Kathoey

Where kathoey comes from

Thai กะเทย was borrowed from the Khmer ខ្ទើយ, which goes back to Proto-Mon-Khmer. 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 not of the word but 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.

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. Phet thi sam means third sex, and sao praphet song is a second-type female.

The distinction that matters is which side of the line each word puts the speaker on. Using kathoey suggests a kind of male; sao praphet song, like trans woman in English, suggests a female identity; phet thi sam claims a category outside both. 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. Translating it as trans woman therefore picks the wrong Thai word and drops the ambivalence the right one carries.

What ladyboy carries with it

The usual English rendering is ladyboy, and it has become common across Southeast Asia. Nalin Satearrujikanon, the creative director of Nalinchan Studio and founder of The Future Is Ladyboy, 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.

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. The Hangover Part II, set in Bangkok, is one of many films in which the word appears as a punchline. Nalin's account of the current position is that younger queer Thais use it in a campy and self-loving way on TikTok and in clubs, and that some prefer it to kathoey outright, while the word retains its othering force in the mouths of visitors.

How Sam Winter counted kathoey

Population estimates for a category this loose are difficult and the attempts are worth reading as method. A 1996 report 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.

Winter's own approach, published in 2002, was to stand at the doors of middle-income shopping centres in Bangkok and Chiang Mai and count. Across ten hours and 14,362 passers-by at four centres, he counted only those he judged certain, having first tested his own accuracy against transgender observers who agreed closely on the definite cases and not at all on the possible ones. Extrapolating from the Bangkok figures gave nearly 17,000 in the capital; extrapolating from the combined data gave roughly three in every thousand people, or six in every thousand males, and about 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.

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. 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; kathoey mediums are known as kathoey maa-khii, and mediumship provides both an income and a network. The prominence is modern rather than old: 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 the social reading rather than the legal one.