the third sex

A lady friend (yes,  a real one!) who hails from Buri Ram was telling me at the weekend how youngsters in her home province are becoming drawn into the ladyboy lifestyle. She says she knows of nippers of six or seven years old who are trying on girls’ clothing, and of those a couple of years older who are putting on makeup and wiggling around like proper little madames. By the time they are in their teens they are already veterans.

Why, why, why, I asked, repeating the question I have posed countless times. Why are so many Thai youngsters so eager to change their sex?

My friend pulled a face. “I don’t know,” she said.

Is it something in the water supply? A genetic fault running through the Thai nation? The Thai equivalent to becoming a footballer or rock star, and leaving your impoverished background behind you? 

What happens to them when they leave school, I asked. Do they come to Bangkok and attempt to work in the cabaret or the bars? For it has to be born in mind that Buri Ram, which is in the northeast and adjoining the Cambodia border, is one of the most impoverished provinces in Thailand.

“No,” she said. “A lot of them stay in Buri Ram. Get jobs as waitress or in beauty salon or department store. Many want man to look after them.”

I thought that one over. Buri Ram is an agricultural province, a region where the living is sometimes hard, and although you can never quantify these things I would not have thought it an obvious place to have a large gay population. The people there are of course mainly Thai but there is a significant population of Khmer descent, and a lot of mixed blood. In fact my friend herself is part Khmer. Not the kind of people you would imagine who are given to liberal viewpoints or decadent ways of living. This is country where every able pair of hands is needed, and where the male side of the family is regarded very much in the traditional peasant way.

So why are all these husky young farmhands and potential farmhands giving up their very traditional way of life to start putting on makeup and sashaying around in their sisters’ dresses long before they have even reached puberty?


“No work in Buri Ram,” said my friend. “Only hard work on farm, or easy work in restaurant or beauty salon. Young boy not want to be like father, work hard, drink too much, fight, never have any money. So become ladyboy instead.”

We in the West are familiar with teenage rebellion. In the East it is far less common. But although we grew our hair long in the 60s, and dressed in odd ways, and tried in as many ways as we could to upset our parents and the established order, we never did get around to changing our sex. In Thailand, it is a rebellion. You can even compare it to the rise of the Red Shirt movement. A rebellion against the established order. But what a strange one it is.