The secret life of Thailand’s ladyboys from Muslim majority southern provinces
Transgender women in Thailand are more accepted than in Malaysia or Indonesia, but those who live in the southern provinces feel obliged to hide their gender identities at home, only letting their hair down in places like Bangkok and Pattaya
Whenever Ardulmalik Maskul returns from Bangkok to her hometown in Pattani province in southern Thailand, she undergoes a transformation. She removes her make-up, changes into trousers and begins to mind her manners. Mostly, though, she doesn’t leave the house.
Asan Sohoh engages in similar sartorial subterfuge on her return visits to Pattani. “I don’t want to embarrass my parents,” she says.
Ardulmalik and Asan are practising Muslims and they’re also transgender women. “It’s very difficult to be like us,” Ardulmalik says in English. “In Pattani it’s a big bad thing to be transgender.”
In Buddhist Thailand male-to-female transsexuals, known locally as katoeys or “ladyboys”, are free to live like women. “They’re widely accepted,” says Pornchai Sereemongkonpol, the author of Ladyboys: The Secret World of Thailand’s Third Gender. “They may face some disadvantages, but no one harasses them.”
That’s not so in Pattani, one of Thailand’s three southernmost Muslim-majority provinces, bordering Malaysia, where more restrictive social mores prevail.