the third sex

Seldom do you find any kind of rational and unbiased discussion about ladyboys in the mainstream media, so I was particularly interested to see a brief item in a recent issue of Thailand Timeout. This is care of their Agony Uncle, Dr Feelgood, who was replying to a reader who claimed he had been fooled into thinking that a ladyboy he met in a bar was a GG. The problem was, said the reader, he actually felt attracted to her.

I don’t know who Dr Feelgood is, but he is a very perceptive writer. I’m quoting directly from his answer, although I have edited it for reasons of space.

“Thai kathoeys can be split usefully into three groups. The first, probably the most numerous, consists of those who are readily identifiable as male. Now I suppose if you were attracted to this type, you would have to be at least bisexual ­ but then it’s unlikely you would be unaware of this before arriving in Thailand.

The second group, also quite numerous, are kathoeys who don’t appear masculine exactly, but have that distinctive ‘ladyboy look’ about them. Kathoeys of this type give some real meaning to the notion of the ‘third sex’. There’s no doubt that some of them can be very beautiful, but I don’t think too many people would readily confuse them with girls. I have no idea how sexual attraction to them should be categorised ­ it’s a species which doesn’t really exist in the West, and I don’t think Western languages and ideas about sexuality are adequate to deal with it.

The third group is probably the smallest ­ ladyboys who really do look like girls. Some of these are quite astonishingly convincing. The feminine persona of some runs so deep, they move instinctively like women. They can be very beautiful and very sexy.

Now I would define attraction to this third group as wholly heterosexual in nature. You think you are dealing with a gorgeous young female and you respond accordingly. Matters become a little bit more complicated if you then discover that ’she’ is really ‘he’ but remain attracted. But lust is a primitive mental function, one that has absolutely nothing to do with the cognitive faculties.

I’m amazed that so many farang men get their knickers in such a terrible twist about this. Almost any straight Thai guy, fooled by a kathoey, will just laugh and treat the matter as of no consequence whatever.

You are not gay. And from what you say, you are not ‘bi’ in any meaningful sense either. This just isn’t worth all the angst.”

I was in Phuket, staying on my own at a beach resort. It was early evening, and I was sitting in my bungalow working on my laptop. My mobile chirruped with an incoming message. It was from a ladyboy who meant a lot to me. “I in hospital” the message said. I texted straight back asking what was wrong. “Have operation cut cock” she replied.

I rang her immediately. She had had the operation earlier that day and sounded woozy under the drugs. Once I found out that everything appeared to have gone well, all I could do was to sound happy for her. And, if that was what she really wanted, of course I was happy for her.

Then I went outside and stood on the beach in the darkness. I felt thoroughly miserable. Our relationship had been a non-exclusive one but it had been close. I felt a genuine love and protectiveness towards her. She was tiny, and vulnerable, and only 19. She had the sweetest face and the sweetest personality. I had photographed her many times, and she was the most photogenic person I have ever known. I had told her many times she was perfect, and she was.

She had always told me that she didn’t want to have the operation. I hadn’t really believed her at the time, because she was so feminine that she could with relative ease make the transition into girlhood that so many ladyboys crave. But I had never seriously thought she would. I had just gone on enjoying being with her, and enjoying photographing her.

And she hadn’t told me that she was going into the hospital for the operation, hadn’t even mentioned she was thinking of it. She knew I would be unhappy, and so she kept quiet. Which was thoughtful of her, rather than deceitful, when I turned it all over in my mind.

I would never have argued against it. To have that operation is such an intensely personal decision that for someone, an outsider, to try and lay down the law would not be appropriate. But I would have dreaded the whole process, and it’s not just the removal of the penis. It is the fact that her personality was about to change.

I have seen this happen so often. A close ladyboy friend or a lover has the operation, and afterwards she ceases to be a ladyboy and becomes someone who is not quite a genuine girl but who is also not the person she was before. As she moves further into the mainstream, fulfilling her own deepest wishes, she leaves behind the person she once was. In many cases she will want to forget her previous life. She will find new friends, new lovers who may not even suspect she started life in the opposite gender.

I knew all this was about to happen to someone I cared for deeply. For her, it was a new beginning. For me, it was the end of the relationship. And to cap it all, I had lost one of my best models.

Out there on the dark beach, I suddenly felt very lonely.

A member emailed asking why I don’t include more pictures of ladyboy feet. He had a point. I do like pretty feet, but although I usually check out the model’s feet during a shoot, I seldom find anything worth photographing. The fact is that ladyboys seldom have attractive feet. I was talking to Ton about this, and she said, so solemnly I burst out laughing, “Ladyboy have big foot.”

Of course, like the Adam’s apple, the foot is one of the hardest parts of the body for the ladyboy to disguise. During a recent shoot one tiny ladyboy had feet so big and clumpy that I deliberately kept them out of the frame. Luckily she more than made up for it in other departments.

Although many ladyboys pay a lot of attention to their hands, and have beautiful hands as a result (Dew is a prime example – she can bend her hands back like a traditional Thai dancer), not many take real care of their feet, except maybe to experiment with nail polish and glue-on false nails. For the Thais, the feet are the lowest part of the body (never point your foot at a Thai), and this may have something to do with it.

Moving slightly upwards, the lower legs of many Thais, not just ladyboys, are also a problem for a photographer.

Look at the legs of any Thai person, male or female, and you are going to find various markings in common. For a start, on the inside right calf you will frequently find a lozenge-shaped patch of discoloured skin. Falling off motorcycles is part of the job description for being a Thai. That scar is a result of the leg coming into contact with the hot exhaust pipe.

On the front of the thigh you will often find a horizontal scar, caused by the wing mirror as the hapless rider sails past the handlebars. Non-road accident markings include blotches from insect bites and paddy field worms, in the case of upcountry Thais. And given that rubber flip-flops are the standard footwear for casual use, minor cuts, bruises and abrasions are the norm for the toes.

So, yes, I usually check the feet. Sometimes I am pleasantly surprised. But in the absence of a foot fetish (I’ve got quite enough other fetishes, thank you), sometimes I just plain forget.

A friend just into Bangkok from overseas and raring to get going on the ladyboy scene told me how he called a girl and arranged to meet her in the early afternoon. She turned up in hotpants so brief that he said you could see her pubic hair. She wore strap-up knee-high sandals, a tiny tube-top, and glitter makeup.

Thinking that he might be a trifle conspicuous walking along Sukhumvit Road with this vision at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, he suggested with some urgency that she go straight back to her apartment, which was nearby, and change into something a little less sudden.

Which she did, emerging soon enough in jeans and trainers, and with her face freshly scrubbed. Then she called her brother so that they could all go shopping together. The brother turned out to have bright orange hair, lipstick and long painted fingernails, and to be so overly camp in his behaviour that he made his “sister” look positively restrained.

My friend, who is generally unflappable, said that when they walked through the shopping mall, he began to have some idea of how it feels to live in a zoo. “All I could do,” he told me, “was to smile back at people and try and look as if I did this kind of thing every day.”

I do know what he means. There are times when ladyboys, or some of them, simply do not realise that ordinary folk generally prefer to be considered ordinary.

I remember some while back when I was doing a shoot in Pattaya. I arranged to meet a couple of models on the beachfront at 1 o’clock in the afternoon, and take them to a hotel. They turned up looking as if they had just come off stage at the Crazy Horse: glitter boots, ballerina skirts, and makeup so thick it could have been taken off like a mask. Try walking along the seafront and into a hotel with a couple of girls like that, and you do cause something of a sensation.

A breast augmentation job is something that most ladyboys yearn for. When someone tells me she is about to have silicon implants, I do however have mixed feelings.

Thailand is one of the world’s great centres of sexual reorientation surgery, but there are still far too many slash-for-cash merchants about. I have seen so many tit jobs that leave one nipple pointing up and one down, or with a Jean-Paul Sartre stare, or with the breast as hard and about as sexually exciting as a water melon. I have known artificial breasts to begin leaking, an extremely dangerous condition.

I’m not really a breast man, not even when it comes to GGs. But with ladyboys, after a couple of years of pumping themselves up with hormones, they might well have neat, small breasts but the hormones will have had a depressing effect a little lower down. So, all in all, it is better to accept the new surgical job and be full of praise when she comes round proudly flashing off her new acquisitions.

Whenever I see a breast job, I ask where it was done and how much it cost. Places of course vary, but the going rate at a decent clinic is 40,000-45,000 baht (around US$1,000 depending on exchange rate).

However, and I have this from a post-op friend who is particularly up on the subject, the surgeon in town with the best reputation is Dr Suporn, at Sriracha Hospital. The charge there is 70,000 baht.

When you convert this to US dollars, the cost is still relatively modest: certainly when you are getting a Rolls-Royce job with the breast soft and supple, a proper fullness underneath, and the nipples both pointing in the right direction.

A few times over the years I have paid up for breast jobs, or contributed to the cost, because even the standard operation is expensive in Thai terms. I’ve done this for a couple of reasons. Sometimes simply because I care for the person herself. Other times because she is about to go through the ritual that all young male Thais face, that of registering for the national draft. Once the name is accepted on the roll, there is a 1-in-10 chance that a two-year military service will be required. It is very difficult to avoid the draft, even for the rich kids: the only sure-fire way out is to display extreme effeminacy. And the army isn’t big on troops with tits.