Gaysia (11 page)

At the song's finale, the lights went off dramatically. When they came back on, the Miss Tiffany's contestants appeared in swimsuits. The crowd roared their approval. The girls stormed the stage in groups of three, pounding the catwalk with their heels before posing in trios for the dozens of photographers at the front of the catwalk. The audience ate it up, applauding and wolf-whistling.

‘You just can't tell, can you?' clucked an elderly British man behind me.

Each of the girls wore bikinis, stilettos and theatrical stage props, a unique combination of apparel and accessories that
belonged in no other worldly situation except on this catwalk, right now. Some of the props were heartbreakingly literal (Contestant #6: ‘I am carrying a blow-up flotation device because I'm in a
bikini
!') while others were patently bizarre (Contestant #11: ‘I have come dressed as a hybrid of a wedding cake, an arrangement of oriental lilies and one of Tolkien's Ents!
Behold!
I have ceramic doves glued to my body!')

Nadia nailed it with her outfit, though. She walked out in her plain white bikini with the confidence of a Milan Fashion Week veteran, making burning eye contact with the judges, her angel wings folded discreetly behind her. Halfway up the stage, she spread the wings out. The two girls who shared the stage with her disappeared almost entirely. It was a brilliant move. The crowd went apeshit. Nadia's gay mafia posse stomped the ground with their feet and howled like jackals. I found myself hollering and whooping at the stage too. There was something contagious and electric about what was happening. The noise was deafening and drowned out the electronic music. In response, the judges started laughing too, enjoying the racket.

If Nadia doesn't win the finals,
I thought,
I'll eat my shirt.

Several years ago, there were actually two ladyboy beauty pageants in Pattaya, both of which were equally famous and broadcast nationally. One was Miss Tiffany's. The other was something called Miss Alcazar, which folded in 2005. There weren't too many differences between the Tiffany and Alcazar pageants, except that Alcazar had talent rounds where the contestants had to show off special talents, such as comedy, acrobatics, public speaking or ballroom dancing. Instead of
winning a car, Alcazar winners scored 100,000 baht (over 3200 US dollars) and a diamond ring.

Alcazar's winner in 2005 was a woman named Yollada Krerkkong Suanyot, who introduced herself to me by her nickname, Nok. At thirty, Nok looked obscenely young (she could easily have passed for eighteen) and had the lithe body of Audrey Hepburn combined with the height of Uma Thurman. On her black top, she wore a gold pendant with diamonds crafted in the shape of a woman's silhouette. If she had been a contestant in this year's Miss Tiffany's, I would have put money on her above the other girls. For Nok, it was bittersweet that she had won the last Miss Alcazar title before it closed for business.

‘Basically, you'll be Miss Alcazar forever,' I said.

Nok burst out laughing in wild hoots. ‘Yes, the last one!'

Dr Preecha had told me to get in touch with Nok, mainly because she was smart – the most impressive transsexual woman he knew. Nok had co-founded and managed a successful brand of jewellery named Carat & Secret, which was predominantly sold through TV infomercials, and she was also in the middle of a PhD examining quality-of-life issues for ladyboys in Thailand, whom Nok referred to as ‘trans females'. In between work and study, Nok ran the Trans Female Association of Thailand, a sort of community activist group and sharing circle whose members ranged in age from ten to their late forties. Members exchanged stories in an online forum and also met every month in Bangkok.

‘We just come and talk-talk-talk,' Nok said, making quacking movements with her hand. ‘We formed our group, how do you say? By
destiny
.' She laughed.

We met on Nok's lunch break at Carat & Secret headquarters, an office space in the back corner of the 24-hour cable
channel that sold the jewellery. We looked over photos of Nok growing up in Thailand's northern province of Nan. One childhood snapshot showed two cute schoolboys posing with a severe-looking male teacher standing between them. Both boys wore blue shorts pulled up high over their waists. The one on the left was Nok.

‘And you know,' Nok said, pointing to the boy on the right, ‘
she
is a trans female too!' She laughed delightedly. In the photo, the two boys were only six or seven years old, but Nok remembered the two of them exchanging notes about not feeling male even back then. Another photo showed a teenage girl, her face smooth with the soft puppy fat that comes for a lot of girls at that age.

‘That's me,' Nok said.

The girl looked nothing like Nok.

‘That's
you?
'

‘When I take hormones, it made me fat.'

Nok was thirteen or fourteen in this photo. She had already been taking female hormones for two years. Her father was a macho guy, a policeman who ran a Muay Thai boxing school. He'd resisted the idea of Nok becoming a female at first, but Nok's strategy was simple: don't argue, stay quiet and simply demonstrate who she was.

‘Both my parents just tried to treat me good, but they didn't think I was going to have SRS,' she said, referring to sex-reassignment surgery. Nok went ahead with a genital sex change when she turned seventeen, paying the 80,000 baht (2600 US dollars) fee herself, helped along by an education scholarship. Nok went to a hospital and was intially examined by Dr Preecha, but had no idea who actually operated on her.

‘I'm not sure if Dr Preecha was the “knife person” or not.
Maybe he just only stand and watch the students.'

‘You seriously don't know who operated on you?'

‘No, I don't know!' she said, laughing.

Things weren't funny when Nok turned twenty-one. At that age, Thai men are obliged to enrol in a conscription lottery that determines whether they will serve in the military. Thailand doesn't allow people to change their sex on any official documentation, which meant that Nok was still considered a man. She was forced to put her details into the lottery too. Just like that, her number came up.

On her first day in the army, Nok stood alongside all the male recruits and, like everyone else, was told to take off her shirt. By that stage, she had fully developed breasts and female genitals courtesy of hormones and surgery. Surrounded by shirtless, snickering young men and intimidating army commanders, Nok stood and stared at the ground, fully clothed, hugging herself. The officers looked at her coldly.

‘You say you've had a sex change already,' they said, ‘so you'll have to show us.
Prove it
.'

Nok was almost relieved at the thought of an examination, assuming she would be taken to a private room with a doctor. But after being led to a toilet, the officers told her to disrobe on the spot. Dozens of eyes were trained on her, some watching with disgust, others with gleeful, sadistic curiosity. It was the first day of a long military stretch for many of them and they were grateful for the entertainment. Shaking, Nok took off her clothes slowly, doing her best to cover her breasts and genitals, and started to cry.

‘I cannot say anything,' Nok said now, quietly. ‘Just only cry. When you're twenty-one, you're still young, right?'

When they finished ogling her, they told Nok she could put her clothes back on. They discharged her with a medical
certificate saying she suffered from a ‘mental perversion'. That medical certificate was a mixed blessing. On one hand, she was officially excused from the military. On the other, it was a permanent stain on her record that meant she'd never be able to get a government job, say, in education, health or the public service.

That Thailand banned its citizens from officially changing their sex might seem a minor oversight, but Nok's situation was only one example of how it could often give rise to nightmare scenarios. For instance, until 2007, Thai law didn't recognise male-on-male rape as a crime, which meant no laws protected transsexual females from rape either. Noon – the chipmunk-cute Miss Tiffany's contestant with the broken heel – said that every time she flew to the United States, she had to carry a male Thai passport with an English letter from her doctor explaining that she was transitioning sex. That was humiliating enough, but one time she forgot to bring the letter and had a wretched, nerve-racking 24-hour plane ride. When she finally got to the US airport, the immigration officers took her aside and gave her a full body inspection.

‘I was so upset,' Noon said. ‘Because I forgot my certificate, I could only stay for three weeks. I had to go back and get another certificate.'

After being dismissed from the military, Nok obtained a fake ID that showed her as female, as a giant fuck-you to the world. With her new under-the-counter identity, she entered a mainstream beauty pageant without declaring she was transsexual. No one could tell she wasn't a genetic girl. Suddenly, she was on the books with the agency Elite Models and posed in big corporate pageant events like Miss Mitsubishi. She also studied like a demon, finishing degrees in food science and
broadcast and television.

Then she did Alcazar. Nok and I laughed and cooed now over photos of that pageant. One showed her receiving the title in a beautiful gold gown, pinned with the number eighteen. For the talent section, Nok had dressed as a clown: not exactly sexy, she realised, but it worked with the judges. Nok said pageants like Miss Tiffany's and Alcazar were necessary for trans-female visibility, but said she also had reservations. She paused to think about how she could phrase it so she didn't sound conceited.

‘When I go somewhere,' she said slowly, ‘and they know and respect me, they think, “Oh wow:
pretty
.” But I have much more than being pretty. You have to focus on other parts of us too. And there are people who were born in bodies that
aren't
pretty. You know?'

I knew. For every conventionally beautiful Miss Tiffany's contestant, there were dozens of trans women in Thailand who had difficulty ‘passing' as female and were still saving up thousands of dollars for surgery. If beauty pageants were the only way these women could be seen and heard, it wasn't surprising that most Thai ladyboys still felt invisible or shunned.

Just before her fake ID expired, someone – Nok still didn't know who – told the police her card was counterfeit. It not only ended her modelling career but took her to court. She was sentenced to prison for a year, but this was lessened on appeal to good behaviour for two years. Nok couldn't risk getting another ID, so her official ID now said
Nai
, or ‘Mister'.

A few years ago, Nok tried to mobilise Thai transsexuals to lobby the government into allowing them to change their official sex from
Nai
to
Nang-Saww
(Miss). Knowing trans women were such a tiny minority, she formed a coalition with divorced
married women who wanted the right to change their name from
Nang
(Mrs) back to the unmarried
Nang-Saww
. Despite the combined power of fierce divorcees and transsexual women, the proposal was rejected.

‘They say, “It's a very little problem. It's a
tiny
problem.” They said, “You are a man who wants to live as a woman? But you're
not
a woman!” They agreed for us to be a freak or a third gender, but it's not the same. It was not a success.'

‘Thai people
like
ladyboys, though,' I said stupidly.

Nok smiled. ‘You know, Thai society is like …' She paused to think of an appropriate analogy. ‘You know pad thai, right? You know pad thai ho kai?'

I nodded. I had seen the dish: a thin, delicately crafted egg crepe parcel, stuffed with glistening pad thai noodles.

‘When you see pad thai hok hai, it's beautiful,' Nok said. ‘But when you open it, you see the pad thai is very …' She made a face, like something had died.

‘Like it's full of worms,' I said.

Nok pointed at me and smiled. ‘That's Thai society. On the outside, people say, “Oh, they accept us!” But when we said, “We have this problem,” they say, “It's
your
problem.”'

We changed the subject and gossiped about boys. Like teenagers, we pored over photos of Nok's current and ex-boyfriends and rated them all with commentary. One photo showed Nok in the arms of a toned blond man, a handsome Scandinavian who looked like a poster boy for the Aryan Nations.