the third sex

A lady friend (yes,  a real one!) who hails from Buri Ram was telling me at the weekend how youngsters in her home province are becoming drawn into the ladyboy lifestyle. She says she knows of nippers of six or seven years old who are trying on girls’ clothing, and of those a couple of years older who are putting on makeup and wiggling around like proper little madames. By the time they are in their teens they are already veterans.

Why, why, why, I asked, repeating the question I have posed countless times. Why are so many Thai youngsters so eager to change their sex?

My friend pulled a face. “I don’t know,” she said.

Is it something in the water supply? A genetic fault running through the Thai nation? The Thai equivalent to becoming a footballer or rock star, and leaving your impoverished background behind you? 

What happens to them when they leave school, I asked. Do they come to Bangkok and attempt to work in the cabaret or the bars? For it has to be born in mind that Buri Ram, which is in the northeast and adjoining the Cambodia border, is one of the most impoverished provinces in Thailand.

“No,” she said. “A lot of them stay in Buri Ram. Get jobs as waitress or in beauty salon or department store. Many want man to look after them.”

I thought that one over. Buri Ram is an agricultural province, a region where the living is sometimes hard, and although you can never quantify these things I would not have thought it an obvious place to have a large gay population. The people there are of course mainly Thai but there is a significant population of Khmer descent, and a lot of mixed blood. In fact my friend herself is part Khmer. Not the kind of people you would imagine who are given to liberal viewpoints or decadent ways of living. This is country where every able pair of hands is needed, and where the male side of the family is regarded very much in the traditional peasant way.

So why are all these husky young farmhands and potential farmhands giving up their very traditional way of life to start putting on makeup and sashaying around in their sisters’ dresses long before they have even reached puberty?


“No work in Buri Ram,” said my friend. “Only hard work on farm, or easy work in restaurant or beauty salon. Young boy not want to be like father, work hard, drink too much, fight, never have any money. So become ladyboy instead.”

We in the West are familiar with teenage rebellion. In the East it is far less common. But although we grew our hair long in the 60s, and dressed in odd ways, and tried in as many ways as we could to upset our parents and the established order, we never did get around to changing our sex. In Thailand, it is a rebellion. You can even compare it to the rise of the Red Shirt movement. A rebellion against the established order. But what a strange one it is.

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.

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One of the best things about being me is that I get some fascinating emails. Apart from the pure salacious, the downright adventurous and sometimes the absolutely hilarious, I also get some very thought provoking and informative correspondence. The writer of this item, who prefers to remain completely anonymous, has certainly taught me some facts I did not know. My thanks go to him for sharing this information.

One of the best reasons to visit Thailand is to meet ladyboys and what better to whet the appetite and sharpen the senses than the exceptional detail of Captain Outrageous’s photo galleries? There are so many views of each model and outstanding photographic attention paid to the exotic Thai cocks in all their states, shapes and sizes. No site I’ve seen pays such homage, so well, to the Thai male member.

However, a quick dip into ethnic sexology, which has quite a wealth of scientific info on the internet, seasoned with a dash of anthropology is also fun. Bizarre practises, ancient fetishes and big regional variations in sexual expression didn’t start with the Swinging Sixties. One of my favourites is the impossibly exotic Victorian explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton who spoke 19 languages, translated the Kama Sutra from Sanskrit and was said to personally sample every tribe or race, both male and female, he ever encountered.

Like most Easterners, Thais fit into the ’smaller’ category of cock – a sizing chart where Africans reign and Europeans come second. Not to say you cannot find some really ‘big’ ladyboys but those with fetishes for the gigantic will have a longer search in the East. And one is not talking relative size, since Thais are often short in body anyway.

Africans also have the longest, most tapered foreskins, the ‘aposthion’ so admired by the ancient (and bi-sexual) Greeks. Eastern Asians have the shortest foreskins and, as a glance in the galleries quickly shows, scant aposthions that are often baggy and seldom tapered.

Circumcision is a rarity in Thailand: Thais, except for a few Muslims from the South, are never put to the ‘knife’. Indeed circumcision is completely unknown in the traditional East – and Thais are very traditional.

Eastern people also have the highest incidence of phimosis, where the foreskin opening is too narrow to retract when erect (or at all) of any ethnic group. A study of young university males in China claimed 15 percent had phimosis against a world median of around 2 percent in adults.

The Japanese take phimosis very seriously, because it’s thought rude to show a cock with the foreskin up, even to one’s girlfriend. Going through LB photo galleries might give the idea that in Thailand, it’s rare to uncover the penis at all, even (or especially) at orgasm. Here’s a word of weird cultural advice – if you ever take a traditional Japanese bath, never get in with foreskin au naturel or you will cause serious offence and probably have the water ladle thrown at your nut.

The Koreans, always averse to things Japanese and perhaps reacting to centuries of colonial invasion have, on the other hand, recently taken to circumcision with a vengeance! Yet whilst Thai LBs seem not to mind any sort of radical gender surgery, often becoming ‘post-ops’ and having their willies sliced and diced, carved and cored into a vagina and labia or breasts and buttocks blown up with silicone and even Adam’s Apples ’shaved’ (ouch) it seems they are averse to any minor operation on a tight foreskin. One told me, ‘It not good but I scared of doctor.’ Now she’s a post-op.

You’ll spot lots of gals in the Captain’s galleries or other ladyboy sites who cannot retract their foreskin or only partially. There is often no cultural basis for surgery in the Orient – Chinese traditional medicine did not, for example, teach surgery at all. Is this the reason some Thais become LBs in their teens, because narrowness of the foreskin opening makes intercourse painful or impossible, and sometimes dangerous? It also means those LBs with phimosis cannot be tops and must take the passive role. Its worth investigating by any sexologist and let me volunteer.

Forced retraction can lead to dangerous swelling and a trip to the emergency room. Famous sufferers include Louis XVI of France, who was unable to make love to Marie Antoinette for many years until he was ’snipped’. His lack of heirs, and the rumour that Marie Antoinette (understandably) chose favours elsewhere made him disliked by the masses that he later had a far more serious condition, losing his other head – to the guillotine.

Is the average tourist aware that the Thai national health service offers free, expensive plastic surgery to repair foreskins damaged in accidents (that darned zipper again!) where every other socialised medical system would just slice the wounded bit off? Or that the Thai language has some half a dozen distinct words for various foreskins at various ages and stages of life?

Whatever, a LB lover will have a wonderful time with the amazingly diverse cocks of Thailand, from the creamy white and pink ones of Chiang Mai to dark and dusky members with heads the colour of ripe plums from Issan or the South – many with teasingly tight openings, novel foreskins and every shape or colour (curved seems almost a fashion and twisted 180 degrees on the axis is not unknown) in between. As was once said of London, when a man tires of the exotically different Thai cocks, he is tired of life.

There is a piece in one of the London newspapers this morning about the increasing acceptance of India’s third sex, the hijras. The article does however make the point that although progress is being made, the hijras still face not only discrimination but hostility. Clearly, there is a long way to go before they are regarded as being equals.

In Thailand, I don’t think there is any hostility at all towards ladyboys. Individual cases do occur, of course, but what I mean is there is no general public reaction against them. A ladyboy can walk down any street and not be in fear of violent abuse. The worst she is likely to face is little kids making fun of her.

This holds true in even the rougher areas. In fact, if you walk through a Bangkok slum you are likely to find ladyboys living there, having decided that they can make more income from the sex trade than from the unskilled work that is the lot of the poorly educated working-class male.

I was thinking this over yesterday, when I was in one of the rougher parts of the city. I†was cutting through the area to visit an interesting old temple, when I saw two ladyboys walking, arms linked, along the lane. They passed a group of men drinking outside a grog shop, and rather than attract ribald comments†they†didn’t attract a second glance. At the corner of the lane was a group of motorcycle taxi riders, a tough looking bunch,†but again there wasn’t even the raising of an eyebrow. The ladyboys were simply part of the scenery. In fact, the†girls hopped onto the back of a couple of the bikes to ride off to the shops.

There are several reasons for this acceptance. The Buddhist culture, of course. The fact that ladyboys are such an accepted part of society that Thai men regularly take them for sexual partners without any qualms at all. And the sheer number of ladyboys,†which means†they are such a common†sight that no one is startled to see a ladyboy in full rig, even in the middle of the day.

Then there is the sheer beauty of so many ladyboys. There are plenty of ugly ones about, naturally, but I would say from personal experience that the greater number are attractive and that they embellish a crowded mall or busy street rather than appear as an oddity.

As I have mentioned before, there is an increasing trend on the part of employers to take on ladyboy staff and put them in upfront positions where they deal with the public. This is very indicative of the way in which the third sex in Thailand is accepted.

There is an ever-increasing number of Thai youngsters deciding to become ladyboys, and so acceptance can only continue to grow. Very little academic work appears to have been done on this very interesting subject, which is a great pity because it could provide all kinds of guidance for other countries struggling to assimilate the transgendered.

I have written on this page before about ladyboy Dew, who is from the Deep South of Thailand and who until she took up a job in her home town as a teacher of dance and drama was a regular visitor to my apartment in Bangkok.

Dew loves pornography. To be more specific, she loves to see pictures of young Thai men. Although pornography is illegal in Thailand, there is a thriving underground of Thai porn magazines and videos, as anyone who walks past Patpong or visits the Panthip Plaza IT emporium will be aware.

Much of this material features Thai guys, and some of it gets posted on the internet. Dew knew where to find the websites, and whenever she visited my place it wouldn’t be long before she took over my computer and went surfing. At this point I would be bundled out of the room, on the pretext that she would be emailing friends and reading the Thai newspapers, and that I would get very bored.

I knew what she was up to. The door to the computer room wouldn’t close properly, and after she had shooed me out she would “accidentally” put a chair against it so that I couldn’t walk in unexpectedly. Then she would hurry back to the screen. She didn’t realise that from a certain angle I could see through the crack in the door: I couldn’t see her face but I could see from her waist down.

Finding a batch of pictures she liked, she would tug down her shorts and knickers and start to play with her cock. I would watch as she got it up to full strength, her hand moving faster and faster, culminating in a white spurt that leapt into the air and went all over her belly. I would be sitting innocently reading a book as she sidled past and went into the bathroom to clean up.

I once asked her to show me the type of boy she liked best, and she pointed out a cute looking young guy with floppy hair and a slim and undeniably attractive body. As I’ve said here many times, I have no interest in men: but I could see the attraction.

Dew’s interest in porn is by no means uncommon amongst ladyboys. When I’m taking photographs, when it comes to the wanking sequence I do sometimes get asked if I have any gay magazines that would act as a stimulant. I feel guilty when I say no, and I tell myself I really should get a selection in, but I always forget.

I have found on several occasions that ladyboys actually have porn clips on their mobile phones. They will lay back and watch the clip, and I will hear strange gruntings and other sounds coming from the phone’s earpiece, but as I am standing with my camera waiting for the white spurtings I have never actually seen the visual quality of these clips.

This interest in porn is yet another facet of ladyboy life, which again underlines the strangeness of it all. Genetic girls tend not to have an interest in erotic pictures, but here is a beautiful girl flicking eagerly through photographs of handsome young naked guys. Then she takes out her own cock and gives herself one off the wrist. What could be stranger?

Ladyboys are however not aroused by pictures of other ladyboys. Many times I have shown visitors and models some of the pictures on the site, and they are always interested to see what their friends look like. They especially like to see photos of their friends’ cocks. But the interest is curiousity, not sexual arousal.