the third sex

Early on Friday evening, Sukhumvit Road being jammed solid with traffic, I decided to take the Skytrain to Siam Square. Getting on at the same station as me was a ladyboy. She was very much the in-your-face type: as tall as me in her high heels, and wearing a bright red little cocktail dress that had no back and which was open at the front so that her silicon boobs were almost popping out. She stood a few feet away from me in the packed carriage. She was not at all my type, so I simply stood strap-hanging, wearing the absent-minded expression that I use when I’m watching people.

The train was full of office workers, there were a few school kids, and even a handful of girl scouts. Nobody paid any attention at all to our fellow traveller, who stood demurely minding her own business next to the door. As unobtrusively as I could, I looked at all the surrounding faces, and there was not one sly look, not one giggle, not one whisper. Our friend disembarked, as I thought she would, at Nana, no doubt bound for one of the ladyboy bars in Nana Plaza. As she stepped out of the carriage, there were no embarrassed grins, no rolled eyes…nothing. She had simply been another passenger.

This I think says a lot about the Thai character, and about the tolerance of ladyboys in Thai society. I would not have given much for the chances of our friend if she had been travelling on the London Tube. But to the Thais, a ladyboy is a ladyboy. End of story.

Of course we are all aware, those of us who follow Thailand’s third sex, of how there has been an enormous increase in the ladyboy population in recent years. Of how there are now so many ladyboys in schools throughout the country that separate changing rooms and toilets are provided for them. Of how if you visit a beautician or hairdresser, or pass through the beauty section of one of the big department stores, you are going to find a number of ladyboys and femboys working there.

My neighbourhood 7-Eleven has three ladyboys on the staff, out of a total payroll of no more than ten. During a stroll through the nearest supermarket the other evening I noted a ladyboy on the fresh foods counter, another in the drinks section, and a third helping take deliveries of a stack of groceries. A 19-year-old student who turned up for a photoshoot at the weekend, and who is studying art at one of the big universities, ran out of fingers when she tried to count how many of her fellow students are ladyboys. (Good potential for new models there!)

One wonders how far it is all going to go. As far as work in the mainstream is concerned, then there is plenty more capacity to absorb more ladyboys. Given the increasing tolerance, there is no reason at all why a well-educated ladyboy should not enjoy a long and fruitful career in the public or the private sector doing the kind of job that we do not necessarily equate with the third sex. During the course of photography I have met ladyboy students on business administration, computer studies and marketing courses, to name a few that come to mind. A few years back I discovered a whole ladyboy community on a local government administration course at one of the Bangkok universities, and they must all be well on their chosen career paths by now. Thai society itself is changing, as anyone who follows the political situation will know, and there is a growing class of people who are coming out of the working class and moving into the middle class. Ladyboys, it would appear, are part of the movement.

My ladyboy model produced from below her dress what appeared to be a rather disappointing cock, a small and floppy one, and began pulling on it. I really didn’t hold out much hope that it would do anything. But then to my great surprise it suddenly stood out long and straight, a very impressive and beautiful tool indeed. The best I’ve seen in the past few weeks.

Next ladyboy into the room (I often do two shoots back-to-back) also produced a fairly unimpressive specimen. Until she began wanking, when it came up big and hard and the head of it turned a bright red. A lovely sight.

The beauty of the penis is something I have gone on about many times (many times!) before on this blog, and even now after seeing heaven knows how many in all their various shapes, colours, sizes and stages of arousal, I still wait with breathless excitement to see the next one. Yet these are all ladyboy cocks. Not guys. It takes the aura of a girl coupled with a cock to do it for me. Not the male aura.

Something very funny happened during the week. I was with a genetic girl, a very good friend, and we had met up during the early evening to have some food. She arrived looking very indignant. She explained that on her way, she had walked past a bus stop where there was a solitary male, a company messenger, who was sitting on the bench giving himself a hand-job. Completely alone, cock out, oblivious to the rest of the world, and obviously enjoying himself, as my friend dryly put it.

I asked if he looked a bit simple-minded. You do find a number of disturbed individuals wandering around Bangkok, sleeping in bus shelters, under footbridges and in doorways, and occasionally doing some distinctly unsavoury things.

No, she said, he was dressed in a smart messenger uniform with the company logo on the back. She had been so indignant she had walked over to a nearby motorcycle taxi rank and told one of the drivers, who had gone to sort out the happy wanker at the bus stop.

As she was telling me the story, I was checking out my own reactions. I found the story genuinely funny, my friend’s own purse-lipped reactions being part of the comic effect. Then there was the word she had used for masturbation when she spoke to the motorcycle taxi driver: “chuk wow”, Thai slang for wank, and which actually means “fly a kite.” She said she didn’t think the driver would understand anything else.

But, even though I came close to tears of laughter, my own underlying feeling was one of repugnance. No, I would not have been in the slightest bit interested in catching a glimpse of the messenger’s cock, or of watching him come to a satisfactory conclusion and spurting all over his nice uniform trousers. No, I would not have felt the slightest inclination to go and give him a hand. The very thought gave me a queasy feeling.

How very different when I go into a bar like Casanova or Pinocchio, where there is decent seating, and admire the cock that one of the more obliging ladyboys will produce while I sit there. How very different when a ladyboy lays on my bed or sofa and gives herself a hand job. How very different when I myself take hold of her dick. Is it just the makeup that does it for me? The female clothing? No, it’s more than that. It’s putting a cock onto a girl. One of the ultimate fantasies.

“Hi, remember me!”

It’s a phrase I hear fairly often on my travels amongst the ladyboy community. The fact is, I didn’t. The girl standing in front of me was mid-twenties, and clearly had an awful lot of silicon in her face. Her eyes glittered deep down amongst plastic cheeks and forehead, and her nose could have opened a bottle of beer.

Yes, I replied politely. But I haven’t seen you for a long time…

“Two year,” she replied. “You photo me two year ago!”

Two years is a long time in ladyboyland. For me, it means a lot of people being photographed, and a lot of personal encounters. For the ladyboy in question, a lot of adventures I would rather not know about, and several changes in appearance so that she will bear little resemblance to the girl I photographed all that time ago.

To be honest, I did not remember her at all. There is a certain ladyboy “look” that so many acquire through going to the same clinics and undergoing the same operations. I remember seeing recently a picture of Hugh Hefner with three of his current bunny loves, and the girls all looked exactly the same. Like clones, or blow-up dolls. Sometimes, with ladyboys, it is just the same.

So we started the shoot. Plastic boobs, no, they didn’t seem familiar, and quite frankly I find plastic boobs as exciting as party balloons. But then down came her pants. Her cock, despite all the hormones, stood out straight, with a bit of encouragement. As her foreskin slid back, I remembered. There was a small freckle on her glans. Nothing odd, nothing freakish: just a tiny brown patch. And yes, I remembered that from the previous shoot, because it was unusual, and I’m always fascinated by the shape, size and colouring of cocks.

Whatever you do to your face, you cannot change your cock. Unless you opt for a circumcision, or you have the thing cut off entirely.

I even remembered that she was able to cum. I simply remembered that freckle jigging about, and then a nice covering of sticky white semen. I do like to watch ladyboy cocks in all their glorious forms, and as so many are standard-issue, those that are a little different, even in having a small freckle, do tend to stay in my mind.

So this time I watched, and after much tugging, gasping and grimacing, she came. It was pretty good: despite the hormones, she still managed a neat little spurt and a sticky puddle in the palm of her hand.

Later, I went back and found that original set. My memories of her cock and its freckle were pretty accurate. In fact, there were some good shots there. But as to her face, I could see very little resemblance.

She sat on the end of the bed, cock in hand, and within a couple of minutes the room was filled with the pungent aroma of hot cum, that odd mixture of fresh coconut juice and household cleaner.

I watched as she sat there gasping. She had splattered up under her chin, all the way down her front and into her tummy button, there was a long trail over her left hip, her pubic hair was glistening, and the sheet had little wet patches extending outwards for a couple of feet.

Well, that was pretty impressive, I said. But you don’t normally do that well. What have you been up to?

“I not take hormones long time,” she said. “Before, cock not strong. Only cum little bit. Very difficult too, sometimes not cum at all. Customer at bar not interested me. Friend tell me stop take hormones. So I stop and about one month after I feel very strong again. Now have many customer, many come back take me again.”

Clearly her friend had given wise counsel. I have known my ladyboy friend for a long time, ever since she was a shy 18-year-old, creeping into my bed and laying with her dick in the air, putting her hands across her face in sheer embarrassment. It had not been a big one in those days, and I took it now in my hand, feeling the strength in it, the weight, the fast response of a cock in its prime.

It was never this big before, I said. You must have done something to make it bigger.

She giggled. “I exercise! Chuk wow every day!”

Chuk wow is slang for wank and it translates as “fly a kite”. Thai slang can be very colourful.

I really don’t know if repeated masturbation when you are in your teens causes your dick to grow bigger. If it did I would need to have special trousers with three legs. But the size of my friend here had certainly increased noticeably.

I was very pleased she was off the hormones. They do not suit all ladyboys. It had been about six months since I saw her last, and I had straight away seen that she had a glow about her, a little more confidence in the way she carried herself. That, I think, was down to the resumption of normal bodily functions. No matter how feminine a ladyboy may feel, there is the undeniable fact that she is biologically male and that having a fully working cock is part of the male package.

I have seen what hormones can do over the years. They can produce a very feminine ladyboy, able to pass anywhere as female, and good luck to those lucky ones. But on others, the effect, even taking out the dick factor, is not so good. Sometimes you find a kind of over-egged effect, in which too much fat builds up in the face and body, resulting in a lack of tone. Sometimes you find mental instability, as the hormones and nature clash. It seems to be a kind of lottery.

There is the undeniable fact, however, that for a man going with a ladyboy, the ideal is a feminine person with a strong cock. To my mind, femininity (in ladyboy terms) comes down to good makeup and grooming, polite manners, soft speaking voice, and decent clothing. Once you have these qualities, and add in the final alchemy of making the male aura disappear, then you have your ladyboy.

I am of course speaking in entirely selfish terms, because generally speaking, this only holds good for the young ones. Someone intent on entering the female mainstream might consider selling herself to be only a short-term way of earning enough money to become independent and to open up a small business; the dream of many ladyboys. She might think hormones are essential for her objective, and hope that by the time the hormones have done their deadly work on her dick, she will be home and dry in terms of savings.

I set myself something of a record during the week. A ladyboy visitor was in the door and out again within 15 minutes, business all done to mutual satisfaction. Admittedly, I had been without company for a week or so, owing to various work pressures, and I was in desperate need. And judging by the rock-hard erection that popped out of my young visitor’s pants as soon as she arrived in my living room, she also had a reserve of energy built up and ready to let fly. But the sexual explosion that occurred left even me shaken by its intensity. She had been a little tiger. In a daze, I watched her wriggle back into her clothes. She was going off to a family event, and departed with a smile and a wave. I looked at the clock. It was 15 minutes since I had opened the door to let her in.

One of the reasons people become addicted to ladyboys is the intense sexual rush, the high-energy burst of sensuality. I’m talking about ladyboys who haven’t hobbled their instincts with too many female hormones, who are biologically male but have a natural female persona. When the mechanism is male, there is no desire to hold back, to be “female” about sexual action. The urge is as desperate as your own. Encounters tend to be brief and frantic. Small wonder that eventually, after a number of experiences with the better class of ladyboy, the idea of sex with a genetic girl can take second place in terms of importance.

What do you do after the act, however? It is going to be a while, a few hours maybe, before you are ready for the next session. Well, that depends largely on your companion. And your surroundings, of course. If you are staying in a house or apartment, or you have a hotel suite, then having a ladyboy about the place can be very agreeable. Inevitably she will gravitate towards the television, which is why you need plenty of space (unless you happen to enjoy Thai game shows and soap operas), and that will allow you to get on with whatever you want to do, such as read a book or fire up your laptop. Until you start eying up the bulge under your visitor’s panties.

I ask the question because in terms of relationships, actually spending a lot of time with a ladyboy poses difficulties. There is the language problem, of course, so any kind of meaningful conversation is possibly not going to happen. Then there is the fact that whereas a GG will, by her inherent nature, be inclined to be domestic and take care of you, tidy the place up, cook some food and so on, a ladyboy does not have that DNA. A friend who recently installed a ladyboy in his rented condo in Bangkok, assuming she would take care of the place while he spent time back home in the USA, wrote to me in anguish to say that the place had become a tip.  

“What do I do?” he asked. “It has become so bad that the landlord is complaining.”

I suggested that he use a maid service a couple of times during the week. But I have also seen a ladyboy’s ideas of domesticity up close, and I knew exactly what he meant. I once installed a ladyboy mistress in an apartment, and found myself doing the housework whenever I went to see her. She really did not seem to understand that dishes need washing, floors need sweeping, etc. She was extremely good at sex. But other than that, there was no female instinct. 

Then there is the fact that, when you enter into a ladyboy relationship, and if you let it become a deep one, you will probably be invited at some point to visit the family. Do you actually want to do this? Are you happy to go upcountry, be introduced to a large extended family who will examine you with curiosity, be followed around by the village urchins, and eventually dump a large amount of cash behind you as you depart? I’ve done it, and it’s not a comfortable sensation.

Back to my own situation. I’m not into the setting of records relating to the brevity of a ladyboy visit. I have a number of relationships that I genuinely value. On the other hand, many of those I invite back really are there for that intense sexual explosion, the kind of feelings that one had in adolescence, and that with maturity become increasingly rare. Then they are gone, until the next time, and I’m left with a sweet afterglow to get on with whatever it was I was doing before she arrived.