Nation column about LBs

rxpharm · February 1, 2013

An interesting column from the Nation January 7, 2013.

Nat Separates the Men from the Ladyboys

Any
man who comes to Thailand and has sex with a ladyboy, even if that man
believed his tryst was with a woman, must be gay, right? Not so, says
Nat. As with any situation with ladyboys, there is far more than meets
the eye.

I once had a friend visit from England who thought he
might go for a spot of some naughty fun in Pattaya. Having been told of
the illicit pleasures that Pattaya could offer a single man, he couldn’t
wait to partake of the services a bar girl would have to offer. I don’t
judge my friend for this. It is well-known amongst Thais that sex
tourism is what brings many people on holiday to Pattaya. I’m not
particularly embarrassed about it either. Of course I hate the idea that
when the rest of the world thinks of Thais they think of us as
prostitutes and drug dealers, but no one — including our leaders — seems
to want to make a concerted effort to rectify this situation, so it is
stereotype that we will have to live with. But I’m not trying to
initiate a discussion on sex workers or drug trafficking. That’s for
another day. The issue I’m going to talk about is the fact that the
comely young lady my friend engaged for the evening was, unbeknownst to
him, a man.

Needless to say that came as an unpleasant surprise.

Okay,
before I go any further, I apologise for all the clarifications I will
make in the name of being politically correct. Not that I’m trying hard
to avoid getting sued. This is what happens when a liberal person like
me discusses how you can tell a boy from a girl.

Don’t get me
wrong. As a gay man, I happily embrace the transgender community
because, in many ways, this community is part of my own. Not that I have
any desire to be a woman. I mean, I have an immense amount of respect
for people with the courage to live openly transgender. I just don’t
happen to be one. I’m just gay. I do have transgender friends, however,
and they are the first ones to tell you that gender identity is not
necessarily about the body one was born with.

See what I mean? I start talking about this and it’s an ideological minefield.

Anyway,
the question everyone wants to know is: couldn’t my friend tell?
Frankly, men — in the strictest sense of the term — have dangly bits
down there. Some men in Pattaya have both dangly bits down there and
jiggly bits up there and some others make a great living from it, but
surely my friend could tell the difference between a man and a woman
based on looks alone. Couldn’t he?

Well, no, he couldn’t. You
see, he didn’t get to see the dangly bits until, deep in the throes of
penetrative sex, he decided to switch on the light, the better to admire
the Thai beauty with whom he was sharing intimacy. And, wouldn’t you
know it, there was more to this beauty than he expected.

Some
people I talk to don’t believe that my poor friend is heterosexual and
that he subconsciously wanted to have sex with a man so chose a
transgender prostitute for the evening. But I assure you, that was not
the case. My friend just couldn’t tell. My friend is not blind, either.

The Likely Ladylads

So why couldn’t he tell?

The
markers for masculinity and femininity are different across races and,
when someone from one race encounters someone from another race, he
can’t necessarily tell the difference. The same could be said for
telling one person from another. The features we look at to tell people
apart vary from race to race. Westerners have hair ranging from platinum
blond to black and so it is often difficult for them to tell one person
from another when looking at Asians because we all have either very
dark brown or black hair. So while it can be racist to declare that all
Asians look alike, if you are trying to tell people apart by hair
colour, such a statement isn’t untrue.

To many westerners, a
thin Thai man doesn’t look that much different from a thin Thai woman
because the markers of gender — large breasts on a woman or big muscles
on a man — aren’t always as obvious. Throw a female wardrobe into the
mix and it can get even more confusing. Instead of looking for such
markers on the body, we in Thailand look more at facial features to tell
men from women or, in the case of my English friend, women from
ladyboys. Men of any race tend to have more prominent brows and larger
noses and chins in comparison to women. Men also tend to have Adam’s
apples. That’s how I usually tell a transgender woman from the average
one.

And so what is my point, or perhaps more aptly, the lesson
to be learned here? One answer would be: it can’t hurt to ask the madam
or bar manager before engaging a prostitute. The real lesson, however,
is that, when travelling from one part of the world to another, it is
wise never to make assumptions based on past experience because the most
basic of distinctions might be made in a different way from what you
are used to.

And what about my friend from England? What became
of him? He, of course, survived the incident and is now telling tales of
his derring-do in Thailand.