the third sex

A ladyboy friend was telling me recently how she travels down to Singapore and hustles for business there. Many Thai LBs and GGs do this, Most go overland, because although the cost of an air ticket is not high (the flight takes about two hours) they are trying to make money rather than spend it. So they usually take the bus, travelling down to the Thai border town of Haad Yai, where they then board another bus that will take them through the Malaysian peninsula and over the border to Singapore.

As these are all ASEAN countries entry is easy enough, but the Singapore authorities are fully aware of what the girls are up to and will often issue a visa for only a few days, especially if there are several other Singapore chops in the passport.

Once on the island she heads for Orchard Towers, a shopping mall on Orchard Road, the heart of tourist country. This is one of Singapore’s great pick-up joints, and although the island does have recognised red-light areas, where prostitution is legal, the odd thing about Orchard Towers is that unlike the others it is right in the heart of tourist country and it does not appear to be “official”. However, so well known is the place for pickups that all the taxi drivers know it as the Four Floors of Whores, and the police don’t appear to show any interest in the goings-on there.

I’ve been knocking around Singapore for a good many years, and I can remember both the old Tropicana, a bar-come-disco that was opposite the Hyatt Regency Hotel, and of course Bugis Street; if you wanted a girl you went to the Tropicana, and if you wanted a ladyboy you went to Bugis Street.

Orchard Towers seems to combine the attractions of both these long-gone venues. If you are looking for it on foot, it is at the top end of Orchard Road, right next door to the Thai Embassy. It is a two-block commercial development, with a four-floor shopping mall that is crammed with the usual kind of places such as tailor shops, electronic goods retailers and so on. What you scarcely realise if you visit daytime is that amongst all these outfits is a vast number of pubs, bars and discos. They don’t open until 5pm, which is when the Four Floors of Whores dramatically changes aspect.

Enter any of the entertainment venues and you will find GGs hanging around looking for business, and at a large number of them you will also find ladyboys. And it is not just the Thais, either, for you will also find Malaysian, Indonesian, Filipino and even Singaporean ladyboys. More nationalities too, I suspect, if you really start looking: a friend told me he found a Mongolian GG on his last visit, so now I won’t rest until I’ve found a Mongolian ladyboy.

For the girls, of both kinds, the attraction is the money they can make, especially when the fleet is in town, but even during an average period because of the huge number of tourists and business visitors who gravitate to Orchard Road: many of them unaware, until they stumble into the mall for a few drinks, of just what is available there.

My ladyboy friend told me that business can be really good. The going rate for a short-time usually starts at 150 Singapore dollars (US$92 or 3,600 Thai baht) and easily goes up to double that, depending on how attractive and how smart she is. If she gets an all-nighter of course it is even better. Compare this to the 1,000-2,000 baht she can expect for a short-time if she is bought out from a Bangkok bar, and where she is surrounded by intense competition, and you can see that the milkrun down to Orchard Road is well worthwhile.

My ladyboy friend called me back a couple of nights ago, sounding very happy. She was back in Bangkok. “Many, many customers!” she bubbled with excitement. Then she told me she was in hospital in Bangkok, and had just had the operation. She had been saving a long time for this, but the money she made in Singapore had doubled her savings, and having made provisional arrangements with the doctor before she went away she had been able to check in as soon as she got back.

“Now I really lady” she told me over the phone, sounding so content that although I preferred her the way she was, I felt delighted for her. I only hope that she doesn’t feel let down after, when she realises that guys prefer their ladyboys to be fully equipped.

But then, when you look at it, a ladyboy has only a limited shelf life. This girl is already 26. She is attractive, but not sensationally so – her real attraction is her lovely bubbly personality and her fondness for jokes. So, unless she attempts to move into the female mainstream now, what is she going to be doing by the time she is 30?

This is the conundrum facing ladyboys. We see only the gorgeous, alluring third-sex creature. They see a whole lifetime fraught with potential difficulties and rejection.

Anyway, just in case you thought Singapore was boring, it isn’t.

Seldom do you find any kind of rational and unbiased discussion about ladyboys in the mainstream media, so I was particularly interested to see a brief item in a recent issue of Thailand Timeout, written by their Agony Uncle, Dr Feelgood.

A reader had written in to say that during a visit to a Bangkok bar, he had been fooled into thinking that a ladyboy was a GG. The problem was, said the reader, he actually felt attracted to her.

I don’t know who Dr Feelgood is, but he is a very perceptive writer. I’m quoting directly from his answer.

“Thai kathoeys can be split usefully into three groups. The first, probably the most numerous, consists of those who are readily identifiable as male. Now I suppose if you were attracted to this type, you would have to be at least bisexual – but then it’s unlikely you would be unaware of this before arriving in Thailand.

“The second group, also quite numerous, are kathoeys who don’t appear masculine exactly, but have that distinctive ‘ladyboy look’ about them. Kathoeys of this type give some real meaning to the notion of the ‘third sex’.There’s no doubt that some of them can be very beautiful, but I don’t think too many people would readily confuse them with girls. I have no idea how sexual attraction to them should be categorised – it’s a species that doesn’t really exist in the West, and I don’t think Western languages and ideas about sexuality are adequate to deal with it.

“The third group is probably the smallest – ladyboys who really do look like girls. Some of these are quite astonishingly convincing. They can be very beautiful and very sexy.

“Now I would define attraction to this third group as wholly heterosexual in nature. You think you are dealing with a gorgeous young female and you respond accordingly. Matters become a little more complicated if you then discover that ’she’ is really ‘he’ but remain attracted. But lust is a primitive mental function, one that has absolutely nothing to do with the cognitive faculties.

“I’m amazed that so many foreign men get their knickers in such a terrible twist about this. Almost any straight Thai guy, fooled by a kathoey, will just laugh and treat the matter as of no consequence whatever.

“You are not gay. And from what you say, you are not ‘bi’ in any meaningful sense either. This just isn’t worth all the angst.”

The other day I was in a five-star hotel in Bangkok, attending a function, when I realised that two of the hotel girls taking care of the guests in the meeting room were in fact ladyboys.

Most of the guests were from overseas and quite possibly unaware of the ladyboy phenomenon, and I amused myself for a while trying to picture their reaction if they discovered what was under those neat hotel uniforms.

The two ladyboys themselves were behaving in a very demure manner, and it was only my enhanced ladyboy vision that picked them out. I watched them, and they knew that I knew, but nothing apart from some inviting sideways glances came out of the encounter.

But I did get to thinking how ladyboys are moving more and more into the mainstream. Pictured on the main site are many students, and they are not all studying beauty and fashion, two of the traditional industries in which mainstream ladyboys make a living. Some are studying marketing, travel and hospitality, accounting, business administration, and other subjects that for want of a better word can be described as totally straight.

1This means that when they leave college or university, they will be well qualified to find mainstream jobs, and embark upon the kind of well-paid, well-respected career that is increasingly open to young Thais, as the country’s economy develops.

The other day I was in the back office of another five-star hotel, and found a ladyboy holding a job of considerable responsibility in the management team. I went into a bank a week or so ago, and one of the tellers was a ladyboy.

I recently saw a ladyboy as a sales agent in a real estate company, and I have seen ladyboy tour guides and travel agent counter staff. I have a ladyboy friend who teaches dance and drama at a junior school, and another who is greatly enjoying her career with one of the big IT distributors. She was offered the job when she left uni, and her employers obviously think well of her, because they fly her around Thailand to deal with corporate customers on a face-to-face basis.

In other words, the acceptance is growing. A few years ago, the idea of a ladyboy holding a job in which she dealt with the public on a regular basis would have been a bit far-fetched.

This is all very heartening. Of course, there is no reason at all why a person of the third sex should not have a satisfying and well respected career. Only prejudice. But with the increasing number of ladyboys in Thailand, and the fact that so many of them are opting for further education, perhaps it is inevitable.

Human Rights Watch has written to Nepal’s government voicing concern over what it calls continuing police abuse of transsexuals. The organisation says there has been a pattern of arbitrary arrests and violence against people the Nepalis call “metis”, genetic males who identify themselves as women, and they are asking for a full investigation.

Police in Nepal say they are taking the allegations very seriously but add that many of the metis were working as prostitutes and that as this was illegal in Nepal, raids on hotels were “permissible”.

The BBC has been covering this story and says that in the past few weeks metis have been detained without warrants, badly beaten, burned with cigarettes, forced to strip and even had guns pointed at them.

Similar allegations – sometimes with photographic evidence – are regularly made by the Blue Diamond Society, a group working among Nepal’s transsexuals, according to the BBC.

Blue Diamond http://www.bds.org.np was founded in 2001 as Nepal’s only organisation for sexual minorities.

It has its own weekly newspaper, with editions in English and Nepali, which acts as a platform for many marginalised groups in Nepal, but tends to be dominated by issues affecting gay and bisexual Nepalese and the significant number of meti, who unlike transsexuals in other countries are almost unknown outside of Nepal, and it appears are little known inside their own country.

BDS’s founder and director, 32-year-old Sunil Pant, explored his own sexuality while studying in Belarus. Returning from overseas, he wanted to discover more about Nepal’s gay culture. Even he was surprised at the number of metis, who are at their most visible, naturally, in Kathmandu.

He chose the name Blue Diamond because blue is regarded as a gay colour in Belarus, while the diamond symbolises compassion in Buddhism, one of Nepal’s two main religions.

Nepalese attitudes to sexual diversity are complex. Sunil says most Nepalese – especially Buddhists – are tolerant in this regard. But Sunil says there is hostility, for instance from those he describes as fundamentalist Hindus. And when metis try to claim equal rights, acceptance wanes and may give way to violence.

The Gurung people of western Nepal have a tradition of men called maarunis, who dance in female clothes. This has endorsement from an unlikely source, namely the Royal Nepalese Army, who recruit maarunis to perform dances as entertainment within the barracks. They have also traditionally had a role in the royal palaces, says Sunil, as good luck symbols.

Curiously enough, Blue Diamond’s newspaper is being funded by the British government, according to the BBC, which quotes an unnamed British diplomat as saying it is part of a campaign to reduce the impact of HIV and Aids. The funding is by Britain’s Department for International Development, which has a budget for small projects like this, with the British Embassy overseeing the grant.

An interesting point was raised the other day by a correspondent who wondered; “if ladyboys can be considered the third sex, should we consider butch lesbians the fourth sex?”

It was an interesting question. There is a tradition in ancient Indian culture that four sexes were created. By the time Buddhism evolved, that had become three sexes. Christians consider there are just two.

My initial reaction was “no” because gays, male or female, are gays. They like partners of their own sex and are generally comfortable being the sex they are. But then I thought again. I know of several lesbians here in Bangkok who outwardly look like men. You can spot a few in Patpong, actually, because they often find work in girlie go-go bars, as cashiers and as mamasans.

I once saw a very butch girl in a fiercely lustful clinch with a go-go girl with whom it was apparent she was having a steamy affair, and I would have taken the dyke for a boy, with her short floppy hair, spectacles, and stocky build.

On Bangkok’s media scene there is a well-known lesbian couple I know slightly, and they are famous fixtures of the media circuit. The girl is feminine, busty and beautiful. The “boy” is slight and slim, cuts her hair short, and wears a man’s suit. She could easily be an effeminate boy. I break out into a rash of lust when I think of them together, because they are both exceptionally beautiful.

There is of course a branch of cosmetic surgery that caters for women who want to become men. Penis construction is a very specialised art, more so than transforming a boy into a girl. I don’t know what the success rate is. I have to confess I have never seen an artificial penis, although I hasten to add that I would never let any experience like that slip by me. This is not a subject I know that much about, so any comments would be more than welcome.