This week I’ve been fixated on the study of transgender. For a class of mine, we were to find something unique about gender in Asia and I picked (actually from my dad’s suggestion) the phenomena of Transsexuals in Thailand, better known as Kathoey.

Transsexuality is a deep and complex subject and I do not fault anyone who finds it so complex that they avoid it all together. So far I’ve read three books and a dozen articles dealing with both Asian transsexuality and Western transsexuality and I feel even more ignorant then when I began… But for your educational value I will try to convey the basics or atleast synthesize what I’ve learned thus far.

The most complex, yet simple problem with the third sex is that there is no mono-lingual word like man, woman, boy, or girl that can describe the third sex. We’ve resorted to a plethora of singular binaries that just merge our dichotomous lingual vocabulary of gender. (i.e. man-woman, he-she, lady-boy, trans-sexual, etc. oh and ‘it”) This of course points to our consistent problem of trying to name “the other” or “not-man/woman.”

Don’t worry just yet!… the lack of a singular term may be because both normal heterosexuals, as well as, transsexuals (this being strictly Western/American society) feel that sexuality should be binary and that American transsexuals desire to be anatomically & socially feminine due to their psychological perception of themselves. Meaning that those who are transitioning sexuality to a female (or male) desire you to think they are either a man or woman, not an other.

So… the third sex calls for us to examine language, but language is more or less an extension of our culture. As Americans we naturally and force-ably ascribe gender categories as soon as we’ve sexed the fetus (aprx. in the 7th month). We reinforce gender by colors (blue/pink), clothes, jewelry, and how different genders speak: Language (notably pronunciations in Spanish & Japanese). The debate over gender generally falls to one question… “just who decides gender anyway?”

Some have said that it is naturally biology that makes us male or female. Specifically our sex organs or genitalia is all that’s needed to concretely labeled in either group. This of course is problematic, because babies who are born hermaphrodites (having parts of both male and female genitalia) or babies who are born with defects or even special chromosomal syndromes like Klinefelter’s Syndrome (KS) in boys or Turner Syndrome (TS) in girls become victims of hasty surgeries to make them “fit in” later in life.

Of course KS and TS are likely the exception and not the norm. The third sex comes from arguably somewhere deeper. Religions have poor answers in this arena, but generally we’re taught that these people are weird and perhaps are products of a “sinful life.” Scientists are no help either… Psychologists suggest something that happened in their childhood or perhaps the result of a hormonal imbalance at birth. Richard Totman, a social anthropologist who wrote the Third Sex, interviewed surgeons who perform sexual reassignment surgeries and they say that for most of their patients, the desire to be the opposite sex often spurs at a very young age… and perhaps developed sometime before birth.

Of course nothing has been set in concrete, we’re dealing with humans after all and perhaps one may notice that humans just do not fit into all of our boxes. While perhaps our knowledge of third sex might be hotly contested (or non-existent) we should still tread lightly when passing judgment. I know that after pouring over story after story of each of these individual’s past, I’ve realized that these are people too and progress with in this “non-purely-gay” and “certainly non-heterosexual” group may be just finding the right words to talk about who assigns gender and sexuality or what it is anyway.

On the other hand, our minds may be too corrupted to change. I know that after just minimal research I find myself questioning why I gender people in such a binary sense. We often I look at someone and say “yeah that’s a boy” or “that’s a girl” until I run into someone who could be either–at which time I’m baffled and think… “weird.” Perhaps you do the same?

Telling these people who are like this to wear blue for boy or pink for girls just won’t work. We need to find language and ultimately we just talk about it.

As for the Kathoey… my research carries on into the deep and complex world of Thailand’s third sex. I suppose I am grateful to my Dad for suggesting this topic, because it opened my mind to a world that I had no clue about. Unfortunately this is likely too deep for him, because it’s questioning preconceived notions of gender that are fragile and weird. That’s OK… We all should look at how we definitively know that: That’s a girl or that’s a boy and I mean it outside what were taught. Is there a third sex? a fourth sex? a seventeenth sex? I’ll leave that for you to decide for yourself… In the mean time you should be proud of who you are… maybe write “I proud to be a man”, or “I’m proud to be a woman”, or “I’m proud to be a …” well you get the point…

~J out

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