prapet song,’ which is a classification tantamount to a second female type. Often, they perform the role of the geisha in Japan, with an emphasis on entertaining in public with colorful cabaret shows and garish costumes.
Inside a packed theater, a line of stunning katoeys in elegant costumes fan out across the stage, while the lead singer lip-synchs the official Thai tourism jingle Amazing Thailand against a shimmering backdrop of golden temples and dragons. The downtown Mambo Theatre is situated in a converted movie house. Every night it is booked with tour groups who come to watch arguably the world’s most attractive lady boys perform 90 minutes of Oriental illusion and disguise. The slapstick spoofs of pop stars like the Spice Girls is unparalleled kitsch.
In 1998, a troupe of lady boys from the Mambo Theatre toured the UK in a show billed The Lady Boys of Bangkok, which boasts “You’ll never look at the opposite sex the same way again!”
“There s something valiant and graceful about these Thai lady boys,” reported The Evening Standard. Tickets sold out at the Queen’s Theatre in London’s West End where it ran for a month before going to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. “It s difficult for a man to watch,” said Phillip Gandey, the show’s UK promoter who has been taking the show annually to the UK since its inception. “I started off thinking that these are men and it’s just a laugh. Then you begin to find them really attractive and you have to pull yourself up very quickly.”
Some men eventually succumb to the lady boys’ charm. Inside the Casanova go-go bar, located on the third floor of Bangkok’s Nana Plaza, a three-story mezzanine adult entertainment complex on Sukhumvit Soi 4, one strapping lad with close-cropped hair is shouting and directing his attention at a lady boy flaunting her wares. He is George Smith, a 35-year-old computer programmer from Wales who had been vacationing in Thailand for the past five years. He’s currently shopping for a new set of breasts for Sasha whom he met at Casanova.
For 40,000 baht (US$800), he says, “you can order breasts that’d make Pamela Anderson look like she’s wearing a training bra.” He plans to take Sasha back to the UK and marry her after the operation. “For [a nation of] so-called tolerant Buddhists, I find it strange that in some bars they won’t allow katoeys in,” Smith says.
It’s not surprising to find that many Thai transsexuals find Europe a haven where there’s a more lenient attitude towards them than in their own country. Thailand’s ambassador to Germany recently told the Bangkok Post, that up to 5,000 Thai transsexuals have immigrated to Germany to take advantage of the same sex marriage laws.
The katoeys are seeking their right to have a cut-and-tuck, to become the ravishing women they were inherently destined to be, despite being born men. Men like Smith cannot agree enough. “They are the most beautiful women in the world,” he says. “And they know how to please a man.”
The bottom tucks for these Thai lady boys are their rights. Until their new gender is officially recognized by the government in the form of changed names on ID cards and Passports, the third sex will continue to be known as the sex that was left behind.