Gaysia

by Benjamin Law

  THAILAND

  In which we attend the world’s biggest beauty pageant for transsexual women. Key question: ‘So why are there more transsexual women in Thailand anyway?’ Key quote: ‘You are a man who wants to live as a woman? But you’re not a woman!’ Average temperature for this story: forty degrees Celsius.

  IT WAS THE KIND of weather where it felt dangerous to be wearing pants. By early morning, Bangkok’s air was already thick and warm like bathwater; by midday, it was scorching. On my walk over to the Si-Yak Bang-Na intersection, I worried about how the heat would affect the busload of twenty-eight glamorous young beauty contestants I was scheduled to meet. I was particularly worried about what it would do to their meticulously applied make-up and hair extensions. I hoped they’d brought tissues.

  This wasn’t a regular beauty pageant. In a country synonymous with sex-change, Miss Tiffany’s Universe was Thailand’s most famous pageant for transsexual women, and reputedly the world’s biggest such event. All that you needed to enter was documentation proving you were born male and were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. The contestants had been culled from a larger national pool of sixty and I’d been told they were supernaturally beautiful. Today marked the beginning of a gruelling week of sponsorship commitments between Bangkok and Pattaya, leading up to a live TV broadcast finale that attracted 15 million viewers nationwide – roughly a third of the number of Americans who tuned in to the Oscars every year. The stakes were high. The winner received 100,000 baht (3000 US dollars), lucrative advertising deals, performance contracts, a new car and an automatic spot in Miss International Queen, which saw transsexual women from countries including Brazil, Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Sri Lanka, China, Russia, Columbia, India, Lebanon, Japan, South Korea, Nigeria, the Philippines and Argentina compete head-on.

  By the time I got to the intersection, I was sweating freely and had soaked right through my shirt. Si-Yak Bang-Na intersection wasn’t really an intersection at all, but a flat island of sticky dirt and gravel, an ugly patch of rubble in the middle of one of Bangkok’s busiest traffic zones. Above and around us, cars, motorcycles, scooters and buses wove their way through a multi-level concrete braid of bypasses and turnpikes. Everything was loud and smelled of mould and exhaust fumes. It didn’t exactly scream ‘glamour’.

  In the middle was a large chartered coach, parked with the engine still running. Outside, a small crew of TV camera operators from Thai broadcaster VTR milled about alongside publicists and photographers, gossiping and smoking cigarettes. Everyone was waiting for something to happen. Not knowing anyone, I popped my head inside the coach to introduce myself. I climbed up the stairs and let the coach’s air-conditioning caress me.

  ‘Hello?’

  A motherly-looking Thai woman with a bob haircut spun around, blocking my view of the girls sitting behind her. This was Kuan Lek, one of the organisers. I smiled as I introduced myself, trying to look over her shoulder.

  ‘Benjamin!’ Kuan Lek said, waving her hands. ‘Please wait outside! Girls are still doing make-up and hair.’

  ‘Oh!’ I said.

  I hadn’t seen a thing, but her reaction made me feel as though I’d caught the women naked. Apologising, I stepped back onto the dirt as the coach doors closed behind me. It had rained the night before. Mud steamed up and stank beneath my shoes as if I’d stepped on a hot turd. Embarrassed, I smiled at the TV crew and staffers. Some jutted their chins in cool acknowledgement, then turned their backs on me to talk in Thai and smoke cigarettes.

  I tried spying on the contestants through the coach’s tinted windows like a sweaty, dreadful pervert. All of the girls had hand mirrors and were grooming themselves. One girl had a mirror in the shape of a gerbera. There was one in the shape of Hello Kitty’s face; another, a teddy bear. Through the tinted windows, I could make out one girl touching every single strand of hair in her fringe, arranging it meticulously with the back of her comb. Her neighbour had curlers in her bangs and was applying mascara. I grew up in a household of women but had never met any girls who paid this much attention to their appearance. Then again, I had never hung around many women like these.

  ‘This year’s ladyboys are so beautiful,’ someone said. ‘You’ll see soon.’

  Behind me was a petite, lithe and effortlessly pretty woman. Pear (‘like the fruit’) smiled at me, shielding her eyes with a pair of oversized designer glasses. At first I thought she might have been a ladyboy herself, but Pear was actually a rarity on this tour – what people called a ‘genetic girl’, a woman who had been born in a female body.

  ‘You actually call them “ladyboys”?’ I asked Pear. ‘I thought maybe that was offensive.’

  Before she could answer, the coach’s doors opened. The crew lifted video cameras to their shoulders and photographers sprung into action. Kuan Lek stepped out first, beaming proudly as she made way for the girls.

  ‘Sawadee-kah,’ the first girl said, putting her hands together and bowing at the TVR video camera.

  Finalist #1 – Chanya Denfanapapol; nickname: ‘Bank’ – looked like a Thai version of Scarlett Johansson, all cheekbones and pillowy lips. With her hair held back in a simple ponytail, she was naturally and alarmingly attractive. Bank had a blue-and-white #1 tied to her wrist – all finalists were required to wear their number for the duration of the competition – and was already the odds-on favourite to win.

  Other girls strutted out of the bus and introduced themselves for the cameras, each one a vision in white. They wore white jeans so tight it was as if they had been born wearing them, and low-plunging white V-neck shirts that clung to their breasts like plastic wrap, emblazoned with the neon-pink Miss Tiffany logo. Their skinny waists led to curvy hips that shimmied and swayed, their white clothes catching the midday sun like sails in a brightly lit sea. The effect was blinding.

  ‘Sawadee-kah,’ they said, one after the other, pouting-smiling-flirting at the cameras.

  After posing for the cameras, the girls walked off-screen and stumbled badly, giggling. They all wore sharp, long stilettos that looked capable of breaking their ankles with a wrong step. I felt a rush of sympathy for them.

  Poor things, I thought. They must still be getting used to heels.

  Then I remembered they were walking in mud.

  We all gathered at the other end of the intersection as an assistant handed the girls a neat stack of flyers for G-Net, a Thai mobile phone company. The girls were instructed to wait until the lights turned red, then weave their way between cars to hand out flyers to passengers and drivers, before racing back to the kerbside when the lights turned green.

  ‘Isn’t this dangerous?’ I whispered to Pear. I’d had enough experience to know that Bangkok drivers ignored road signs and drove straight over lane markings. ‘It’s not like traffic here is exactly … polite.’

  ‘Oh, it’s definitely safe,’ Pear said. ‘Don’t worry.’

  When the lights turned red, the girls shot out, twenty-eight white-clad gazelle-like women wading among grimy traffic in heels. Pear was right. Bangkok traffic might have been unwieldy, but it was also so congested that the girls had plenty of time to hand out flyers even when the lights were green. A man dressed as G-Net’s mascot – a blue bumblebee–robot hybrid – walked among them while G-Net reps waved advertising placards around the group. Onlookers smiled. Kids waved.

  Pear saw me smiling at the scene. Ladyboys hadn’t always been embraced in Thailand, she said, but over the last thirteen years or so, more and more people in Thai society had begun to accept transsexual women. In Pear’s mind, it wasn’t a coincidence that Miss Tiffany’s had been running for exactly that length of time.

  ‘Before then,’ Pear said, ‘people saw them as a joke, only for funny or comedy, something like that. Ladyboys weren’t as public.’

  ‘So they were there, but hidden.’

  Pear nodded. ‘You’ll find out, a lot of these girls have been through a lot with their families. You see what th
ey’re like now, but it’s been hard to get to this point. Especially with their fathers: they expect their son to be a boy. They have to work very hard for their family to accept them. That’s why they have really good manners. These girls are very polite. They go to university, go to school, study hard to get a good job.’

  ‘So they won’t disappoint their families further,’ I said.

  Pear looked solemn and nodded.

  Keang, the pageant’s young, smartly dressed choreographer, came over to hand the girls tissues, Wet Ones, disposable cotton towelettes and bottles of ice water. I was surprised the girls’ make-up wasn’t dripping off their faces. The G-Net mascot removed his costume’s head, revealing a young man’s pink face drenched with sweat, his hair stuck to his temples like seaweed. When I smiled at him, he smiled deliriously back and gave me the thumbs-up.

  The Miss Tiffany’s girls dabbed themselves with tissues, swabbing their foreheads and pulling down their shirts to collect the sweat around their boobs. I couldn’t help but stare. Some of the girls caught my eye and smiled. I felt myself blush. It didn’t matter whether you were attracted to men or women. Sometimes there were people in the world so gorgeous, so remarkably beautiful, that they made you feel as though you didn’t belong in the same dimension as them.

  At first I thought I wouldn’t be able to tell any of them apart. When they had disembarked from the bus, they had been a blur of long legs and pretty faces, but now I was able to make distinctions. There was the Disney Cartoon Princess, the Bright-Eyed Kids TV Host, the James Bond Glamour-Puss, the Hot High School Slut and the softly spoken Nervous Wreck Who Constantly Looked Like She Was About to Spew, who had clearly surprised even herself by getting this far in the competition.

  For me, Contestant #8 – Numpath Prasopchok; nickname: Nadia – was the prettiest. Her doe eyes, cut-glass cheekbones and lioness mouth belonged on billboards. When she caught me staring at her, she smiled and waved in my direction. I bashfully looked to the ground like a pigeon-toed, twelve-year-old doofus.

  In among all the white t-shirts and jeans was the Vixen. Instead of the generic white outfit of the finalists, the Vixen wore an intricate gown of turquoise and purple sequins, with a bright yellow sash across her torso. The crown on her head was a series of spikes so long that they could have impaled a small animal. Her multi-level earrings dangled like tiny anvils.

  ‘Who,’ I asked Pear, pointing at the woman discreetly, ‘is that?’

  ‘Sorrawee,’ Pear said. ‘She was the winner of Miss Tiffany’s last year.’

  Apart from a smallpox vaccination scar on her left shoulder, Sorrawee Natee’s skin was flawless. Statuesque and poised, she was not the most feminine-looking of the group but was definitely the most striking. Unlike this year’s finalists, she didn’t smile for the cameras. She smouldered. She looked at you like she was going to eat you and you would be completely grateful if she did. It was as if she were emitting raw heat through her eyes.

  When I spoke to Sorrawee later, she beamed about the competition and spoke Thai in a slightly nasal, honking voice. She looked like Tyra Banks and sounded like Fran Drescher.

  ‘I’ve had such great opportunities,’ she said. ‘Life’s changed a lot. Winning Miss Tiffany’s was already a big award, but after I won, it meant I could also get a better job. Now I have new opportunities to work and education.’ She had been studying fashion design at a college, but she was now in her senior year and had national attention. ‘This year’s winner’s life can be expected to change, the same way my life has changed. What I have experienced here, she’ll get it too.’

  I watched as Sorrawee knocked on the passenger side of a cab to hand the driver a G-Net flyer. When the cab driver refused to wind down his window, Sorrawee turned to us and raised her eyebrows – as if to say, watch this – and opened the door to climb right in. Everyone hooted and laughed. All of this traffic-stalling activity felt very dangerous and illegal. At one point, the girls simply stood in the middle of the road, posing for photos with onlookers and leaning on the braked cars as props. They had literally stopped traffic. Traffic police officers approached us in severe, tailored black uniforms and I flinched. Instead of arresting us, the officers directed traffic around the girls. When it was all under control, they asked for photos too.

  On the taxi ride from Bangkok’s airport, my cab driver – an enthusiastic guy in his late fifties called Mr T – had asked me what I was doing in Thailand. When I told him I was writing a story on the Miss Tiffany’s pageant, he chuckled to himself.

  ‘Oh, so you like this sort of thing,’ he said, lowering his voice.

  I wasn’t sure what he was getting at, but I could guess. ‘You know of Miss Tiffany’s, then?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, yes. Many people in Thailand know and see this.’

  ‘Do you think there are more ladyboys here than in other countries?’

  ‘In Thailand? Yes, I think so.’

  ‘Any idea why?’

  He laughed again, then shrugged his shoulders. ‘Why?’ he said. ‘I don’t know!’

  Thailand has a long history of transsexualism. Before the 1960s, it had three gender categories: chai (masculine); ying (feminine); and kathoey, a sort of umbrella term that referred to in-betweeners – effeminate men, masculine women and people with intersex conditions. Afterwards, those categories splintered further into super-specific identities like gay, tom (masculine lesbian) and dee (feminine lesbian). Now, many Thai children and teenagers had a basic understanding of how to pinpoint their gender or sexual orientation if it deviated from the norm. Schools had an unusually high proportion of boys who identified as girls and openly declared themselves to be female from an early age. In 2008, a BBC journalist had gone to a secondary school in Thailand’s north-east and found the school offered its pupils a transsexual bathroom option, signposted by a half-man, half-woman picture. Throughout Thailand’s cities and villages, ladyboys were often the women who served drinks and meals at restaurants and worked in beauty parlours, grocery shops and 7-Elevens. No one knew why there seemed to be more transsexuals in Thailand. Maybe there was something in the water. Something fabulous.

  The Miss Tiffany’s entourage reconvened for lunch at a place called the Royal Dragon, a Chinese restaurant that had made the Guinness Book of Records in 1991 for having the world’s largest seating capacity (5000) and the most staff (1200). It was spread over eight acres, as vast as it was absurd. We laughed as a man in a polyester Qing Dynasty outfit flew past our window strapped to a flying fox, sailing over an artificial lake with a tray of hot food in his free hand. We ate shredded chicken, seafood chow mein, deep-fried fish intestines with cashews, dim sum served with century egg, fungus and mushroom soup, crispy-skinned duck, Buddha’s delight and tom yum fish soup. Going against my expectations of beauty contestants, the girls pigged out.

  The lunch was a thank-you for sponsors and a recap of Miss Tiffany’s pageants gone by. Now in its thirteenth year, the pageant had been running long enough to have created legends. One of the previous winners – 23-year-old Treechada Marnyaporn; nickname: Nong Poy – had been voted most beautiful ladyboy of all time. She was now one of G-Net’s primary spokespeople. Poy was gorgeous and looked like the kid sister of Gong Li. Her voice was feminine – almost remarkably so, since a deep voice was something neither surgery nor hormones could really ‘fix’. At age nineteen, Poy had won Miss Tiffany’s before being crowned Miss International Queen in 2004. Since then, she had scored roles in two Thai soap operas – Rak Ter Took Wan (‘Love You Every Day’) and Muay Inter (‘The Chinese Girl’) – as genetically female characters, without any references made to her sex change. She was also the star of the hit Thai pop music video ‘Mai Chai Poo Chai’ (‘I Am Not a Guy’) for an artist called Doo Ba Doo. She was living the dream.

  Alongside G-Net, there were thirty major sponsors for Miss Tiffany’s Universe, ranging from the big guns – the Tourism Authority of Thailand, Coca-Cola, the Pattaya Mail newspaper – to ones that had sublim
inally humiliating connotations, like Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum (‘Come see the freaks!’) and Louis Tussaud’s Waxworks (‘Feast your eyes on people who aren’t real!’).

  Another sponsor was a computer chain called Banana IT. After lunch, we visited the computer store where the girls were made to pose sexily for the cameras with giant plush bananas, their lips brushing the toys sensuously. As far as marketing partnerships went, it was either a stroke of genius or hideously offensive, or possibly a hideously offensive stroke of genius. Another sponsor was something called the Asoke Skin Hospital. That’s nice, I thought. This thing isn’t all about business. It’s good to see the pageant supports burns victims too. As it turned out, Asoke Skin Hospital was a cosmetic beauty centre that specialised in laser peels. For a facility that resembled the lobby of a Marriott Hotel, ‘hospital’ seemed an overly dramatic term.

  By the end of the day, the girls were beaming but sleepy from all the public appearances. I still hadn’t had a proper conversation with any of the finalists, just passing hellos and stupid giggles. I desperately wanted more. What were their stories? What did their parents think? What were their strategies for winning? Where could I buy a Hello Kitty hand mirror? As we waved goodbye to Asoke Skin Hospital, the girls boarded the Miss Tiffany’s coach headed for Pattaya, while the staff and I boarded our own air-conditioned minibus.

  After the brutal heat of that day, the two-hour bus ride was soothing and cool. Tech-heads fell asleep around me and the radio softly played old soft-rock classics. When we reached the highway, a power ballad from the ’90s came on by a band I’d long forgotten. The song was called ‘Wind of Change’.

  When I woke up in Pattaya, it was night-time and my mouth was dry. Our minibus had parked outside a bar called the Bed, an ultra-chic, über-modern place that had avant-garde furniture in the lobby, the kind you can’t actually sit on. We’d arrived before the Miss Tiffany’s coach, so the staff and media got out and together we stretched our legs.