Ladyboys: The Secret World of Thailand’s Third Gender
By Susan Aldous and Pornchai Sereemongkonpol
Published by Maverick, 2008

The lives, heartaches and breakthroughs of Thai gender benders, shared in a weave of miserable lament and giddy fluff. My review, at the request of the publisher.

I suppose Susan Aldous and Pornchai Sereemongkonpol’s book makes a decent guide for young people pondering gender — and the possibility of changing it — and a warm companion for kathoey who can identify with its many familiar episodes.

Other than that, I don’t see the point.

The argument that not enough is written about transgenders in Thailand is patently false. Who doesn’t already know how surgeons turn a penis inside out to form a vagina? Or that effeminate boys go through hell en route to realising they’re really girls?

The justification that straights reading this book will come to understand and empathise more with kathoey might stand up if it were better written, with answers to more probing questions, rather than being a lazy transcript of nine women’s not-altogether-edifying life stories. Besides, the bigots are never going to read this book.

The authors seem to think they’ve got a closet full of secrets to share with the world about ladyboys following their interviews with the nine disparate individuals.

Unless I’m badly mistaken, these “secrets” are that the ones who still have penises tape them tightly into their crotches to appear more like women, and that breast implants have to be massaged daily following the operation to keep them from assuming unsightly shapes.

This stuff is common knowledge to anyone who’s ever read a magazine feature about the women-trapped-in-men’s-bodies who seek new identities under fresh but misguided labels like sao praphet song (second kind of woman) and phet thi sam (the third sex). Why the authors are so caught up with taep — the Thai word for penis-taping — is beyond me. It’s just “tape”, just as com is the “Thai word” for computer. (NOTE: Please see the comments below.)

And are the authors really “authors”? Each of the kathoey featured tells her own story with no interjections from an interviewer, first person all the way through. Presumably Aldous and Pornchai have stitched together the segments and fixed up the syntax, but in doing so, their approach is exposed for its affectation, because all nine women misspeak the same, and surely that’s not their fault.

Everyone refers to their place of origin, for example, as “the Ubon Ratchathani province” or “the Nakhan Sawan province”. Why “the”?

Finally, while Aldous and Pornchai gush in their introduction about the “willingness, warmth and openness” their subjects displayed, only two of the ladyboys come across as likeable. One of them is Parinya “Nong Toom” Charoenphol, the celebrated former kick-boxer, who KO’s any desire to embrace kathoey wholeheartedly.

“It is very disheartening to find a group of people who you think understand you, only to discover that not one among them is genuine,” she says of the ladyboys she’d sought out as companions.

“I have plenty of friends who want to eat with me in nice restaurants and have fun, but none of them are willing to be there for me when I’m down. I don’t intend to stop socialising with them, though. I think it’s important to be able to acknowledge their flaws and keep them at bay. I just won’t be giving them any further handouts.”

TEXT BITE: From airline hostess Nicky, one of the “success stories” in the book: “The only real difficulty we now face is that some of his friends and family don’t know about my true identity, and he insists that he doesn’t want them to ever find out. His parents are very fond of me and often ask when we plan to marry and how many grandchildren I expect to give them. I feel so flattered by their expectations that I hate the thought of dashing their hopes.”