the third sex

A ladyboy friend whose bottom and cock I have been intimately acquainted with for several years called me during the week to say that she was back in her home province of Surin, near the Cambodia border, and would be away for at least a couple of months.

I was surprised she would be away so long, as she has a responsible job as a hairdresser at a beauty salon, but when I asked her what she was doing, all she would say was that she had to spend time with her family. So I didn’t think too much more about it until Sunday, when a friend of hers turned up to see me. Why is Dawan away for so long, I asked her.

“She go be monk!” 

Of course. Now I understood. All young Thai males enter the monkhood for a short period, and many of them do so during the rainy season, when they spend two or three months in the monastery. It is known as the Rains Retreat, and it’s one of Thailand’s most charming customs. The monks and novices stay within the temples rather than roaming the countryside, and the villagers and townsfolk ensure that food and other supplies are delivered to them. This is also the reason for the famous Candle Festival: huge candles are made at this time to ensure the temples have enough light during the three-month period, a time when the days are frequently dark with rain clouds.

My young friend, who is 22, had been persuaded by her parents that she should spend at least two months in the local monastery, for it is also a merit-making time for families.

“She have hair cut off!” said my visitor, and I realised why Dawan had been so shy about telling me what she was doing. She had had her hair and eyebrows shaved off, and was no longer the cute little ladyboy I knew, but instead she was a monk, dressed in saffron robes and with no real identity of her own. She had not wanted me to think of her in this way, preferring that I retained the ladyboy image.

I had to smile at this. She is actually quite boyish, having a trim body that manages without any surgical alteration or hormone ingestion to be both masculine and feminine at the same time. She has an awesomely sweet little bottom, a perfect shape, that I plough into on a regular basis. Her cute little dick is one of those that swerves to the side, and which delivers on cue a hot little spurt that goes down a treat. But I can visualise her as a boy, just about, and I would think she will integrate with temple life without too much of a problem.


How would I react if I saw her as a monk? I don’t know, but the removal of hair and eyebrows does nothing flattering to your appearance, and if I saw her by chance in the street in that guise, I quite probably wouldn’t recognise her.

Another thought occurred to me. She is going to be completely chaste for at least the next two months. Abbots are very aware of the temptations that are felt by sex-starved young men, and they take care to monitor the sleeping arrangements in the dormitories. So even if any of the other monks and novices do realise that in her normal life she is a very cute little ladyboy who loves to act the slut, they are not going to be able to do anything about it.

Yet another thought… so chaste and so sacrosanct are Buddhist monks, that they cannot be touched by a woman or even sit next to a woman. So how does this square with my little friend Dawan, usually so feminine in appearance, thought and deed? I shall wait with great interest for November and her return to Bangkok.

I was in Central Department Store in Rama III Road one Sunday afternoon recently. Just browsing around by myself, checking out the camera store mainly, with its mouthwatering display of vintage Leica cameras. Up on the third floor of the atrium I saw a ladyboy. She was by herself, looking over the balcony towards the escalators, obviously waiting for someone.

I liked the look of her. She was very young, very natural looking: not much makeup, and wearing a neat little grey-and-black dress. I went and stood beside her, and spoke to her softly in Thai. I said that she looked good, and that I knew she was sao prapet song, which is the polite Thai term for a ladyboy. She gave me a warm smile, not at all scared by the approach of a foreigner.

I asked her what she was doing, and she said she was waiting for a friend. I asked her if she had an hour to spare, and said that I had an apartment nearby. If she came with me, I said, I would give her some money so that she could come back later and enjoy herself with her friend.

There was no hesitation. She called her friend’s mobile and said she would be back during the afternoon. Then she gave me another beaming smile and we went outside and hopped into a taxi.

Back in my apartment she slipped out of her little dress to reveal a firm and boyish body with an exceptionally hard cock. I held it gently. It was so hot and so eager that I thought it might go off in my hand, so I turned my attention to her cute little bottom. But the situation was so explosive that everything was all over within a few minutes, she shooting what felt and tasted like an endless volume of creamy salty white-hot cum.

Then we both got dressed and she gave me another of those warm smiles, which I had come to really like. She told me she was still at school. Her family had no money. Her father was a driver and her mother worked in a noodle shop. I handed her the promised money, and she said she would treat her parents as well as going with her friend to buy a new dress and then for a meal. She went out of the door looking really happy. By the time she got back to the mall, the entire episode would have taken just an hour.

Two things. One, this was an incredibly erotic experience, enhanced by the unexpectedness. Brief encounters with a stranger can be dynamite. The other aspect is that I would never have approached a genetic girl in that way, unless she had made it clear she wanted me to. By dressing as a girl, my ladyboy friend was sending out a signal that she was available. A ladyboy does not decline sex, unless she has a very good reason.

A GG, unless she was on the game, would be frightened off by a direct approach. You could even find yourself exciting the attention of the security guards. But a ladyboy is up for adventure, sex, and the chance to make a little bit of cash. My little friend was no hooker. She was just a natural ladyboy, and for a brief hour one sunny Sunday afternoon, two people were happy.

Seldom does the mainstream media carry any serious coverage of young transgendered people, but the following article written by Patricia Leigh Brown appeared in a recent edition of the New York Times. I’m reproducing it in full here. The article can be found here .

‘Until recently, many children who did not conform to gender norms in their clothing or behavior and identified intensely with the opposite sex were steered to psychoanalysis or behavior modification.

But as advocates gain ground for what they call gender-identity rights, evidenced most recently by New York City’s decision to let people alter the sex listed on their birth certificates, a major change is taking place among schools and families. Children as young as 5 who display predispositions to dress like the opposite sex are being supported by a growing number of young parents, educators and mental health professionals. (more…)

Someone asked me the other day how I had managed to keep in contact with the ladyboy community before everyone had a mobile phone. It was a good point. Ladyboys are always moving, especially the students of course, because to keep rents down they share rooms, and then they fall out with their room mates, or they go on somewhere to get a better room and a better deal, and so on.

The way it so often used to work was by an extraordinary form of bush telegraph. This method of communication is traditional in parts of Asia, and is not confined only to the LB community. It is actually quite difficult for a foreigner to understand, because a message spreads with amazing speed through what can be a complex network. We, if we ever had the art, and I suppose we did before the days of electronic communication, have lost it.

But a word out to one LB friend that I wanted to see someone else soon arrived at its destination. Ladyboys are tremendous gossips. They will pass on any scrap of information about anybody they meet. This is one of the reasons I behave myself very well with them.

In city areas it is relatively easy to understand how the system works, but in rural Thailand, where few people have their own car and a motorcycle is (or was, a few years ago) considered a luxury, this form of communication also works with amazing speed. Here, the word is transmitted through the temples, the beauty salons, the noodle shops, the endless country fairs that the Thais stage, as well as, apparently, the ether.

I saw this means of communication in action a few years ago when I was down in the Deep South of Thailand. This was long before the separationist troubles blew up there. I had gone down with the intention of photographing 20 local ladyboys, and I knew only one.

So I hired a car, and my scout, and we set off. During the course of one evening we trekked through the streets of Pattani and Yala, calling into a disco, a coffee shop, a beauty parlour, and a local store. In each place there was an attractive ladyboy, and she of course had friends. Within a day I had my 20 models lined up, and raring to go. And I could just as easily have had 20 more. They were queuing up. It was a memorable experience.