by Benjamin Law
‘No, that’s not true. See? The rich: they can choose the surgeon. Haha. The poor, they will go to the medical centre. They get the student, but under supervision, the same as in any city hospital in the world.’
I showed Preecha a picture of Miss Tiffany’s Contestant #8 – Nadia – on my digital camera. He looked impressed and nodded thoughtfully, the way art dealers do when they’re inspecting a particularly fine sculpture.
‘I imagine a lot of work has gone into her,’ I said.
To get this result, Preecha explained, Nadia would have had to start on hormone therapy from a young age, ideally before puberty. The reason why Thai transsexual women all looked beautiful was because they had access to the hormones at an early age, since they could buy them over the counter, no prescription needed.
‘So these women aren’t just beautiful because Thai people are more feminine, or because Thai surgeons are better,’ I said. ‘They’re beautiful because they’re getting hormones when they’re kids?’
Preecha nodded. Nowadays, he said, you could venture into Thai schoolyards and find kids and teenagers who had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the types of hormones they could score at chemists, the doses you should take and the results they’d produce.
‘They know which hormones make the breasts enlarge, the hair full, the voice more feminine. They even teach us how to choose the hormone!’ Preecha exclaimed, slapping the table and laughing.
Some of the Miss Tiffany’s finalists had told me they had felt female from childhood, while others felt it more when they hit puberty. Most of them counted themselves lucky that hormone pills – oestrogen, puberty arresters, testosterone blockers – were traded around Thai schools in the way other kids around the world traded baseball cards or Pokémon. Twelve-year-old kids asked older kids for pills, then took them often without their parents knowing. There was an entire underground playground racket going on. Even kids understood that you needed to get onto hormone treatments quickly. The last thing any of them wanted was to be fourteen years old and have a moustache.
Preecha had heard terrible stories of Westerners who couldn’t get on the drugs until they were seventeen or eighteen, by which time their pituitary glands had betrayed them. Fuelled by the brute, pumping force of naturally produced testosterone, their body hair, broad shoulders and facial hair had burst out. Many of Preecha’s overseas male-to-female clients were in their forties or fifties, and some were married with children. ‘They’ve tried to be a man, you see,’ he said, shaking his head in pity. Fighting the broad shoulders and masculine facial structure of a fully developed adult male was always going to be an uphill battle.
Thailand’s underground trade in teenage hormones wasn’t exactly legal, but Preecha said its existence reflected a kind of Buddhist live-and-let-live attitude towards sex and gender in Thailand. ‘The Thai community is very easy to adjust to any new phenomenon. They adjust to anything. They’re very easy to accommodate the new thing. We’re very free and open-minded. Now, they not really agree with this kind of phenomenon. Many families are against. There is still discrimination. It’s getting better because of the social acceptance, not because of the law. In Thailand, society accepting.’
‘So, it’s not like Thailand necessarily has any more ladyboys than other countries?’ I asked.
‘No! Not true,’ Preecha said, hands flailing about. ‘It’s just society accepts. They want to show off; come out in the public. You can see in America, you don’t even see transsexuals in the cabinet! But actually there is some, just hiding!’
To demonstrate, Preecha drew his arms close to his body and looked around, pretending to be frightened – like, I guess, someone trapped in a cabinet. ‘Not because Thailand has more, no. Because the Thai allow you! “Okay, come out, come out!” See?’
Then Preecha mimed opening a door, stepping outside and suddenly spreading out his arms. He changed his facial expression from frightened to beaming with happiness. This was what it looked like to finally climb out of the cabinet. I smiled and applauded softly.
Back at Miss Tiffany’s, the girls were preparing for the swimsuit round at Central Beach, a towering multi-level mall in Pattaya. Made of white concrete and what seemed to be kilometres of glass, the mall proclaimed itself the world’s largest beachside shopping centre. It loomed over the ocean like a shiny monolith.
An entire section of the mall had been sealed off for Miss Tiffany’s. The swimsuit round was a special source of anxiety for some of the girls. It was a sensitive issue whether contestants had or hadn’t retained male genitals. No photographers or reporters were let inside the dressing rooms where girls were changing into their bikinis.
‘What’s going on in there?’ I asked Pear, pointing to the closed door.
‘Some of the girls are taping themselves up,’ she said.
‘Does it matter to the judges whether they still have …’ I trailed off. ‘You know?’
‘No one knows,’ Pear said. ‘It’s not a part of the judging process.’
I nodded. ‘What’s actually involved in taping yourself up anyway?’
‘I don’t know,’ Pear said. ‘But apparently it’s quite painful.’
From the taping rooms, the girls came out for hair and make-up. It was easy to tell how much money was behind each contestant. Like any competition, there was no such thing as an even playing field. Some of Miss Tiffany’s contestants had come from Thailand’s outer regions and had only a single friend, sister or self-trained beautician-slash-second-cousin doing their make-up. Those contestants – like the startled, doe-eyed #6, or the terminally shy #24 – were always the quiet ones. Noon was perched in her corner with her hair in curlers, while a butch-looking female relative stoically applied make-up to her face.
Nadia, on the other hand, had a glamorous entourage attending to make-up, costume, hair and styling. She had money behind her and was already on an agency’s books. Even putting aside her looks, there was something fundamentally magnetic about her. Some of it, I think, had to do with that primal instinct to align yourself with the winning team. After a group of men helped strap a massive pair of angel’s wings to Nadia’s shoulders, she walked back and forth as everyone closely analysed her movements. When she sat back down, a plump, squat man with a belly bursting out of a too-tight shirt expertly applied eyeliner and mascara, while a swarm of young gay men twittered around her taking photos and sending MMSes to friends. They wore leather hats, studded belts and screenprinted t-shirts with slogans like ‘HOT GUY FROM MYSPACE, FACEBOOK & OTHER’, and shoes in colours like chemical-fume purple and blue-black fuchsia that existed only outside the natural world.
Jung, a young guy in his early twenties, had dyed his hair blond and grown it long, covering his face. When I asked him whether he thought Nadia had a chance of winning, Jung and his friends said Nadia wouldn’t just win tonight’s round but the whole competition.
‘What makes you so confident?’ I said, grinning.
He put his hand to his mouth and laughed bitchily. ‘I mean, don’t you think he’s a handsome girl?’
I stopped grinning. Nadia sat still for the make-up artist but shot Jung a look.
‘That’s horrible,’ I said. ‘Nadia’s a she – a beautiful girl.’
‘No, no! Handsome boy, handsome boy!’
Jung cracked up and shrieked shrilly, prompting the other guys to start clapping and make whooping noises. I tried to ignore this.
‘Are you willing to put money on her?’ I asked.
They all laughed. ‘No, we are just his friend,’ Jung said.
‘Why do you still refer to Nadia as he?’
Jung sighed dramatically like I’d killed all the fun. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘She, she, she.’
Outside the mall, I ate an ice-cream and watched the sun sink into the sea like a slowly poached yolk. By now, hundreds of people – supporters, onlookers, curious tourists – sat on concrete tiers around the open-air catwalk erected in Central Beach’s courtyard. The evening’s fiv
e judges took their seats in front of the stage, a motley crew of academics, former models and urban professionals. In a brown jungle-inspired outfit, Sorrawee arrived wearing her crown to sit alongside last year’s Miss International Queen, an adorable Japanese woman named Haruna Ai. All big smiles and bubblegum cheeks, Haruna had won the title of world’s most beautiful ladyboy the year before, even though she’d come from Japan: a country that had only legalised sex-change procedures in 2004. She was now a huge mainstream television and pop star back home.
People started calling out, ‘Sorrawee, Sorrawee!’ To Haruna Ai, they cried out, ‘Hello, hello!’ Both women smiled, waved and posed for their photographs, before giggling with each other. Sorrawee didn’t speak Japanese, Haruna didn’t speak Thai and neither woman spoke much English, so they communicated by taking photos of each other with their smartphones like high school kids on some marvellous UN-sponsored beauty exchange.
It was dark now and the catwalk lights burst on. Cabaret ladyboys appeared on the stage in skyscraper-high crowns and Thai silk dresses, posing in tableaux. Male dancers leaped into action with choreographed, jerky dancing and the speakers began to pump out a brand of European house music I’d wrongly assumed had become extinct in the mid ’90s. The male dancers somersaulted and spun their forearms around with big cruise-ship smiles as the women started to lip-sync to a song about ‘flying so high’ to ‘make you believe in me’ because ‘it’s my destiny’.
At the song’s finale, the lights went off dramatically. When they came back on, the Miss Tiffany’s contestants appeared in swimsuits. The crowd roared their approval. The girls stormed the stage in groups of three, pounding the catwalk with their heels before posing in trios for the dozens of photographers at the front of the catwalk. The audience ate it up, applauding and wolf-whistling.
‘You just can’t tell, can you?’ clucked an elderly British man behind me.
Each of the girls wore bikinis, stilettos and theatrical stage props, a unique combination of apparel and accessories that belonged in no other worldly situation except on this catwalk, right now. Some of the props were heartbreakingly literal (Contestant #6: ‘I am carrying a blow-up flotation device because I’m in a bikini!’) while others were patently bizarre (Contestant #11: ‘I have come dressed as a hybrid of a wedding cake, an arrangement of oriental lilies and one of Tolkien’s Ents! Behold! I have ceramic doves glued to my body!’)
Nadia nailed it with her outfit, though. She walked out in her plain white bikini with the confidence of a Milan Fashion Week veteran, making burning eye contact with the judges, her angel wings folded discreetly behind her. Halfway up the stage, she spread the wings out. The two girls who shared the stage with her disappeared almost entirely. It was a brilliant move. The crowd went apeshit. Nadia’s gay mafia posse stomped the ground with their feet and howled like jackals. I found myself hollering and whooping at the stage too. There was something contagious and electric about what was happening. The noise was deafening and drowned out the electronic music. In response, the judges started laughing too, enjoying the racket.
If Nadia doesn’t win the finals, I thought, I’ll eat my shirt.
Several years ago, there were actually two ladyboy beauty pageants in Pattaya, both of which were equally famous and broadcast nationally. One was Miss Tiffany’s. The other was something called Miss Alcazar, which folded in 2005. There weren’t too many differences between the Tiffany and Alcazar pageants, except that Alcazar had talent rounds where the contestants had to show off special talents, such as comedy, acrobatics, public speaking or ballroom dancing. Instead of winning a car, Alcazar winners scored 100,000 baht (over 3200 US dollars) and a diamond ring.
Alcazar’s winner in 2005 was a woman named Yollada Krerkkong Suanyot, who introduced herself to me by her nickname, Nok. At thirty, Nok looked obscenely young (she could easily have passed for eighteen) and had the lithe body of Audrey Hepburn combined with the height of Uma Thurman. On her black top, she wore a gold pendant with diamonds crafted in the shape of a woman’s silhouette. If she had been a contestant in this year’s Miss Tiffany’s, I would have put money on her above the other girls. For Nok, it was bittersweet that she had won the last Miss Alcazar title before it closed for business.
‘Basically, you’ll be Miss Alcazar forever,’ I said.
Nok burst out laughing in wild hoots. ‘Yes, the last one!’
Dr Preecha had told me to get in touch with Nok, mainly because she was smart – the most impressive transsexual woman he knew. Nok had co-founded and managed a successful brand of jewellery named Carat & Secret, which was predominantly sold through TV infomercials, and she was also in the middle of a PhD examining quality-of-life issues for ladyboys in Thailand, whom Nok referred to as ‘trans females’. In between work and study, Nok ran the Trans Female Association of Thailand, a sort of community activist group and sharing circle whose members ranged in age from ten to their late forties. Members exchanged stories in an online forum and also met every month in Bangkok.
‘We just come and talk-talk-talk,’ Nok said, making quacking movements with her hand. ‘We formed our group, how do you say? By destiny.’ She laughed.
We met on Nok’s lunch break at Carat & Secret headquarters, an office space in the back corner of the 24-hour cable channel that sold the jewellery. We looked over photos of Nok growing up in Thailand’s northern province of Nan. One childhood snapshot showed two cute schoolboys posing with a severe-looking male teacher standing between them. Both boys wore blue shorts pulled up high over their waists. The one on the left was Nok.
‘And you know,’ Nok said, pointing to the boy on the right, ‘she is a trans female too!’ She laughed delightedly. In the photo, the two boys were only six or seven years old, but Nok remembered the two of them exchanging notes about not feeling male even back then. Another photo showed a teenage girl, her face smooth with the soft puppy fat that comes for a lot of girls at that age.
‘That’s me,’ Nok said.
The girl looked nothing like Nok.
‘That’s you?’
‘When I take hormones, it made me fat.’
Nok was thirteen or fourteen in this photo. She had already been taking female hormones for two years. Her father was a macho guy, a policeman who ran a Muay Thai boxing school. He’d resisted the idea of Nok becoming a female at first, but Nok’s strategy was simple: don’t argue, stay quiet and simply demonstrate who she was.
‘Both my parents just tried to treat me good, but they didn’t think I was going to have SRS,’ she said, referring to sex-reassignment surgery. Nok went ahead with a genital sex change when she turned seventeen, paying the 80,000 baht (2600 US dollars) fee herself, helped along by an education scholarship. Nok went to a hospital and was intially examined by Dr Preecha, but had no idea who actually operated on her.
‘I’m not sure if Dr Preecha was the “knife person” or not. Maybe he just only stand and watch the students.’
‘You seriously don’t know who operated on you?’
‘No, I don’t know!’ she said, laughing.
Things weren’t funny when Nok turned twenty-one. At that age, Thai men are obliged to enrol in a conscription lottery that determines whether they will serve in the military. Thailand doesn’t allow people to change their sex on any official documentation, which meant that Nok was still considered a man. She was forced to put her details into the lottery too. Just like that, her number came up.
On her first day in the army, Nok stood alongside all the male recruits and, like everyone else, was told to take off her shirt. By that stage, she had fully developed breasts and female genitals courtesy of hormones and surgery. Surrounded by shirtless, snickering young men and intimidating army commanders, Nok stood and stared at the ground, fully clothed, hugging herself. The officers looked at her coldly.
‘You say you’ve had a sex change already,’ they said, ‘so you’ll have to show us. Prove it.’
Nok was almost relieved at the thought of an ex
amination, assuming she would be taken to a private room with a doctor. But after being led to a toilet, the officers told her to disrobe on the spot. Dozens of eyes were trained on her, some watching with disgust, others with gleeful, sadistic curiosity. It was the first day of a long military stretch for many of them and they were grateful for the entertainment. Shaking, Nok took off her clothes slowly, doing her best to cover her breasts and genitals, and started to cry.
‘I cannot say anything,’ Nok said now, quietly. ‘Just only cry. When you’re twenty-one, you’re still young, right?’
When they finished ogling her, they told Nok she could put her clothes back on. They discharged her with a medical certificate saying she suffered from a ‘mental perversion’. That medical certificate was a mixed blessing. On one hand, she was officially excused from the military. On the other, it was a permanent stain on her record that meant she’d never be able to get a government job, say, in education, health or the public service.
That Thailand banned its citizens from officially changing their sex might seem a minor oversight, but Nok’s situation was only one example of how it could often give rise to nightmare scenarios. For instance, until 2007, Thai law didn’t recognise male-on-male rape as a crime, which meant no laws protected transsexual females from rape either. Noon – the chipmunk-cute Miss Tiffany’s contestant with the broken heel – said that every time she flew to the United States, she had to carry a male Thai passport with an English letter from her doctor explaining that she was transitioning sex. That was humiliating enough, but one time she forgot to bring the letter and had a wretched, nerve-racking 24-hour plane ride. When she finally got to the US airport, the immigration officers took her aside and gave her a full body inspection.
‘I was so upset,’ Noon said. ‘Because I forgot my certificate, I could only stay for three weeks. I had to go back and get another certificate.’
After being dismissed from the military, Nok obtained a fake ID that showed her as female, as a giant fuck-you to the world. With her new under-the-counter identity, she entered a mainstream beauty pageant without declaring she was transsexual. No one could tell she wasn’t a genetic girl. Suddenly, she was on the books with the agency Elite Models and posed in big corporate pageant events like Miss Mitsubishi. She also studied like a demon, finishing degrees in food science and broadcast and television.
