the third sex

I had an email from a new member during the week, saying that as a middle-aged American man who had loved women all his life, to his great surprise, on a trip to Thailand, he had experienced ladyboys and now felt overwhelmingly attracted to them.

He said that it was difficult to live in what he evocatively described as a “shadow world”, in which an attraction to ladyboys forces us to live split lives. We can be with a ladyboy in Thailand and be fine with that even in public….BUT, he said, there is no way in which you can even talk about your feelings when you get home, because nobody will understand.

There was no way, he said, in which he could explain that loving ladyboys is not the same as being gay. “And how am I to explain something as mysterious as finding ladyboys very erotic when I don’t even fully understand it myself?”

This latter comment really rang a bell with me, because even after all these years I can’t quite explain the attraction that ladyboys have for me.

I have no problems whatsoever with genetic girls, having been turned on to them obsessively when puberty hit at the age of 12 or 13, and finding them as alluring now as I always did.

My secondary school in London was for boys only, and in the changing room and showers I found the sight of a penis to be exciting in an odd kind of way, which I put down at the time and to this day as being a result of having strong sexual urges but no female company of my own age. I have no sisters, and probably spoke to no more than a handful of girls my own age between the ages of 11 and 15, after which I realised that they were more or less of the human species and not adverse to the attentions of gauche teenage boys.

But even in those girl-less days, despite doing the usual things that nasty stinky little English schoolboys did, I would never have had sex with any of my school mates and even today, after a lifetime of often bizarre sexual experiences, I find the idea of having sex with a man to be a turn-off.

I have a number of gay friends, and I meet up with them sometimes for happy hour drinks and I listen to their stories but although they more or less accept me because of my ladyboy interest, I still feel an outsider.

I don’t even want to get caught up in the transsexual rights movement, because I don’t have any agenda on that. It’s not something I would argue for or against. The subject is entirely personal to the individual concerned, and deserving of the greatest sympathy and understanding; beyond that, I have no reason to participate. Except to say that as far as Thai ladyboys are concerned, the phenomenon has little to do with genuine transsexualism: or if it does, given the enormous number of people involved, there must be something very dodgy in the water here.

But am I a hypocrite? I, who spend so much time with ladyboys, and who find them erotic dynamite? I, who have sex on an extremely frequent basis with people who are biologically male? I, who know more than anybody else I know about Thai ladyboys and who could probably do something useful with my knowledge?

Having thought long and hard about all this over the years, I have come to one conclusion: Fuck it. I don’t care. I’m in it for the fun.