the third sex

I’ve written before on this page about my maid’s son. I’ve known him since he was in his early teens. I hadn’t realised before then that she had a son: she has two lovely little daughters but the boy was from an earlier relationship and he had been living upcountry. He had arrived with his mother one day to help her out with the housework, and I couldn’t help but notice he was good at ironing and dusting. He sang to himself in a high-pitched voice as he worked and he did tend to sashay around the apartment somewhat. I might have put it down to the oddities of being 14 years old, but my maid rolled her eyes and told me he wanted to be a ladyboy.

Since then however he has always stayed in that half-way zone, looking and speaking like a boy but wearing makeup and growing his hair long. He went into the jewellery business when he left school but is now studying tourism and hotel management, and is learning English to help him in what he hopes will be a career in the tourism industry. He is a thoroughly nice kid, and I’m always happy to see him turn up with his mother.

He is twenty-one now, and had to go back to his home province in the northeast of Thailand to undergo the medical for possible military draft. All young Thai males face this. The draft takes about ten percent of young Thai men each year and is done by a kind of lottery. If you are proved medically fit your name goes forward. You then draw a card: a black card releases you from any further obligation, but a red card means you’re a soldier now. And if you are selected there is almost no way out. No matter who you are, or whose son you are.

I have always believed that many young Thais become ladyboys simply to avoid being registered for the draft, because aside from the physical fitness aspect or lunacy one of the very few ways to avoid having your name put forward is to demonstrate extreme effeminacy. And it is no good a young guy putting on makeup and wiggling and pouting in front of the selection board: they’ve seen it all before. So the taking of female hormones begins, and once you have interrupted nature in this way in your mid-teens you have unleashed something you cannot always control.

Even this is not always a guarantee. Much depends on the needs of the Ministry of Defence at that time, for the numbers required are throttled up and down depending on political and economic policies. But an entertaining ritual for the media every year, and for the potential conscripts queuing up at the selection board centres, is the parade of ladyboys desperately trying to prove how utterly unfit they are to be trained killers.

Of course, silicon breasts are a help. For one thing, they get in the way when you are firing a rifle. The army is not big on troops with tits. I have known many a young ladyboy in a panic to save enough money for a breast job before going for the draft registration.

One in particular was Yo (pictured), who appears a few times on the main site. Yo was unable to take hormones as they made her ill, and as she was slim, agile and obviously in the peak of physical condition she worried herself sick over the strong possibility of being passed A-OK. She had saved for a breast op job but she didn’t have enough money. She contacted me and asked if I could help. I was travelling at the time but I was due back the day she had booked herself into the clinic. I met her outside the Nana Hotel and I’ll never forget how wan she looked, partly through worry, and partly because she was unable to eat or drink anything for 24 hours before the operation. When I handed the cash over, she almost flew to the clinic.

Although I have no intention of undermining Thailand’s defence efforts, I have on a few occasions helped other ladyboys in a similar situation. One or two would actually have made magnificent troopers, the great Talisha especially, who could have shagged an entire enemy regiment to death. But on each occasion I have helped out because I cared about the person involved. Conscription in England ended long before I would have been eligible but being patholigically unable to accept orders from anyone I would have myself been a dismal failure as a squaddie.

Anyway, my maid’s son returned from his home province a few days ago, beaming broadly. He had been turned down because he is so small and skinny he is under the required height-weight ratio. In more desperate times he would have been put forward, but this is a time of cutbacks and reduced military numbers, and so he was spared. Plus he is obviously as gay as a blade. He got to work doing my ironing, singing happily to himself. I did have to smile, I really did.