by Benjamin Law
Pear introduced me to a fellow Australian called Kristian, a Eurasian guy in his thirties who was now based in LA as a freelance photographer. He’d shot Angelina and Justin, Zac and Miranda, and talked about them on a first-name basis. Affable and talkative, Kristian told me he’d been trailing the pageant for a few days already, but had decided to skip the Bangkok sponsorship trail.
‘Did I miss any good photo opportunities?’
‘You did miss their stint with a shop called Banana IT,’ I said. ‘There were plush bananas involved.’
I leaned over and showed him photos on my crappy point-and-shoot camera.
Kristian winced. He knew a missed photo opportunity when he saw one.
When the girls arrived, we were all ushered into the bar for rounds of alcohol-free cocktails. As Kristian, Pear and I stacked food from the buffet onto our plates, we talked about our lives back home. Kristian talked about his wife and daughter. I talked about my boyfriend. That piqued Kristian’s interest.
‘Can I ask you a question?’ Kristian said.
‘Sure,’ I said.
‘So, you’re attracted to guys, right?’
I nodded.
Kristian glanced over our shoulders at the contestants, lowering his voice. ‘So knowing these girls were – well, actually, are – guys. I mean, does that do anything for you?’
I looked at him blankly, then laughed. ‘No, I’m attracted to guys. There’s nothing remotely guy-like about these girls.’
He nodded, watching the girls, weighing things up in his mind. ‘It’s just, you wouldn’t be able to tell with some of them, would you? Well, I mean, some of them you can.’
He gestured to one of the contestants whose cheekbones were stronger and had pretty broad shoulders.
‘Well, what about you?’ I asked. ‘If you started having a relationship with one of these girls and everything about them was female – their brains, their mannerisms, their bodies – would you have a problem if you found out they were born male? Would that matter?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. He hesitated. ‘There’s just still something about it. I’m just being honest, you know. I think I would be shocked –’
‘And then you’d end the relationship?’
He made the face of a seven-year-old kid who’d been asked a difficult ethical question. ‘Probably,’ he said, sighing. ‘I don’t know. I think so?’
Later, during evenings I spent in Pattaya’s and Bangkok’s tourist bars, drunken male tourists would have similar but far less subtle variations of these conversations with me. For them, ladyboys were nothing more than the punchline to every loud, obnoxious joke they told. ‘Be careful which girl you take home!’ they slurred. ‘’Cos she mightn’t actually be a real girl, ya know!’
They laughed, but I also sensed a palpable fear. Or maybe it was arousal. Or both. These men invariably knew of someone – always ‘a friend’ – who had ‘accidentally’ ended up sleeping with a transsexual Thai woman. In most cases, the story was the same: the friend in question was drunk, before being fooled by a beautiful woman who – quelle horreur – had a penis. Or not! Maybe she had a surgically constructed vagina, but felt obliged to tell the man about her past anyway. And then – only because the guy was so helplessly drunk – they would have sex. Truly, they just weren’t to know! Still, I suspected all these men had been willingly fooled. And it felt wrong to me that it was the woman who was always the butt of the joke.
I was guilty of it too, though. I hadn’t encountered many transsexual women before. In high school, I remembered my friend Matt declaring his love and affection for ‘chicks with dicks’ at lunch one day to everyone’s squealing horror. ‘You get the best of both worlds,’ he’d explained. ‘They’ve got tits and dicks.’ Then when everyone got dial-up modems, we’d run AltaVista searches for ‘chicks with dicks’, scream at the image results and forward the pornographic JPEGs to our friends’ Hotmail accounts as pranks. At university, we’d buy each other she-male novelty playing cards for each other’s birthdays, passing them around in lecture theatres and laughing so hard that we were nearly kicked out of class.
That was the thing about transsexual women: they were always either a joke or the extreme, off-limits sex object. And in a world where transsexual women were the outcasts, where access to hormone treatment was near-impossible and sex-change operations were either primitive and dangerous, surely there had to be one place – one country – that was their homeland, their safe house. Thailand was a country that seemed to give these women mainstream recognition and even a beauty pageant. Winners became famous and their faces sold products to housewives and young women! Surely, I thought, this was progress.
The next morning, I joined the Miss Tiffany’s crew for breakfast. They were a bunch of sharply dressed young producers and tech experts. Because I am one of those irritating people who places bets on things like the Oscars and elections, I asked everyone to pick their favourites for the pageant. Eve, one of the tech girls, offered to translate our conversation. I told her to start the betting.
‘But there are so many more pretty girls this year,’ Eve complained. ‘Way more than in the past. Normally, they have one or two standouts in the competition, but this time they’ve got a lot.’
‘Come on, humour me,’ I said.
‘Okay,’ Eve said, laughing. ‘For me, I love #1. She looks natural.’ Contestant #1 was Bank, Thailand’s Scarlett Johansson. A sound guy sitting next to Eve picked Bank to win too. Keang, the competition choreographer, picked #8 – Nadia – the girl who had smiled at me yesterday and was already becoming my favourite. A producer named Ann picked Nadia too, as well as #29, who had the girl-next-door looks of a high school volleyball captain.
‘It really is too difficult to pick, though,’ Keang said in Thai. ‘This year, a lot of the girls are already working as models.’
‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Are they earning a lot?’
‘No, not necessarily,’ he said. ‘Because they’re not “real” girls, people don’t really accept them. So usually, they can’t be famous in Thailand.’
‘Couldn’t they just try to pass as ladies, though?’
‘Well …’ Eve said quietly, ‘there is their voice.’
‘Oh.’
‘I mean, you’re right,’ she said quickly. ‘If they walked past you, you’re really not going to know. But if they speak …’
‘You can tell with all of them?’ I said.
‘Almost all of them. Eighty per cent.’
Ann leaned over to Eve and whispered something in Thai. Both women laughed. ‘Okay, okay, maybe ninety per cent,’ Eve said. ‘Plus, they’re taller than normal ladies. Thai ladies are not that tall. Their shoulders are wider too.’
After breakfast, I joined the girls for rehearsal. Ann ran through her notes and Keang led them through their steps for the televised finale. Today they were dressed uniformly again, but this time they wore standard-issue Miss Tiffany’s t-shirts coupled with micro miniskirts. Over the speakers, the opening disco beats of the gay anthem ‘I Am What I Am’ filled the room. The lyrics were empowering, but I would hear the song so often in the coming weeks of rehearsals that it would seep into my dreams. I’d spend my waking hours wishing I had a power drill to extract it from my brain.
After going through walks, poses and struts, Keang stopped the music. He told half of the girls to sit down so he could concentrate on one batch at a time. A brunette girl – adorably cute like a cartoon chipmunk – sat next to me. Contestant #10 – Parnrapee Tipjariyaudom; nickname: Noon – wore giant gold hoop earrings and arranged her long hair in a shiny, horse-like ponytail.
‘Look,’ Noon said, making a sad face and pointing to her feet. Her stiletto was damaged, its cork heel split right through the middle like an old carrot. It was irreparable.
‘Oh man,’ I said. ‘That sucks.’
‘Yes,’ Noon said. ‘It sucks a lot.’
Noon was twenty-three years old and tall. Her voice was powdery like
talc. She had been living by herself in Thailand since she was a teenager, and was now studying for a business degree and thinking about a career in finance. When she was young, Noon’s parents had migrated to the United States without her to start up a Thai restaurant in Massachusetts, while her sister lived in England. Each year since then, Noon had flown to the States for three months to earn enough US dollars at her parents’ restaurant – around 200,000 baht (6500 US dollars) – to support her studies back home. It was a strange family situation, but Noon was purposefully vague about why it had come about. I suspected part of the reason was Noon herself.
‘I told my mum I don’t feel like a boy when I was seven or eight,’ Noon said. ‘They made me dress like a boy, but inside I was thinking, “This is not me.” My mum gave me a hug. She cried. She felt pity for me, she felt sorry.’ Noon’s father was more hostile. Because Noon was their only son, he refused to believe she was a woman for years and years. ‘So now my family don’t have a son,’ Noon said, a little sadly. ‘My dad had hoped for a son so much.’
At sixteen, Noon started a course of female hormones. By eighteen, she had breast implants, paid for by her parents. At twenty, she underwent complete genital sex-reassignment, half-funded by her, half by her parents. That procedure alone cost roughly 300,000 baht (9700 US dollars). She estimated that over the years she’d spent around a million baht (32,300 US dollars) on her four surgical procedures: nose job, breast work, eye work and sex-change.
Noon was staring at me intensely. ‘You want to see something?’ she said.
‘Uh,’ I said.
She whipped out her smartphone and fanned through photos of her parents, before landing on a folder full of personal glamour shots: her modelling portfolio.
‘Noon!’ I said faggily. ‘These are gorgeous.’
I meant it. Noon was attractive enough already, but these photos made her look like every straight teenage boy’s pin-up dream. In studios and by the beach, she posed like a natural in tight shorts, skirts and bikinis. Some had her smiling innocently, others had her posing with come-hither, fuck-me looks. The shots were taken by a modelling agency called the Josie Model Society.
‘I really love it,’ Noon said, ‘but it doesn’t pay good money.’ On a good day, Noon could earn up to 5000 baht (160 US dollars), but most days she only hit between 800 and 2000 (a miserable twenty-five to sixty-five US dollars). After paying for the petrol to get herself to the shoot, she was lucky if she broke even. It was her three months of American restaurant work that covered her university tuition and living expenses.
In so many ways, Noon was on her own. She didn’t have a boyfriend, at least not right now. She’d had one boyfriend before, but he’d freaked out when Noon told him about being born a boy. ‘In Thai society, they’re not too open to this,’ she said. ‘If men know I’m a ladyboy, they say, “No way!” Some wouldn’t even know I’m a ladyboy, but if they found out, they’d say, “No, no, no.”’
That made me sad to hear. Everything about Noon – her brain, her body – was so decisively and adamantly female. What was it that men feared exactly?
Keang started clapping his hands, signalling the girls to rejoin the main group. Noon got up and apologised, hopping away on a pair of replacement heels. Ann cued the music and Keang started clapping out the beats, running through the steps to ‘I Am What I Am’ again. I looked down momentarily at my notes. Before I knew what was happening, the girls were screaming.
When I glanced up, the girls were squatting down on their haunches, stretching forward with their torsos at a horizontal angle, as though they were in the last few minutes of an intense tug of war. The position made their miniskirts hitch up around their waists and exposed their underwear. It was difficult not to notice some girls had a telltale bulge. Politely, I looked away. They continued to shriek with horror and embarrassment. Keang laughed and put out his palms, shaking them across each other as if to say: Okay, okay. We won’t be doing that.
Later, I returned to Bangkok to track down two of Thailand’s most prominent sex-change surgeons. First was Dr Pichet, a sharp-looking man who gave off the brusque, businesslike confidence of a finance broker. If you ran an internet search for ‘Thailand sex-change’, Pichet’s website was the first that popped up. He ran the Bangkok Plastic Surgery Clinic in the city’s shambolic Din Daeng district and had treated over 1000 people from all over the world. But even though Pichet was one of the country’s most famous sex-change surgeons, he confided that barely any of his clients were Thai nowadays.
‘They cannot afford my price!’ he said.
Instead, most of Pichet’s clients came from America, Europe and Australia. And even then, Pichet said, people seeking sex-change procedures didn’t make up the bulk of his clients. At most, they accounted for a fifth.
‘It’s not quite common,’ he said. Leaning in conspiratorially, he lowered his voice. ‘You know how many people allow you to cut off their penis every day?’
‘Uh,’ I mumbled, caught off-guard. ‘I guess it’s a pretty extreme thing to do?’
Pichet nodded. ‘Correct!’
Of course, it was more complicated than just slicing off part of the anatomy, he explained. Pichet listed all the motions of the surgery as though running through a grocery list. ‘Build a new vaginal canal. Remove all of the testicles. Use the scrotal tissue to do the labia – a large labia. A small labia? We use your penis skin and some part of your glans penis to make a new clitoris there. That’s it.’
I nodded, gulping.
‘Say if I wanted to be a woman,’ I said, ‘what could you do about this?’ I pointed to my Adam’s apple, which had been weirdly prominent since puberty. You could hang a coat off the thing. ‘Could you make this go down?’
Pichet studied my throat. ‘Hmm. After you take the hormones,’ he said carefully, ‘I think maybe your “Adam’s” will go down. Then we could open it up, remove some part of cartilage. But I do not perform the voice; only the shape. I don’t perform “the voice surgery”. I do not believe it is possible. They’re still speaking like me.’
On the other side of the city was Dr Preecha, widely regarded as Thailand’s pioneer of modern-day sex-change procedures. Almost every legitimate surgeon in the country who conducted these operations had studied under him – close to eighty plastic surgeons over the past thirty years.
Preecha ran his clinic out of a slick, air-conditioned facility called PAI (the Preecha Aesthetic Institute) on the main road of Sukhumvit 55, a trendy area of restaurants and boutiques popular with Bangkok designers, expats and cashed-up tourists. Its reception also resembled the suite of a luxury hotel. Preecha’s staff looked like they worked for Vogue, with their perfect skin, tailored clothes and asymmetrical haircuts. I waited for Preecha on suede sofas so deep that my feet didn’t quite touch the floor. Opposite me, there was a framed certificate of appreciation from an organisation named the Houston Transgender Unity Committee.
Preecha was one of the most expressive people I had ever met. Everything he said was accompanied by the hand movements and facial expressions of a primary school teacher reading to children. He pretended to be scared when he talked about fear, pointed to imaginary things when telling a story, and even changed positions in his seat when he re-enacted conversations between two people.
When he found out I was Australian, Preecha told me that he had studied plastic surgery in Melbourne for a year in 1976. There, a plastic surgeon asked him to observe and assist with a male-to-female genital sex-change procedure. It was the first time Preecha had seen anything like it. Then, when he returned to Thailand, he started seeing patient after patient who, desperate for a sex change, had been horribly mutilated by unqualified surgeons. Throughout the ’70s and into the ’80s, Thai surgeons were basically improvising sex-change procedures, making it up as they went along. Surgeries across the country became butcheries.
‘Some would just cut off the penis!’ Preecha exclaimed, making a snipping V-shaped motion with his finger. ‘Cut
off their balls, sew it up! That’s it!’
He pretended to throw something over his shoulder like garbage, disgusted.
‘What happened is,’ he said, ‘they have no hole. Some just look like an animal. See? So we have to do a lot of reconstruction. Really difficult! We had to do lots of corrections with very limited amounts of tissue.’ He put his fingers together in a pinching motion as if to say: only this much.
Local psychiatrists told Preecha that when they diagnosed someone as being transsexual, they didn’t know who to trust for their referrals. So Preecha got to work and started training surgeons around him, based on the sex-change procedure he’d observed in Melbourne. It was revolutionary work but marred by controversy. Many of his clients were lower-class transsexual women with little money, who mainly earned their living through sex work. Other surgeons even criticised him to his face.
‘Why do you spend your time operating on these people?’ they would ask. ‘It’s crazy! You operate on them, then they just go out and sell sex.’
But Preecha saw his work as a social project as much as a medical one. The more successful were the operations he and his team performed, the easier it would be for these women to integrate themselves into Thai society and climb the social ladder. He saw a direct link between performing successful sex-change procedures and improving his patients’ social standing.
‘First higher education starts to come out, then you start to have beauticians with their own television show!’ he said. ‘Now we have medical students, bankers, lawyers, all kinds of professions. We have many high-class families in the country who have the sex change. The families have started to accept.’
As with Pichet’s, most of Preecha’s patients were now from overseas: Australia, America, Canada and Europe. Still, that didn’t mean only rich Thai ladyboys had sex changes.
