Ladyboys in Thailand

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
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Link to this week’s column

Haha! I was a little busy this weekend and hadn’t taken the time to check out this week’s new column until someone PMed me to ask if I’d seen it.

A pretty good column, but I feel compelled to make some remarks. First, to the best of my knowledge the word kathoey is a standard Thai word and not slang at all. My wife confirms this. Second, the English term “ladyboy” I have never known to be “widely considered pretty offensive.” The wife confirms this too. “Ladyboy” is commonly thrown around in Thai-language conversation and in the local English-language news media, and I’ve never heard of anyone taking offense to it.

I agree ladyboys are more accepted in Thailand than they or even gays in general are in the West. However, there is still a degree of discrimination, and their plight and struggle often makes it into Features news stories. The Thai government not only does not recognize gay marriage like the US does now but Thai ID cards and passports still list the holder’s birth gender regardless of any sex changes. But one does encounter ladyboys in pretty much all walks of life, and some schools upcountry made the news by implementing a system of third-sex restrooms – however, the reason it was in the news was because it was so unusual. I’ve never seen a ladyboy standing at the urinal, but I have seen them in men’s rooms (they always use the stalls). But some will use the ladies’ room, and I know a Malay lady in Bangkok who has told me a ladyboy regular at her gym always uses the ladies’ changing rooms.

Here’s a thread I started four years ago on a new Thai airline that was going to hire only transsexual stewardesses. That ended up not really getting off the ground though, so to speak. If it’s still around, it’s doing only charter service, but I’ve not heard anything else about them for a long time.

I made a number of comments about ladyboys in this post from a thread eight years ago that someone recently revived. In that post, I mentioned there were three ladyboy bars just in Nana Plaza alone, and that figure has at least doubled since then. In fact, I have it on good authority that the only bars in Nana Plaza that are enjoying a booming business are the ladyboy bars. In that post, I say:

“Who likes them? Well, honestly, the Japanese seem to. At least, a lot of the male Japanese who come here. One bar owner in Patpong hired a bunch of transvestites, or kathoeys, once he realized his Japanese customers couldn’t get enough of them. And I don’t mean just chatting them up in the bar. I mean taking them out of the bar and off to a short-time room or back to the hotel. Then the tourist season ended, and the steady stream of Japanese customers dried up, so he ended up firing all of the transvestites. (An American friend who has lived in Japan for a number of years says he can believe it and tells me of many, um, “unusual” sexual fetishes to be found there. Seems centuries of non-repressive sexuality has made them quite liberated in certain ways.)”

In that post I mention a bar in the Patpong red-light area, but getting back to Nana Plaza, I recall sitting and having a beer at Big Dawg’s beer bar at the entrance to Nana Plaza, watching the world go by, when I saw an older Japanese gentleman not walking but positively running out the entrance with two (2) ladyboys in tow, hailing a taxi so he could get his treasures back to the hotel as quickly as possible. And besides the ladyboy bars, a large number of rough-looking street ladyboys hang out around the entrance. An Australian naval officer picked one up six years ago and had his laptop computer containing classified information stolen (thread on that here).

As for the number of prostitutes in all he figure of 200,000 prostitutes of all genders in Thailand is generally considered a woefully low figure. And it’s an old figure, maybe from the 1980s. The researchers tasked with coming up with the number freely admitted it was almost certainly low but said that was the best they could come up with.

As for the Ping-Pong ball show, that’s amateur stuff. I have seen ladies pop open beer bottles and the like with their vaginas. Really. A mamasan once drew me a diagram on a napkin showing how a bottle opener is secreted up there. That’s never seemed like much of an advertisement for the lasses though. I mean, really, would you want to take a chance?

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I forgot to add: While the Vietnam War could be said to have jump-started the Western-oriented sex industry, that aspect represents a minuscule portion of the overall trade. I would say certainly less than 10% and possibly less than 5%. The sex trade was here long before the Vietnam War, but it was more of a local thing, which it mainly still is. I believe the Thais generally credit the Chinese with their traditions of concubinage as starting the sex trade, for whatever that’s worth. That is where the tradition of “minor wives” supposedly comes from. A “minor wife” is sort of like a, say, mistress in France only more institutionalized. There are actual ceremonies to go through that are close to a wedding. Illegal for 100 years now but still widely practiced. My Thai father-in-law, who died 15 years ago, had at least one minor wife and separate family – they all came to my wedding. They think he may have had at least one other minor wife squirreled away somewhere too.

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Perhaps not so in Thailand, but in the transgender community of America (the country to which Cecil is primarily writing for) ladyboy is a pretty offensive term. Cecil and I debated for a while even including it in the column (I thought it should have been, due to the context of the question).

I’m actually traveling to Bangkok in September to teach for a week, and am hoping to meet some members of the kathoey community over there to conduct a few interviews for my show. I’m hoping to learn more about the community face to face that way.

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I’m honestly confused, what’s a “transgender” person? I though that was someone surgically altered to have the sex parts of the other sex. If that’s the case, how does one tell the difference between a “ladyboy” and a “ladylady”?

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Transgender is simply an umbrella term which encompasses many people who a gender identity or gender expression which is different from “normal.” Transsexuals are those have a gender identity which does not align with their physical sex, and who are taking legal, social, hormonal, and/or surgical means to change their body gender.

Thus kathoey are transgender, but many of them (most?) are not transsexual.

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Ah, I see. I thought Cecil meant the term was considered offensive in Thailand since the question was about Thailand. It’s such a common term here that I had no inkling it was considered offensive elsewhere. Even the Thai kathoeys use it freely and will tell you right off the bat that they are a ladyboy.

I’ve never done a survey, but I think it safe to say most here are pre-op. In Thailand, “transvestite” seems to mean pre-op and “transsexual” means post-op, although I do know, largely thanks to this Board in the past, that’s not necessarily the case elsewhere. But here that seems to be a strict dichotomy.

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Oh and BTW, you’re coming at a good time. The Thai currency, the baht, is at a six-year low, about 35 to the US dollar right now. It wasn’t too long ago that it was close to 29 to the dollar, just a few months ago it seems.

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Where are you getting this from? I’ve lived in Thailand for two years, I have friends who are ladyboys and have discussed this with them. In my experience, they do feel that they were born as the wrong sex and without exception they are all taking hormones. Hormones are available freely here without a prescription, and its common for ladyboys to start taking them at ages 11-14, often with tacit approval / acceptance from their families. In my opinion, they are definitely trans-sexual and trans-gender. Most lady-boys also want to get surgery, in some cases only top surgery, because there is plenty of farang men that like that particular combination in Thailand, but many also want both top and bottom surgery.

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Given that there are apparently several errors in the article pointed out by people with direct in country knowledge of the facts will the “Ladyboys” article be revised?

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I mangled my words a bit answering on my stupid phone. You are completely correct. I meant to say many are transgender and transsexual, but many (most) not had SRS surgery (outside of BA). What I posted as-written above was incorrect.

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I’ve never heard the use of “ladyboy” in the USA except when referring to Thai ladyboys. I could imagine calling an American transgendered male-to-female in the USA would be offensive, but it would never, ever occur to me to do so because in my mind, ladyboys are only Thai.

So my query for further clarification is, does the American transgender community object to the use of ladyboy when referring to Thai ladyboys, or only when used as a potential slur when referring to American ladyboys?

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“As for that ping-pong-ball trick, let’s just say the physics behind it is pretty simple. The rest I’ll leave to your imagination and/or your Google search history.”

It seems this should be “Google search ability” or something like that.

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Once you inset the ball, just squeeze your vagina and POP. Seems simple enough.

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I’m not the Trans Pope, so I can’t tell you what all people think. My experience is that the lines are blurred, but it is viewed as an offensive term when used towards non-Thai transgender people, and as such it has some “carry-over” offense even when used for a group where the name is more traditional. Similar cultural mis-match occurs with the use of the word hijra (which actually describes third gender people), and the term Mahu in Hawaii (which is actually even more complicated, as it’s sometimes used as a slur even towards that community in Hawaii).

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I just mean that the “search history” phrasing seems to be wrong. You get to know things by searching for them, not by using your “search history”.

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Sure, but you also need to get the ball over the net, have it hit inbounds, and avoid a vicious return by your opponent.

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I think what Cecil meant was that your Google search history would now have a very, um, Interesting entry, that might be awkward to explain to an SO, parent, or employer. At least, that’s how I read it.

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Darts. Not only have I seen vaginally propelled darts popping balloons, but some of those balloons were moving targets. Now that takes skill.