Free Gaysia by Benjamin Law

‘I don’t know. I think so?’
    Later, during evenings I spent in Pattaya’s and Bangkok’s tourist bars, drunken male tourists would have similar but far less subtle variations of these conversations with me. For them, ladyboys were nothing more than the punchline to every loud, obnoxious joke they told. ‘Be careful which girl you take home!’ they slurred. ‘’Cos she mightn’t actually be a real girl , ya know!’
    They laughed, but I also sensed a palpable fear. Or maybe it was arousal. Or both. These men invariably knew of someone – always ‘a friend’ – who had ‘accidentally’ ended up sleeping with a transsexual Thai woman. In most cases, the story was the same: the friend in question was drunk, before being fooled by a beautiful woman who – quelle horreur – had a penis. Or not! Maybe she had a surgically constructed vagina, but feltobliged to tell the man about her past anyway. And then – only because the guy was so helplessly drunk – they would have sex. Truly, they just weren’t to know! Still, I suspected all these men had been willingly fooled. And it felt wrong to me that it was the woman who was always the butt of the joke.
    I was guilty of it too, though. I hadn’t encountered many transsexual women before. In high school, I remembered my friend Matt declaring his love and affection for ‘chicks with dicks’ at lunch one day to everyone’s squealing horror. ‘You get the best of both worlds,’ he’d explained. ‘They’ve got tits and dicks.’ Then when everyone got dial-up modems, we’d run AltaVista searches for ‘chicks with dicks’, scream at the image results and forward the pornographic JPEGs to our friends’ Hotmail accounts as pranks. At university, we’d buy each other she-male novelty playing cards for each other’s birthdays, passing them around in lecture theatres and laughing so hard that we were nearly kicked out of class.
    That was the thing about transsexual women: they were always either a joke or the extreme, off-limits sex object. And in a world where transsexual women were the outcasts, where access to hormone treatment was near-impossible and sex-change operations were either primitive and dangerous, surely there had to be one place – one country – that was their homeland, their safe house. Thailand was a country that seemed to give these women mainstream recognition and even a beauty pageant. Winners became famous and their faces sold products to housewives and young women! Surely, I thought, this was progress.

    The next morning, I joined the Miss Tiffany’s crew for breakfast. They were a bunch of sharply dressed young producers and tech experts. Because I am one of those irritating people who places bets on things like the Oscars and elections, I asked everyone to pick their favourites for the pageant. Eve, one of the tech girls, offered to translate our conversation. I told her to start the betting.
    â€˜But there are so many more pretty girls this year,’ Eve complained. ‘Way more than in the past. Normally, they have one or two standouts in the competition, but this time they’ve got a lot.’
    â€˜Come on, humour me,’ I said.
    â€˜Okay,’ Eve said, laughing. ‘For me, I love #1. She looks natural.’ Contestant #1 was Bank, Thailand’s Scarlett Johansson. A sound guy sitting next to Eve picked Bank to win too. Keang, the competition choreographer, picked #8 – Nadia – the girl who had smiled at me yesterday and was already becoming my favourite. A producer named Ann picked Nadia too, as well as #29, who had the girl-next-door looks of a high school volleyball captain.
    â€˜It really is too difficult to pick, though,’ Keang said in Thai. ‘This year, a lot of the girls are already working as models.’
    â€˜Really?’ I asked. ‘Are they