Adolescent Sexuality by Dr. Karen Rayne

I was delighted to read this article in such a “popular” magazine as Time:

Where the ‘Ladyboys’ Are

Monday, July 7th, 2008

By Hannah Beech

Life can be complicated enough for members of the transgender community — the last thing they need is to hesitate between two bathroom doors: Male or female. Luckily for students at the Kampang high school in rural northern Thailand, there’s now a third option. Introduced in May, the symbol on this bathroom door is of a human figure divided vertically, with the blue side wearing pants and the red side sporting a skirt. The Kampang school’s principal says he decided to build the new bathroom after a poll found that nearly 10% of the school’s 2,500 students identify themselves as transgendered.

Buddhist-majority Thailand displays what may be the world’s most tolerant attitude toward what locals call kathoey, loosely translated as “ladyboys.” The term, which does not have an exact counterpart in English, refers to people who are born male but, as one Thai saying goes, “have a female heart.” Kathoeys include everyone from occasional cross-dressers to those who have completed gender-reassignment surgery.

Although kathoeys do face some stigma and bureaucratic hurdles in Thailand — even those who have undergone sex-change operations, for example, are still listed as men on their national I.D. cards — they are also a normal and visible part of society. A Bangkok travel agency I use is staffed by kathoeys, and a cashier at my local grocery store is rapidly transitioning toward womanhood. One of the Immigration Department officers who helped me renew my work visa last year had both an adam’s-apple and lavish mascara. Kathoeys star on T.V. soap operas and grace the catwalks, while an all- kathoey pop group called the Venus Flytrap plies the airwaves. Notable kathoey athletes include a kickboxing champion, who liked to plant kisses on her vanquished opponents, and a volleyball team dubbed the Iron Ladies that won a national championship in the mid-90s.

The Kampang school isn’t the first one to accommodate its kathoey pupils. Several years ago, a technical college in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai unveiled what it called “pink lotus” bathrooms, reserved for kathoeys. Now, Thailand’s Education Ministry is considering whether to introduce similar bathrooms and dormitories on the university level, even though many colleges require “ladyboys” to wear male clothing on campus. (For the most part, kathoey students can, however, choose feminine hairstyles and wear jewelry, nail polish and makeup.)

Some kathoeys say they don’t need specially designated bathrooms, arguing they should be able to use either male or female toilets. Others would rather educational funds go to combating stereotypes that the only jobs kathoeys can expect to excel in are in the beauty or entertainment — read sex — industries. Certainly, career prejudice is a lingering problem: one Thai teachers’ college, for instance, refuses to enroll kathoeys. Nevertheless, Thailand is a far more open-minded place than even the United States. And the tolerance isn’t just a liberal, urban phenomenon. Kathoey beauty pageants are popular in Thai villages; the Kampang school is located in one of Thailand’s poorest and most rural regions. As one Thai hill-tribe creation myth goes, in the beginning, there were three sexes: female, male and an intertwining of the two — just like the image on the Kampang bathroom door.

Today I am thinking about the intensely personal nature of -isms.  Mostly about sexism and racism.

These are the two -isms that we talk about the most. Both of these -isms have been highly visible in the democratic primary.

I realized early on that I had a very personal, very emotional investment in Hillary Clinton. Politically speaking, I preferred others - but they were both white men. As a woman, I am consistently left out of phrases and writings (because “man” is not a gender-free word, and it does not include me). But I don’t talk about that much. I don’t know why, I just don’t. Maybe because I worry that if I voice concerns about gender and women being considered lesser, I’ll be considered self-serving or judgmental or…even worse…an overly-emotional female.  (Even as  I type this, I worry about these comments I can already see my readers’ fingers typing…)

Sigh.

So I don’t talk about gender much. And I didn’t even talk about gender and Clinton very much, even as it was clear that the media approached her campaign very differently than the mens’ campaigns.

Racism and sexism are insidious in America.  And I’m tired of it.  If president, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama would do good things.  If president, both would make substantial in-roads against the inherent sexism or racism in America.  And that would be a good thing either way.

But I’m still deeply saddened that my two young daughters won’t grow up seeing a woman leading their country.

Gender is such a malleable concept.  And it can be difficult for people who are entrenched in the general understanding of gender to understand the variances.

I spoke with  my friend Sarah Dopp here some months ago, but I’m not sure I mentioned her website Genderfork, which explores androgyny and gender variance through artistic photography.

I was recently teaching a sex ed class for middle schoolers, and one of the boys was looking at two pictures of an effeminate man from the book Naked New York by Greg Friedler.  In the first picture the man is fully clothed, and the second one he is fully naked.  The boy was grappling with gender and sexual orientation, and confused by the difference between the two.

He said something along these lines: “I can see from this first picture that he is a transsexual, but then I’m confused by this second picture.  He’s clearly gay from the waist up, but then straight from the waist down.  Can you explain this to me?”

Happily, the explanation was much easier to explain than the boy’s erratic guess. (The pictured man was somewhat androgynous, and that we could make no guesses or assumptions about his sexual orientation.)

I have just started a session of my class for parents, and one of the topics that the parents said they wanted to be sure and cover was the difference between transgender and transsexual and how those two topics relate to the gay-straight continuum.

So I’ve been thinking about gender here and there over the past several months.

Then I ran across an article in the New York Times published today called Albanian Custom Fades -  Woman as Family Man.  In extremely patriarchal Albania, if the patriarch of the family died with no male heirs, a virgin woman in the family could take a vow of virginity, give up marriage, sex, and children, and become culturally a man.  Wow!

However, as women have gained rights in Albania, it is no longer problematic for a household to be without a patriarch, and so the custom has died out.  The women quoted in the article seemed basically happy with their lives as men, which they had both sworn to around age 20.  They felt they had more options, more freedom when they were young women living as men, and they had more respect now that they are old women living as men.  One woman said she might not have made the choice she did if women had had more options when she was young.

The article is sure to state that this tradition had nothing to do with being a lesbian.   But I wonder what it has to do with gender.  How much of young, virgin, Albanian women changing genders was based in need of the family, and how much was based in gender identity?  In any event, the Times article is highly interesting and has some great pictures.  It is well worth a read.

(Oh, and we’ll be talking about gender and homosexuality in the third parent class, by the way.)