Ladyboys: New Year and All That

The festive season has been and gone. New Year’s resolutions probably all broken by now.  Some optimism for the new year ahead still just about lingering on.

I’m not one given to making wishes; not one given to expecting miracles to happen. So, all I can hope for is:

1) Not to see any of the following words (plus plenty of others) in the Thai media (printed and otherwise) in the same sentence as “Ladyboys” over the coming months; words such as:

• Stolen
• Mugged
• Drugged
• Assaulted
• Tricked
• Raped
• Lied
• Beaten
• Shocked
• Deceived
• Falsely
• Scam
• Killed
• “He”

I know, I know…. I can but dream but the above words and others now seem to be so synonymous with Ladyboys (after all it’s a good read for the punters who read these so-called e-newspapers which publish the stories) that all T people are being “tarred with the same brush” — and it’s not nice! (The tar that is.)

2) The media try to take a more balanced view about the causes of some of the behaviours they are reporting on; minorities are always easy targets. Plus, the scribes try to be a bit more sympathetic to the plight of T people generally; case in point — a Russian tourist in his mid twenties met a Ladyboy on the infamous Pattaya Walking street (bar street, brothel street) late one night. After some negotiation they adjourned to a ‘’short-time” hotel, presumably to simply have a nice cup of coffee and chat, when, to the reported great surprise of the Russian, the genitals of the lady in question turned out not to meet his expectations of what a lady’s should look like… so, like the gentlemen that he clearly wasn’t, he thumped her, breaking the poor girl’s nose.

The Police were called and the tourist and the Ladyboy were duly carted off to the Police Station where, I imagine, the “reporter” of the newspaper had been hanging out day and night for “juicy” incidents like this to present themselves — for anyone who knows Pattaya there must be half a dozen, very strange incidents reported every day, some which would make your hair curl — but generally along the lines of: money+male tourists+bars, clubs+alcohol+girls+anything goes=trouble!

Still, did the resulting story about the Russian and the Ladyboy show any sympathy for the poor girl? Was there any pity for the predicament she found herself in? Was there any sadness that girls like this have to continually sell themselves to overweight, inebriated tourists in order to try and move on with their, already difficult, lives?

Sadly, you don’t need me to answer these rhetorical questions.

Back to my wishes and, in fact, apart from these two, I have lots of other wishes for T-people, not just in Thailand, and not just for this year — but every year. Yet, as I have pointed out before in earlier articles, nothing material seems to be happening; there are very limited signs of progress. We’re miles behind our L&G friends.

So, either we all in the T-community need to get together, sort out our internal differences and have a united front to push for change… or I need to start believing in fairies to make my wishes come true!

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Tags: featured, Ladyboy, opinion, Thailand

Category: Transgender Opinion