the third sex

Despite all the years I have been involved in Thailand’s ladyboy scene, every so often it bowls me a googly.

Recently I did a photoshoot of a ladyboy named Bee. I really liked her, as she was cheeky and funny and urchin-like and pretty. She had taken my phone number and a couple of days later rang to suggest I do a shoot of one of her friends. That’s the way it so often works, friends of friends, so I said sure, yes.

The date and time was arranged and Bee rang me a couple more times, full of excitement, to confirm. And as I suggested, she also rang from the taxi on the appointed day, so I could go down and meet them.

The taxi pulled up and out stepped three people: a ladyboy friend named Ann, who often comes along when I’m doing shoots, and the new model, and a small young guy with cropped hair.

“Where’s Bee?” I asked, mystified.

“I’m Bee!” said the young guy.

I looked, and I looked, and my mouth must have hung open in astonishment. I simply did not recognise the Bee I had so eagerly undressed and photographed a few days previously. The face looked different without makeup, only the smile was the same, and the cropped hair of course changed everything.

“Turn round.” I said. Bee was still wearing the same low-cut jeans she (he?!) had arrived in before, and which had so turned me on because I could see the top of her bottom cleft above them. I could see it now. Just to be sure, when we got to the room I pulled Bee’s jeans down and saw the heart tattooed on her (his!) bum.

Bee, who is 20, explained that he had reverted to being a boy for now, because he has gone back to college and it is one of the few that doesn’t allow female dress by its ladyboy students. “Later I be girl again,” he said.

All this reminded me of an experience of a few years back. I had been sitting having an innocent drink in Patpong when I saw a young ladyboy going up the steps to one of the upstairs bars. She had a cute little smile and a ponytail, and she wore a little tennis skirt, white ankle socks and trainers. Just my type. She saw me looking, flipped up her skirt to show her knickers, and then fled up the steps giggling. I went after her.

That was the beginning of an intense relationship. Kwan was a little sex fiend, all the more irresistible because of her Lolita looks and her knock-knee’d schoolgirl stance. I couldn’t get enough of her, and the affair went on for months. But then we drifted, as these things do, and eventually she disappeared.

Early one evening about a year later I was walking up Silom Road to Patpong and as I was passing the bus stop two young guys, obviously gays, got off a bus. One of them, a weedy looking boy with a rabbity grin, approached me and greeted me by name. I was totally mystified until he said, “It’s me – Kwan!”

There was no trace of the Kwan I had known. He told me he had decided to go back to being a boy, and that he was now working in a gay bar in Soi Twilight. He told me the name of the place and invited me to go along later. But the sexual heat had gone along with the ladyboy illusion, and I never did take up the offer.

There is more to someone becoming a ladyboy than simply donning female clothes and putting on makeup. I was photographing a ladyboy the other afternoon and although she was well madeup, and a nice enough person, she still had a distinct masculinity about her. As I worked at the pictures, I tried to analyse it.

She was shapely, and slim, and had almost no body hair. So it wasn’t her size and build that was causing it. She moved well, in a feminine and non-exaggerated way, so it wasn’t that. Her voice was pleasantly pitched, so it wasn’t that.

Somehow she had not managed to shed her masculine aura. I can’t define it. At what point does a person cease to be male and become a member of the third sex?

I have said it here before, that being with a ladyboy, the best of them anyway, is not like being with a guy. It really is almost, but not quite, like being with a genetic girl. Unless you have tried being with a ladyboy, it is very hard to explain.

I remember being at a beach resort in Phuket late last year, sitting at the beachfront bar. There was a ladyboy working there, and also a gay guy. The guy, who was very effeminate, was actually better looking than the ladyboy. But I had no interest in him at all – it was her I couldn’t take my eyes off.

There is an uncanny way that ladyboys have of losing their masculinity. It just somehow slips away. But they can get it back again. I have seen Bee several times since the transformation. Each time, he was becoming more masculine. The first time after the haircut he had still been very effeminate, but inside the space of two months he has become almost like any other young guy, too loud, too pushy, and with a distinctly unfeminine swagger.

Whereas I had found Bee a real turn-on as a girl, as a guy I find him, to be perfectly honest with you, just another guy.