Ladyboys by Degrees

I had occasion recently to be in the company of a number of Ladyboys whilst waiting for the start of a wedding/wedding dress promotional event. In Chiang Mai, such events are usually held twice per year, with the largest of the bi-annual events being this time of year as the weather gets just that little bit cooler.

Ladyboys are, more often than not, favored for the roles of modeling the various wedding dresses owing to their usual height advantage over a typical Thai woman. At the event, the Ladyboys spend their time looking glamorous and prancing around displaying the dresses, but also trying to attract brides-to-be to book through the particular wedding salon which they have been hired to represent. A great job if ever there was one, I’ve often thought!

I was there as simply as a casual observer and had turned up early on the first day really before the event had got into full swing, and somehow got talking to a number of the girls. Not only that but we slipped into a conversation about being a Ladyboy in Thailand and what it means to the different girls involved.

Leaving aside some of the more unusual reasons for being a Ladyboy (one of them told me: “I can earn more money doing this and being in shows that I can doing any job as a man!”), the vast majority of the girls I did speak with all confirmed that they felt they were women trapped in a man’s body and had the ultimate goal of living full-time as a woman (most doing so already).

Yet two things did particularly strike me post-conversation, once I was back home and reflecting on my hour or so with the Ladyboys. Firstly, was the mixtures of “intent,” if I can call it that, about just how far each Ladyboy was prepared go to feminize themselves, to be a “complete” woman. Then, secondly, the variety of sexual orientations of those I spoke with; whilst most preferred men as partners, there was a large proportion who still preferred being with other women and also those were comfortable having a physical relationship with either of the main genders.

Yet it was the first point which had caught my real interest and so I decided to research it a bit further, given that it reminded me of something I had been reading about, quite co-incidentally, a few weeks earlier about the evolution of attempts at defining what transgenderism really involves.

The pieces I had read seemed to fit quite aptly with the descriptions of feelings and comments I had listened to from the Ladyboys at the wedding dress event—making me realize, yet again, that we T people are fundamentally the same the world over, irrespective of our place of habitation, our race, or our upbringing! Being T is unequivocally in-built into all of us…

A paraphrasing of the articles I had been reading goes as follows: Over the past two to three decades, many male to female T people have undergone transition, including both a social change of gender and a surgical “sex change” of the genitalia.

Thereafter, they have gone on to live successful lives in their new gender. There have been many media stories about some high profile cases which, in turn, have helped society gradually become more aware, tolerant of and accepting of the notion of gender transition. Many employers now even have procedures in place to accommodate people going through such transitions and, indeed, many countries now have well-established procedures for changing names and gender for those who complete a transition from one gender to another.

However, over the last 5-10 years more cases have been observed where some T people who do not have intense transsexual feelings, have begun to undergo transgender transition. Some are people who have reached an age where they feel they can no longer “live the lie,” maybe are now financially more comfortable and less worried about their career, or are “empty nesters” or the like. Some of such people might have initially considered themselves “crossdressers” who are finally overcome by T feelings and the need to take on a female social identity.

Most of these T people begin transition by taking modest doses of female hormones (enough to produce some degree of feminization) or, for example, undergoing electrolysis to remove facial hair. When feminized in this way, they shift their full-time social gender by dressing to some degree as women, modifying their voice and mannerisms to varying degrees, taking on a female name, and maybe obtaining some forms of formal identification in the female gender. Thus they achieve varying degrees of social gender transition without genital or other surgery.

As many T people have become more aware of the opportunities for social transition, the number of this type of transitions has risen dramatically. Many gender counsellors now see far more TG transitioners than TS transitioners, especially amongst their older clients. This is an important new trend, since there clearly are many more TG people than TS people in the wider gender continuum.

Some TG transitioners may actually feel a little uncomfortable about becoming “fully female” in presentation and mannerisms, they are especially uncomfortable about modifying their genitalia.

They instead feel a need to take on a TG or possibly a slightly androgynous social role that better matches their mixed-gender identity. Such transitioners often remain visibly TG and are comfortable in that identity, and their social lives outside work usually involve people in the transgender community.

As I reflected on my conversations with the Ladyboys that morning, and the varieties within the group, it struck me that there is still so much to understand and learn about the journey to realization which all of us T people find ourselves on. As someone once said to me: “No matter who or where you are the T journey is exactly the same, it just depends where you stop the bus and get off!”

Or put another way, it’s almost Ladyboys by degrees…

Tags: featured, Ladyboy, Thailand, Transgender, Transition, transsexualism

Category: Transgender Body & Soul, Transgender Opinion