the third sex

O is one of my all-time favourite people as well as being one of the best models I have ever photographed. She appears on the main site in the Schoolgirl O series, and one of the best sets in my opinion is when I dressed O as a girl scout and took her out into woodland with another ladyboy named Trish for a twosome. The set is not a nudie one, but there is an eroticism to it that derives from the uniforms and the outdoor setting, in addition of course to the beauty of O.

But what a difficulty it is shooting outdoors!

I had taken O to Pattaya, where we met up with Aum, who lives there and whom I had photographed before, and Aum’s friend Trish. I hired a jeep so that we could get out of the city and into the surrounding countryside. We packed the scout costumes into a bag and off we went.

Now, driving through Pattaya in a jeep with three ladyboys is an experience in itself, but the girls were very demure and well behaved, and as they looked very feminine we didn’t attract much attention. I only mention this because I have driven in a jeep through the city with other ladyboys in the past and such has been the attention they have generated that all I could do was sit behind the wheel with what I hoped was a “there is nothing odd about this at all, I do it all the time” _expression and hope the tomato-red of my face would be taken as sun-tan.

But I digress.

With O sitting next to me and Aum and Trish in the back, we left the city limits on the main highway and began to explore the countryside, looking for somewhere quiet. This proved to be extremely difficult. Far more so than I thought it would. Each time we turned into a quiet lane we found ourselves cruising through a village, or pulling up in a farmyard, or entering a building site. On and on we drove, and I was getting uneasy. A photoshoot is not going to work if the models are tired and fed-up, and besides that the jeep was an old one, fine for rattling around Pattaya City but not a vehicle to rely on too much in remote countryside.

Eventually we found a quiet dirt track with no houses anywhere near, and with some decent woodland. Beyond were deserted fields. I pulled the jeep off the road. O and Trish began to get changed into their scout uniforms, with Aum acting as wardrobe mistress and makeup artist. The girls looked fantastic. Aum stayed in the jeep as lookout while I went with O and Trish into the woodland.

We began the shoot and it was working well. I had it mapped out in my mind what to do, and I was getting what I wanted. But we were all uneasy. The countryside seemed full of eyes. Labourers going past in a truck, a couple of motorcycles, somebody calling in the distance. Another car went past, and we stopped shooting for a while. Then we started again. The girls had dropped their pants and were getting into the sticky part. I was holding my breath, hoping that nothing would go wrong in these last critical moments. Then Trish let out a big sigh, and more, and I had my set.

At that moment a pickup truck hove into view. There was only one point in the lane from which we could be seen and it parked there, watching us. The girls were fully clothed but clearly this wasn’t a scout camp, and I am no scoutmaster. We got back into the jeep with as much dignity as we could muster, I revved the old engine and we rolled away in a cloud of dust.

A brief exhibition and conference is now taking place in Leeds on one of the most intriguing characters of 18th century society in England and France, the Chevalier d’Eon, who no one appeared to know whether was a man or woman. The Chevalier, a native of Burgundy, had been posted to London in 1763 by the French diplomatic service and for most of the next half a century was celebrated as a person of truly indeterminate gender. In that bawdy era, such was the fascination that a betting book was opened at the London Stock Exchange with the latest odds posted in the coffee houses. Only at d’Eon’s death was the secret revealed.

What made this more than a story of mere titillation was the world of smoke and mirrors that d’Eon inhabited.

Born in 1728 and baptised as a boy named Charles-GeneviËve-Louis-Auguste-AndrÈ-TimothÈe Eon de Beaumont, he excelled at languages and graduated in law from the CollËge Mazarin in Paris. By 1756, he was inducted into Louis XV’s espionage network, the Secret du Roi.

D’Eon had already proved himself able to pass as a striking looking woman by an appearance he made at a masked ball. This prompted Louis to post him to the Moscow court of Empress Elizabeth I, not as a man but as a woman. If this seems odd to us now, at that time the European upper classes were fascinated by the idea of cross-dressing, particularly for society events, and d’Eon appeared more adept at this than most. Enough to pass as a Mademoiselle Lia de Beaumont and to create a sensation at the cross-dressing salon that Elizabeth held every Thursday. All this was not just whimsy on the part of Louis XV. At that time there had been a diplomatic crisis between Russia and France, and it seems as if d’Eon’s spying and maneuvering helped to restore full relations between the two countries.

Back in France in 1761, d’Eon was assigned to another mission, this time to go to London and see if the British would be prepared to sign peace agreements and also to size up the prospects for a possible French invasion. He dressed initially as a man and hoped for promotion to the position of French ambassador. Assuming his stay would be a long one he used his Burgundy contacts to start importing wine for the English elite. But his plans fell apart when he was passed over for the ambassador posting and he found himself in debt with the wine business.

Refusing demotion and recall to France, d’Eon threatened to reveal Louis XV’s invasion plans. Amidst all this intrigue, around 1770 rumours began to circulate that d’Eon was a woman, possibly initiated by d’Eon himself who would have reasoned that French agents would have been less likely to kill a woman. He slipped easily into female clothing and his genderbending became the talk of London society.

” alt=”historical shemales” align=”left” />This transition is being discussed at the d’Eon conference in Leeds, which is being organised by Dr Simon Burrows, a senior lecturer in Modern European History at Leeds University. He is the author of a forthcoming biography on d’Eon, and will argue that d’Eon’s less admirable qualities should not be discounted, either. “His actions were also connected to his craving for publicity. We can’t ignore that he was also a dubious figure who fabricated stories against his enemies,” he says. The d’Eon exhibition is being held in the Brotherton Library, which has a large collection of d’Eon’s private papers and which is part of Leeds University Library.

Another speaker, Gary Kates, author of Monsieur d’Eon is a Woman, believes d’Eon needed to become a heroic female to “regenerate his soul”. Another d’ Eon authority, Clare Harman, says it was only the psyche of a woman, not the clothes that he craved. D’Eon wanted “to be considered a woman who passed herself off successfully as a man [rather than] to dress per se as a woman”, she says.

Whatever d’Eon’s deepest motives, he became far more famous than he would have had he become French ambassador. He was caricatured in the broadsheets of the day, there was a play named The Female Chevalier, and a financier offered d’Eon £30,000 to disrobe. He wisely refused, and the mystery grew around him.

By now, France had a new king, Louis XVI, who agreed to pay off d’Eon’s debts on the proviso that he return to France and continue dressing as a woman. D’Eon had earned his Chevalier title as a captain in the French Dragoons and his masculine persona stirred on his return to France. He wore the plainest female clothing for a while, and then reverted to wearing his Dragoons’ uniform in his native Burgundy. For this he was imprisoned: a woman dressing as a man was considered indecent under French law at that time. With his father dead, only his mother knew the truth – and she seems to have kept very quiet.

D’Eon himself wrote that “I am humiliated and depraved among men; I am elevated and exalted among women.” He returned to England and resumed his feminine persona. He became a public performer, fencing in skirts for money, on one occasion taking on the Prince of Wales.

He was an object of curiosity amongst the most serious minded people. British prime minister Horace Walpole said “she” was a “noisy and vulgar individual whose hands and arms… are fitter to carry a chair than a fan”. Dr Johnson’s biographer James Boswell observed, “she seemed to me to be a man in woman’s clothes”. Mary Wollstonecraft considered d’Eon to be one of the pioneers of the feminist movement, articulating views about the female perspective from a unique position. D’Eon muddied the waters by saying, “God created man and woman, the one for doing good, the other for doing bad. So long as a man is a man, the earth is his; so long as a woman is a woman, virtue is hers.”

The Chevalier d’Eon died in a London apartment at the age of 81. A post mortem was held and the doctor, accompanied by 12 witnesses, recorded: “the male organs in every respect perfectly formed”. But as to whether Monsieur d’Eon found life enriched by crossing the gender divide, or whether he found himself occupying a no-man’s and no-woman’s land, is not really known. The conference is aiming to come to some conclusions on this.

Documentary evidence does however indicate that d’Eon died a virgin.

I received this e-mail the other day from Michelle in Spokane, USA:

Your piece, “Coming in Cardiff,” immediately triggered personal feelings invoked when I began to dissect Beardsly’s fantasia imagery of the early 1900s when I was an art student during the 1970s: androgynous boys and girls. The grand illusion of undeveloped bodies occupied by non-formed innocent minds.

To males but not females, there exists a level of sexual excitement in viewing such persons. Females prefer either males or females; sometimes both and sometimes both in the same body, but wholly functional with minds that understand sex.

For males, it would seem that the more innocent appearing, the greater the sexual excitement. Perhaps that’s the primordial thing of conquering; certainly it has a lot to do with controlling.

Of course I must also examine my own feelings and rememberances of when I began to venture into sexuality as a quasi-ladyboy myself. It seemed that my minimal makeup and only a hint at breasts (tissue paper stuffed into a bra!), long bare legs in a short skirt and heels, along with painted nails and a wig, turned guys on more than when I paid attention to my makeup – sometimes though like a drag queen or female impersonator – with long-sleeve blouses and longer skirts. And I found that high heels were mandatory or no matter how I was dressed, men wouldn’t pay attention to me.

A curious thing though that I have noticed in your personal experience postings as well as the postings of others here at third-sex.org: participation of the ladyboy as an active partner. Here in America, TGs and TSs rarely get into that role as the men who have sex with us prefer that our erections not interfere with their sexual pleasures (not that I have that ability anymore and even when I had that organ, it was quite infrequent that it ever rose to any input).

I guess one of the reasons I wish that you could come here to visit, is to see and experience for yourself how different American male perspectives are regarding gender and sexual identity.

I recently listened to a black American male describe his experiences in Bangkok with the ladyboys. Derision was paramount in his tone! Finally I ventured that his comparisons with American drag queens, female impersonators, transgendered and transsexuals, was skewed due to his inability to separate in his mind the vast differences in the gender and sexual identity apparent and those implied, in this country and that applying those standards to Bangkok was wholly unfair to all concerned.

You could almost literally hear the gears grinding and clashing in his mind! You could certainly see it in his face! Finally he blurted out, “who … what are you?”

I told him that I was a post-op transsexual (I hate that term! Transsexual! It was created by the news media and not the medical or legal community!) and that I had made the acquaintance of many ladyboys in Bangkok before and after my SRS, and that I had a good friend who had two web sites devoted to Thai ladyboys. I went on to say that in Thailand and for most of Asia, the concept of ladyboy was less the phenomena it is here in America and more of the day-to-day reality of both ancient and present day societies in Asia as a whole.

Of course during his rant and then during my own dissertation, I was watching his body language; especially his crotch, which was a little hard to miss as he grew a great bulge as he was busy putting down ladyboys!

And therein lays the crux of the whole matter from an American viewpoint: sex isn’t any fun unless one can feel guilty about it! To minimise the guilt, one then is compelled to put down the things that bring both pleasure and guilt. We can blame religion for this. But I think that’s enough from me for now!

I receive so many emails asking me if I know of ladyboys in the sender’s vicinity. Usually, I don’t. Well, I do get asked about some odd places. However, the email below, quoted with the sender’s permission, is heartening! If you live in an area where you are sure there are no ladyboys but you are desperate to find one, I suggest you carry out a systematic search. You are never sure what you may find.

“I have become increasingly curious about Thai ladyboys but I had never met one. I surfed the net and found your site. Many of the ladyboys are so pretty and feminine, often prettier than normal women and so much nicer than the Western transsexual.

Only last week in the small ads section of the escort listing in my local newspaper I came across an ad from a Thai ladyboy. I decided to call the number and find out more!!

The ladyboy spoke very poor English and could not give directions so a local guy came to the phone and told me how to get there. The area is not a nice one and the idea of a guy being in the house worried me a bit but I decided to go for it.

Upon arrival the local guy opened the door and smiled and showed me to a room. Inside was a Thai ladyboy with long black hair, tall, very slim, nice face and wearing long black boots and kinky black leather gear. We had a small chat and then got down to sex.

I asked her to strip naked…nice body, no boobs and normal sized in the downstairs department. She asked me what position I wanted her, and then we were off for a mind-blowing experience. For me, it was a fantasy come true.

My first time ever with a ladyboy. Gone are the nerves or hang ups…so Thailand here I come for rounds 2, 3, 4, 5, and more.

RJ, Cardiff, Wales”

So, if you can find a Thai ladyboy in Welsh Wales, I am sure you can find one anywhere. Check out the escorts section of your local press, or better still search the internet. Find the special interest groups. Get to know a Thai or two, because the network will reach to everyone in your country.

There is a footnote to this brief story. Mr Jones actually made it to Thailand. I met up with him in the coffee shop of his hotel. “Where do you suggest I go first?” he asked. I said Obsession, in Nana Plaza, was his best bet. There is a good selection of girls, and you don’t get the usual pestering of a group of LBs when you walk in.

So Jones the Bonk went there that very evening. Next day he called me, goggle-eyed even over the phone.

“I cannot believe it,” he lilted. “I have just had a life-altering experience!”

That’s what ladyboys do for you.