The Greatest Lie Part 15

It would help an unsympathetic world understand this dilemma, and incidentally reduce the incidence of spousal abuse, divorce, and sexual assault if all guys had to dress and live as girls for a week as a rite of passage: let's call it "GenderWeek." After a "femme initiate" had lived under the sexually interested gazes and intimidating physical presence of males, and learned to live with the expectation that the appropriate response to these pressures are indulgent smiles and responsive flirting, he would learn to moderate the extremes of his subsequent masculine behavior.

On the other hand, if you made boys live as girls you would probably increase the incidence of transsexuality in the population, as some guys got addicted the tug of a satin thong catching in the crack of their buttocks.

Perhaps a secret, latent tendency found in the male population explains the overwhelming numbers of transsexuals you meet in trans-tolerant climates like Thailand. By some estimates there are three hundred thousand male-to-female transgenders in a population of sixty million.

Perhaps more boys become MtF transsexuals in Thailand because it's more easily done in a country where nine-year-olds can buy female hormones over the counter and young adults of eighteen can get their surgeries without first having to justify themselves to two shrinks for at least a year.

Or maybe it's a product of the influence of the Thai creation story: a love triangle between Itthi, the first woman, Pullinga, the first man, and Napumsaka, a hermaphrodite. Itthi preferred Pullinga to Napumsaka, who becomes jealous and kills Pullinga, and thereby loses Ithhi's love and dies, leaving Itthi and her children alone, to repeat the love triangle of creation in the next generation. Perhaps these stories explain the Thais' tolerance for, and discrimination against, their transgendered minority.

This fascinates me because I am an American post-op MtF. I was on my way to Thailand to investigate Thai transsexuals as I continued my academic research on the behaviors of transsexual sex workers, in the steamy, tawdry cabarets and bars of Chiang Mai, Bangkok, Phuket and Koh Samui.