Gaysia (10 page)

Preecha was one of the most expressive people I had ever met. Everything he said was accompanied by the hand movements and facial expressions of a primary school teacher reading to children. He pretended to be scared when he talked about fear, pointed to imaginary things when telling a story, and even changed positions in his seat when he re-enacted conversations between two people.

When he found out I was Australian, Preecha told me that he had studied plastic surgery in Melbourne for a year in 1976. There, a plastic surgeon asked him to observe and assist with a male-to-female genital sex-change procedure. It was the first time Preecha had seen anything like it. Then, when he returned to Thailand, he started seeing patient after patient who, desperate for a sex change, had been horribly mutilated by unqualified surgeons. Throughout the '70s and into the '80s, Thai surgeons were basically improvising sex-change procedures, making it up as they went along. Surgeries across the country became butcheries.

‘Some would just cut off the penis!' Preecha exclaimed, making a snipping V-shaped motion with his finger. ‘Cut off their balls, sew it up! That's it!'

He pretended to throw something over his shoulder like garbage, disgusted.

‘What happened is,' he said, ‘they have no
hole
. Some just look like an
animal
. See? So we have to do a lot of reconstruction. Really difficult! We had to do lots of corrections with very limited amounts of tissue.' He put his fingers together in a
pinching motion as if to say:
only this much
.

Local psychiatrists told Preecha that when they diagnosed someone as being transsexual, they didn't know who to trust for their referrals. So Preecha got to work and started training surgeons around him, based on the sex-change procedure he'd observed in Melbourne. It was revolutionary work but marred by controversy. Many of his clients were lower-class transsexual women with little money, who mainly earned their living through sex work. Other surgeons even criticised him to his face.

‘Why do you spend your time operating on these people?' they would ask. ‘It's crazy! You operate on them, then they just go out and sell sex.'

But Preecha saw his work as a social project as much as a medical one. The more successful were the operations he and his team performed, the easier it would be for these women to integrate themselves into Thai society and climb the social ladder. He saw a direct link between performing successful sex-change procedures and improving his patients' social standing.

‘First higher education starts to come out, then you start to have beauticians with their own television show!' he said. ‘Now we have medical students, bankers, lawyers, all kinds of professions. We have many high-class families in the country who have the sex change. The families have started to accept.'

As with Pichet's, most of Preecha's patients were now from overseas: Australia, America, Canada and Europe. Still, that didn't mean only rich Thai ladyboys had sex changes.

‘No, that's not true. See? The rich: they can
choose
the surgeon. Haha. The poor, they will go to the medical centre. They get the student, but under supervision, the same as in any city hospital in the world.'

I showed Preecha a picture of Miss Tiffany's Contestant #8 – Nadia – on my digital camera. He looked impressed and nodded thoughtfully, the way art dealers do when they're inspecting a particularly fine sculpture.

‘I imagine a lot of work has gone into her,' I said.

To get this result, Preecha explained, Nadia would have had to start on hormone therapy from a young age, ideally before puberty. The reason why Thai transsexual women all looked beautiful was because they had access to the hormones at an early age, since they could buy them over the counter, no prescription needed.

‘So these women aren't just beautiful because Thai people are more feminine, or because Thai surgeons are better,' I said. ‘They're beautiful because they're getting hormones when they're kids?'

Preecha nodded. Nowadays, he said, you could venture into Thai schoolyards and find kids and teenagers who had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the types of hormones they could score at chemists, the doses you should take and the results they'd produce.

‘They know which hormones make the breasts enlarge, the hair full, the voice more feminine. They even teach
us
how to choose the hormone!' Preecha exclaimed, slapping the table and laughing.

Some of the Miss Tiffany's finalists had told me they had felt female from childhood, while others felt it more when they hit puberty. Most of them counted themselves lucky that hormone pills – oestrogen, puberty arresters, testosterone blockers – were traded around Thai schools in the way other kids around the world traded baseball cards or Pokémon. Twelve-year-old kids asked older kids for pills, then took them often without their
parents knowing. There was an entire underground playground racket going on. Even kids understood that you needed to get onto hormone treatments quickly. The last thing any of them wanted was to be fourteen years old and have a moustache.

Preecha had heard terrible stories of Westerners who couldn't get on the drugs until they were seventeen or eighteen, by which time their pituitary glands had betrayed them. Fuelled by the brute, pumping force of naturally produced testosterone, their body hair, broad shoulders and facial hair had burst out. Many of Preecha's overseas male-to-female clients were in their forties or fifties, and some were married with children. ‘They've tried to be a man, you see,' he said, shaking his head in pity. Fighting the broad shoulders and masculine facial structure of a fully developed adult male was always going to be an uphill battle.

Thailand's underground trade in teenage hormones wasn't exactly legal, but Preecha said its existence reflected a kind of Buddhist live-and-let-live attitude towards sex and gender in Thailand. ‘The Thai community is very easy to adjust to any new phenomenon. They adjust to anything. They're very easy to accommodate the new thing. We're very free and open-minded. Now, they not really
agree
with this kind of phenomenon. Many families are against. There is still discrimination. It's getting better because of the social acceptance, not because of the law. In Thailand,
society
accepting.'

‘So, it's not like Thailand necessarily has any more ladyboys than other countries?' I asked.

‘No! Not true,' Preecha said, hands flailing about. ‘It's just society
accepts
. They want to show off; come out in the public. You can see in America, you don't even see transsexuals in the
cabinet
! But actually there is some, just hiding!'

To demonstrate, Preecha drew his arms close to his body and looked around, pretending to be frightened – like, I guess, someone trapped in a cabinet. ‘Not because Thailand has more, no. Because the Thai
allow
you! “Okay, come out, come out!” See?'

Then Preecha mimed opening a door, stepping outside and suddenly spreading out his arms. He changed his facial expression from frightened to beaming with happiness. This was what it looked like to finally climb out of the cabinet. I smiled and applauded softly.

Back at Miss Tiffany's, the girls were preparing for the swimsuit round at Central Beach, a towering multi-level mall in Pattaya. Made of white concrete and what seemed to be kilometres of glass, the mall proclaimed itself the world's largest beachside shopping centre. It loomed over the ocean like a shiny monolith.

An entire section of the mall had been sealed off for Miss Tiffany's. The swimsuit round was a special source of anxiety for some of the girls. It was a sensitive issue whether contestants had or hadn't retained male genitals. No photographers or reporters were let inside the dressing rooms where girls were changing into their bikinis.

‘What's going on in there?' I asked Pear, pointing to the closed door.

‘Some of the girls are taping themselves up,' she said.

‘Does it matter to the judges whether they still have …' I trailed off. ‘You know?'

‘No one knows,' Pear said. ‘It's not a part of the judging process.'

I nodded. ‘What's actually involved in taping yourself up anyway?'

‘I don't know,' Pear said. ‘But apparently it's quite painful.'

From the taping rooms, the girls came out for hair and make-up. It was easy to tell how much money was behind each contestant. Like any competition, there was no such thing as an even playing field. Some of Miss Tiffany's contestants had come from Thailand's outer regions and had only a single friend, sister or self-trained beautician-slash-second-cousin doing their make-up. Those contestants – like the startled, doe-eyed #6, or the terminally shy #24 – were always the quiet ones. Noon was perched in her corner with her hair in curlers, while a butch-looking female relative stoically applied make-up to her face.

Nadia, on the other hand, had a glamorous entourage attending to make-up, costume, hair and styling. She had money behind her and was already on an agency's books. Even putting aside her looks, there was something fundamentally magnetic about her. Some of it, I think, had to do with that primal instinct to align yourself with the winning team. After a group of men helped strap a massive pair of angel's wings to Nadia's shoulders, she walked back and forth as everyone closely analysed her movements. When she sat back down, a plump, squat man with a belly bursting out of a too-tight shirt expertly applied eyeliner and mascara, while a swarm of young gay men twittered around her taking photos and sending MMSes to friends. They wore leather hats, studded belts and screenprinted t-shirts with slogans like ‘HOT GUY FROM MYSPACE, FACEBOOK & OTHER', and shoes in colours like chemical-fume purple and blue-black fuchsia that existed only outside the natural world.

Jung, a young guy in his early twenties, had dyed his hair
blond and grown it long, covering his face. When I asked him whether he thought Nadia had a chance of winning, Jung and his friends said Nadia wouldn't just win tonight's round but the whole competition.

‘What makes you so confident?' I said, grinning.

He put his hand to his mouth and laughed bitchily. ‘I mean, don't
you
think he's a handsome girl?'

I stopped grinning. Nadia sat still for the make-up artist but shot Jung a look.

‘That's horrible,' I said. ‘Nadia's a
she
– a beautiful girl.'

‘No, no! Handsome boy, handsome boy!'

Jung cracked up and shrieked shrilly, prompting the other guys to start clapping and make whooping noises. I tried to ignore this.

‘Are you willing to put money on her?' I asked.

They all laughed. ‘No, we are just his friend,' Jung said.

‘Why do you still refer to Nadia as
he
?'

Jung sighed dramatically like I'd killed all the fun. ‘Okay,' he said. ‘
She, she, she
.'

Outside the mall, I ate an ice-cream and watched the sun sink into the sea like a slowly poached yolk. By now, hundreds of people – supporters, onlookers, curious tourists – sat on concrete tiers around the open-air catwalk erected in Central Beach's courtyard. The evening's five judges took their seats in front of the stage, a motley crew of academics, former models and urban professionals. In a brown jungle-inspired outfit, Sorrawee arrived wearing her crown to sit alongside last year's Miss International Queen, an adorable Japanese woman named Haruna Ai. All big smiles and bubblegum cheeks, Haruna had won the title of world's most beautiful ladyboy the year before, even though she'd come from Japan: a country that had only
legalised sex-change procedures in 2004. She was now a huge mainstream television and pop star back home.

People started calling out, ‘Sorrawee, Sorrawee!' To Haruna Ai, they cried out, ‘Hello, hello!' Both women smiled, waved and posed for their photographs, before giggling with each other. Sorrawee didn't speak Japanese, Haruna didn't speak Thai and neither woman spoke much English, so they communicated by taking photos of each other with their smartphones like high school kids on some marvellous UN-sponsored beauty exchange.

It was dark now and the catwalk lights burst on. Cabaret ladyboys appeared on the stage in skyscraper-high crowns and Thai silk dresses, posing in tableaux. Male dancers leaped into action with choreographed, jerky dancing and the speakers began to pump out a brand of European house music I'd wrongly assumed had become extinct in the mid '90s. The male dancers somersaulted and spun their forearms around with big cruise-ship smiles as the women started to lip-sync to a song about ‘flying so high' to ‘make you believe in me' because ‘it's my destiny'.