A friend of mine recently mentioned that he had had sex with a ladyboy and not realized it at the time. It was only several weeks later that he became aware of this fact, and only then it had come to him thanks to some deep thought and piecing together of hazy memories. I think it’s fantastic that we can all live happily in this country, meet the girl of our dreams, and then a few weeks later stumble upon the revelation that she’s actually a boy. It’s totally offbeat. Another friend admitted that he had been in the same scenario. It’s just one of those things, they both iterated.

I wrote an article about ladyboys back in June. I’m still no closer to understanding the enigma, and I’m not sure I really want to be, but by chance I met an interesting man named Morris in the Robin Hood pub, Phrom Pong. Morris seemed to have cracked the conundrum. I got chatting with him, as you do, and he soon revealed that he was married… to a ladyboy. He made no attempt to hide this and seemed quite proud of himself. I asked him to tell me a little more and he went ahead and told me how he had come to Thailand and discovered the joys of these “other” ladies of the night.

To set the scene, Morris looked, for want of a better word, normal. He was a regular 40-year-old guy and you wouldn’t look twice at him in the street. His only distinguishing feature was slicked-back, dark hair that made him look like Michael Madsen in Reservoir Dogs. Morris was close to six feet in height, he looked to weigh around 80 kilos, and he had a plain face with a large nose and narrow blue eyes. He was very to-the-point and his manner was somewhat boisterous, but not overbearing.

Morris knocked back a large gulp of Heineken from a pint-glass, and there we were, his story about to unfold. “I’m a Londoner through and through,” he said. “I’ve been living here in Thailand for six years or so. There’s no grey areas for me. In my mind ladyboys are a third sex. To describe them in any other way is a mistake. I’ve slept with lots of ladyboys, both here and in London where there are two ladyboy clubs. I’ve met plenty of blokes who have slept with ladyboys too, and none of them consider themselves as being gay. Neither do I for that matter. If people say that I’m gay then that’s OK by me, but I’ve been married twice before: Once to a British woman and once to a Thai lady.”

I was a little scared at how forward he was being with me. Why was he telling me all these things, and was he going to mind if he read them in a magazine a few weeks later? I covered my bases and told him I was a writer, of sorts, and he said he would be happy for me to tell his story. “It might wise a few people up about what it’s really like to be a ladyboy,” he said.

Having recently met Venus Flytrap (Thailand’s first all-ladyboy pop group), I can vouch for occasionally being struck by the grandeur of some of these ladyboys, but for whatever reason, the whole experience was unsettling. Perhaps that is the appeal. It’s like a journey into the unknown, but few people ever get past the stage of curiosity. Morris had gone the whole hog.

“I am married to a ladyboy called Varisa,” he continued, clearly a little drunk and excited, another beer on the way. “She’s part Thai and part Lao, from Nakom Pathom. She’s 35, she went to a good school, and she attended university in Bangkok where she earned a degree in communications. She struggled to find a proper job in Bangkok and so, with the help of some of her ladyboy friends, she found work in Patpong in a go-go bar before moving to Singapore and working as a street prostitute.”

Already I felt a strange admiration for Morris and his honesty. He’d only known me half-an-hour and already he had divulged that his wife was a man, had worked in a go-go bar, and had sold her body in Singapore.

“Varisa returned to Thailand after one year under the floorboards of a truck,” Morris went on. “She’d overstayed her visa, you see. She went back to Patpong and worked as a street prostitute which is where I met her four-and-a-half years ago. We spend two or three days a week together now, socializing in Patpong and sometimes in Nana.”

The obvious thought at this point was how people might react to this brazen Londoner walking hand-in-hand with a ladyboy. Is Thailand as accepting a country as it is made out to be?

“Even after all this time,” he confessed, “we still get puzzled looks and occasional abuse, usually from English tourists. We try not to let it bother us. The staff in the bars we go to are used to us now. The locals in my apartment block have accepted us and my farang friends understand that this is my decision. Some people can’t believe I prefer the company of ladyboys to a pretty Thai girl. You’re wondering why I like ladyboys aren’t you. I can sense it.” He was right. “They’re mysterious, tempting, exotic, enigmatic, and certainly never boring. They’re my choice, even if it is a dangerous one.”

I frowned momentarily. A dangerous one? “Not all Ladyboys are violent and irrational,” Morris Explained. “Most are just stuck in a rut with no money, no future, limited opportunities. They’re worried about their future, same as you and me. They have to support their families. This is, unfortunately, why so many of them steal. They have no prospect for a husband for support, or for children to take care of them when they get older. Competition is fierce. There are few ladyboys over 40-years-of-age around the Patpong area. Some support other ladyboys who have become too depressed to carry on, while others just fade away, back to their village, or commit suicide – a knife to the stomach, a drug overdose, or jumping off a roof being the preferred ways.”

I could sense the mood was turning a little somber, so I pushed Morris on how Varisa’s family had reacted to their son becoming a woman and marrying an Englishman. “I have been to my wife’s village twice now,” he said. “Varisa stayed away from the family home for nearly ten years. We had a reunion with her mother and father last December. Her brothers and sisters have mostly accepted her, but she still has two sisters who refuse to talk to her. It takes time. Her mother is very happy. She has a new daughter now, she says, and she is very proud. We went for Songkran this year and had a great time.”

This story seemed to have a happy ending… for Morris and Varisa at least. For many others, though, the scenario is not as romantic: “It’s hard to be a ladyboy,” said Morris, “even in Thailand. They don’t deserve to be looked down upon. They are only human. Prejudices run deep in this so-called Land of Smiles, but there is a slowly-growing level of acceptance. There are something like 100,000 ladyboys in Thailand. It’s not a new trend, and it’s something that’s been here for at least 200 years, or so I’ve read. Even qualified, educated ladyboys, however, find it hard to get a job. They face a hard life, but perhaps they have it easier here than they would anywhere else in the world.”

There’s some irony in the fact that Thailand is famed for its ladyboys, and yet Thai culture still seems to find it difficult to come to terms with these same ladyboys as members of society. They are mysterious creatures who are an enigma to us all; perhaps gender issues are something we can never fully understand. Morris finished his final pint of beer and emphatically bid me farewell. He looked overjoyed at having shared his story. I couldn’t think of anything to say except: “Take care.”

How do you respond intelligently to a story such as Morris’?

Techno’ tags: Ladyboy, People, Bangkok, Thailand, Katoey, Transgender