Kathoey

The breadth belongs to the category itself. Nalin Satearrujikanon, the creative director of Nalinchan Studio and founder of the campaign The Future Is Ladyboy, describes it as covering somebody who has transitioned and equally somebody who simply presents femininely or lives outside the masculine norm, and as being both more open and more vague depending on who is using it. In Thai gender norms many people read kathoey as a third gender, and Thai law recognises no such category.

Where kathoey comes from

Thai กะเทย was borrowed from the Khmer ខ្ទើយ, which Wiktionary traces back to a Proto-Mon-Khmer root. The Australian scholar Peter Jackson holds that in antiquity the word referred to Intersex people, and that the sense shifted in the middle of the twentieth century towards males who cross-dressed. Before the 1960s the term took in anyone who departed from the dominant sexual norms, whatever the departure was.

The earliest dated record on file is of the role. The Chinese envoy Zhou Daguan, who visited Angkor in 1296 and 1297, recorded in his account of Cambodian customs the presence of èrxíngrén, two-formed persons, who approached Chinese men with the promise of gifts. That is seven centuries of documented presence in the region and no dated first use of the Thai word. Wikipedia notes a nineteenth-century reading of the Khmer Chbab Srey said to describe malicious women punished in the four hells and reborn as kathoey, and flags the source for it as unreliable. Nalin's account puts the earliest recorded mentions in Buddhist teaching on the cycle of rebirth.

One reason the record runs continuously is political. Thailand was among the few countries in Southeast Asia that European powers did not colonise, and the Them account draws the contrast directly: gender-variant categories elsewhere were suppressed under colonial rule in ways that kathoey were not, which is part of why the word is still ordinary Thai and never needed recovering.

Why kathoey is not phuying

Thai has several words here and they are not interchangeable. A study of 195 Thai transgender women found that most called themselves phuying, woman; a minority used phuying praphet song, second kind of woman; very few used kathoey. The distinction that matters is which side of the line each word puts the speaker on.

Kathoey can also be pejorative, particularly in the form kathoey-saloey, which sits close to the English fairy or queen, and it is used as an insult for gay men. Rendering it as trans woman picks the wrong Thai word, and drops the ambivalence the right one carries. The reverse mistake is available too: Wiktionary lists ladyboy as the synonym and trans woman only as a coordinate term, which is a lexicographer's way of saying the two are neighbours, not equivalents.

The category also spreads across presentation in a way the English vocabulary does not. Wikipedia describes at one end people who live and are read as women, and at the other people who wear make-up and use feminine speech patterns while dressing as men, whom it places closer to the Western category of effeminate gay man than to Transgender. Both are kathoey. Neither is a partial case of the other.

What ladyboy carries with it

The usual English rendering is ladyboy, and it has become common across Southeast Asia. Nalin describes the difference as one of register: kathoey is local, soft, and layered, while ladyboy came in from foreigners, sometimes in admiration and sometimes as a show. Her account of the controversy is about use: the word was often a way to attract attention or get laughs, sometimes at the expense of real people's dignity.

The history behind it is a tourist history. Jeremy Marre's documentary Ladyboys was broadcast on Channel 4 in 1992, following two adolescent kathoeys in rural Thailand trying to get work in a Pattaya cabaret revue. The Lady Boys of Bangkok revue has toured Britain since 1998, playing theatres and its own Sabai Pavilion for nine months of the year. The Hangover Part II, set in Bangkok, is one of many films in which the word appears as a punchline.

The most recent occasion for the argument was a monologue in the third season of The White Lotus, in which a character played by Sam Rockwell describes an encounter with a ladyboy to a character played by Walton Goggins. What the scene set off, in the reading Them reports, was a conversation about cisgender men treating trans women and transfeminine people as material for their own self-discovery, and Nalin's own response was that the subject had usually been handled as a joke and was not being handled as one there.

Thai kathoey are not only the object of that vocabulary. Venus Flytrap, the first all-kathoey music group in Thailand, was formed in 2006 and promoted by Sony BMG. Thai kathoey style and fashion borrow heavily from Korean popular culture. Nalin's summary of the reclamation is that younger queer Thais use ladyboy in a campy and self-loving way on TikTok and in clubs, that some prefer it to kathoey outright, and that which word feels right is a personal matter.

How Sam Winter counted kathoey

Population estimates for a category this loose are difficult. A 1996 report by Ehrlich in Elle put the figure at 10,000, which Sam Winter of the University of Hong Kong judged almost certainly too low; informal estimates as high as 300,000 also circulated. At the other end of the evidence, Winter cites Matzner's report of a provincial Thai university where a student body of 15,000 supported a sorority of more than 100 transgender students, roughly one in 150 of the whole.

Winter's own approach, published in 2002, was borrowed from field botany: learn to recognise the thing, go to likely places and count, then extrapolate. He stood at the doors of middle-income shopping centres in Bangkok and Chiang Mai and counted passers-by. Across ten hours and 14,362 people at four centres, he counted only those he judged certain. He had first tested his own accuracy against transgender observers, on the reasoning that the people best able to read a kathoey are kathoey: over 2,237 passers-by he identified ten definite cases and his assistants twelve, close agreement, while on possible cases he identified fourteen and they identified none.

Extrapolating from the Bangkok figures against a city population of 5,647,799 gave nearly 17,000 in the capital. Extrapolating from the combined Bangkok and Chiang Mai data against a 1998 national population of 61,466,178 gave roughly three in every thousand people, or six in every thousand males, and nearly 180,000 nationwide. Winter set out the objections himself: kathoey may be more common in cities than in the countryside, and may spend more time in shopping centres than other people do. Against that he argued the count is more likely to miss people than to invent them, because it ignored every possible case.

How Buddhism reads the category

There is no single Buddhist position. Within Theravada teaching, some hold that being kathoey follows from transgressions in previous lives, a reading that produces pity rather than blame and, on some accounts, an obligation to make merit through donation or ordination. The Thai Buddhist author Bunmi traces it instead to lower level spirits, phi-sang-thewada, itself a matter of a past life. Others hold that the Buddha was never hostile and that the karmic reading is a mistake.

Practice diverges from doctrine. In northern Thailand kathoeys, women, and gay men are held to have soft souls and therefore to be open to possession, which is why all three are heavily represented among spirit mediums; people without soft souls are held to be immune. Kathoey mediums are known as kathoey maa-khii, and mediumship provides both an income and a support network. The prominence is modern: there is little evidence that kathoeys were associated with religious practice before the modern period, and they were barred from ceremony. In the south, kathoeys act as mediums of the deity Kaun Im at the festival of the nine gods, and the traditionally male Nora dance had a majority of gay and kathoey performers among its male dancers by 2014.

What Thai law does and does not give

Activism has produced constitutional protection against unjust gender discrimination, in force since January 2015. It has not produced a separate legal gender category, and kathoeys cannot change the sex recorded on their documents. Gender-affirming surgery, by contrast, is routine: Bangkok hospitals perform two or three operations a week, and more than 3,500 have been carried out over thirty years, with an increasing list of prerequisites including a minimum age of 18. The gap between a medical infrastructure of that size and the absence of a legal category is the shape of the Thai position, and it is why Third gender describes only the social reading.