the third sex

Sargent Shameless and I were talking during the week about a ladyboy we had both known a few years ago who worked at Hi!Boss in Pattaya. She was not only one of the cutest ladyboys I have ever seen, with real star quality, but she was also a smart little cookie. I remember going with her once when she wanted to draw money out of her bank account, and peeping over her shoulder at the ATM screen I saw she had almost a quarter of a million baht in her account. And she was still only 19. 

She had always refused to have her photograph taken, by me or anybody else, which was a great pity because she really was a girl, and nature, as a joke, had stuck a willy on her. She would have been fabulous to photograph. 

Talking to the Sargent about this natural beauty she had, I mentioned that she had told me she began taking hormones at about the age of 12. She said that at her school in Pitsanulok there had been as many as a third of the boys in her year who were experimenting with becoming ladyboys. The Sargent was shocked (he is hard to shock, believe me). If that is the case, he said, then there really is a third sex emerging in Thailand.

We went on to speculate about the effect that adolescent ladyboys have on the other male members of a school.

We all remember what it was like to enter adolescence and to suddenly become aware of girls, and the obsession one develops about them. But how would we have reacted if some of our schoolmates had begun to develop into a third sex?

Okay, for those of us from the West the idea is derisory. The nasty, stinky little kids in my school were already grotesque enough as males. And when I go back to London these days and see the feral youth that the country is breeding I doubt even their own mothers find them attractive.

But transfer this prospect to Thailand where ladyboys are, and have long been, part of the culture. Where ladyboys can be far more beautiful than genetic girls. Where a boy taking female hormones and wearing girls’ clothing can look like a little doll. The memory of my little friend from Hi!Boss comes before me as I write this.

So, what does that do to your emerging masculinity, if you are a straight kid, given that ladyboys are by their nature sexually provocative and not demure like genetic girls? When you are literally bursting for sex, but the girls in your school and neighbourhood are off limits? When the fledgling ladyboys are taking female hormones and looking for boyfriends?

I’m sorry, but I don’t really know.

The Sargent told me of a ladyboy friend of his who, so she told him, would regularly entertain the local lads after school, and that she would often find an easy way of earning some cash when she was walking home through the fields. A lot of Thai men enjoy going with ladyboys. Many keep a ladyboy mistress. There is no stigma about having sex with ladyboys. All I can think is, they learned this at an early age.