the third sex

I have just returned from India, where I spent a couple of weeks travelling mainly on the back roads and staying in little local hotels. Early on during the trip I had arrived at a small town and checked into one of the smartest of the hotels, a tiny place designed mainly for travelling sales people, engineers and officials.

Small and local the hotel may have been, but it had a couple of uniformed bellboys. The one who took my bags to my room aroused my curiosity. In the lobby he had seemed an ordinary enough youth: late teens probably, average height, pleasant round face, slightly plump. It was only when he spoke to me in the room that I realised he was in fact a girl.

Or, at least, I am pretty sure he was a girl. The voice was undeniably girl-like, with none of the forced or husky quality that comes with a male attempting to talk like a female.  The hands also were feminine. There was no sign of a bust beneath the uniform, but the aura was feminine.

I realised that this very polite young person was a genuine transsexual, and I suddenly realised too how seldom it is that I actually meet one.

There is a great deal of difference in being genuinely transgendered and being a ladyboy. Seldom are Thai ladyboys suffering from a misalignment of genes and chromosomes. If they were, given the enormous numbers of them, I could only say that there is a serious genetic fault running through the Thai nation. The fact is that ladyboys make a specific choice, usually pre-adolesence, and they make their choice for a number of reasons.

So the beautiful, exotic ladyboy that so enthralls the likes of you and I is not a mistake of nature, she is the result of a lifestyle choice.

I do see a number of transgendered girls in Bangkok. Quite a few of them work in the bars as cashiers, and if you visit the Patpong go-go bars you will usually spot them showing customers to their seats or collecting money. I don’t know if any are available: I have never tried, mainly because they look like boys. I have also seen them working as messengers. I remember one publisher friend complaining bitterly that his transgendered messenger “boy” had run off with his female sales manager. I remember one working on the motorcycle taxi rank outside my office, and I have known a couple who drove taxi-meters. A few years back I knew one who drove a number 14 bus, which I used to catch at Siam Square, where I was then living. She was a demon driver, one of the most impressive Bangkok bus drivers I have ever seen.

I would very much like to have had a conversation with my bellboy/bellgirl, but apart from the fact her English appeared very limited it is of course not that easy. In fact she seemed very nervous of me, the only European face in the hotel. I had to check out the next morning and I didn’t see her again.