Free Gaysia by Benjamin Law Page B

she said.
    â€˜Uh,’ I said.
    She whipped out her smartphone and fanned through photos of her parents, before landing on a folder full of personal glamour shots: her modelling portfolio.
    â€˜Noon!’ I said faggily. ‘These are gorgeous .’
    I meant it. Noon was attractive enough already, but these photos made her look like every straight teenage boy’s pin-up dream. In studios and by the beach, she posed like a natural in tight shorts, skirts and bikinis. Some had her smiling innocently, others had her posing with come-hither, fuck-me looks. The shots were taken by a modelling agency called the Josie Model Society.
    â€˜I really love it,’ Noon said, ‘but it doesn’t pay good money.’ On a good day, Noon could earn up to 5000 baht (160 US dollars), but most days she only hit between 800 and 2000 (a miserable twenty-five to sixty-five US dollars). After paying for the petrol to get herself to the shoot, she was lucky if she broke even. It was her three months of American restaurant work that covered her university tuition and living expenses.
    In so many ways, Noon was on her own. She didn’t have a boyfriend, at least not right now. She’d had one boyfriend before, but he’d freaked out when Noon told him about being born a boy. ‘In Thai society, they’re not too open to this,’ she said. ‘If men know I’m a ladyboy, they say, “No way!” Some wouldn’t even know I’m a ladyboy, but if they found out, they’d say, “ No, no, no .”’
    That made me sad to hear. Everything about Noon – her brain, her body – was so decisively and adamantly female . What was it that men feared exactly?
    Keang started clapping his hands, signalling the girls to rejoin the main group. Noon got up and apologised, hopping away on a pair of replacement heels. Ann cued the music and Keang started clapping out the beats, running through the steps to ‘I Am What I Am’ again. I looked down momentarily at my notes. Before I knew what was happening, the girls were screaming.
    When I glanced up, the girls were squatting down on theirhaunches, stretching forward with their torsos at a horizontal angle, as though they were in the last few minutes of an intense tug of war. The position made their miniskirts hitch up around their waists and exposed their underwear. It was difficult not to notice some girls had a telltale bulge. Politely, I looked away. They continued to shriek with horror and embarrassment. Keang laughed and put out his palms, shaking them across each other as if to say: Okay, okay. We won’t be doing that.

    Later, I returned to Bangkok to track down two of Thailand’s most prominent sex-change surgeons. First was Dr Pichet, a sharp-looking man who gave off the brusque, businesslike confidence of a finance broker. If you ran an internet search for ‘Thailand sex-change’, Pichet’s website was the first that popped up. He ran the Bangkok Plastic Surgery Clinic in the city’s shambolic Din Daeng district and had treated over 1000 people from all over the world. But even though Pichet was one of the country’s most famous sex-change surgeons, he confided that barely any of his clients were Thai nowadays.
    â€˜They cannot afford my price!’ he said.
    Instead, most of Pichet’s clients came from America, Europe and Australia. And even then, Pichet said, people seeking sex-change procedures didn’t make up the bulk of his clients. At most, they accounted for a fifth.
    â€˜It’s not quite common,’ he said. Leaning in conspiratorially, he lowered his voice. ‘You know how many people allow you to cut off their penis every day?’
    â€˜Uh,’ I mumbled, caught off-guard. ‘I guess it’s a pretty extreme thing to do?’
    Pichet nodded. ‘Correct!’
    Of course, it was more complicated than just slicing off part of the anatomy, he explained.