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Notes -
The ‘Kathoey’ or Ladyboy designation is a more honest way of categorizing both very effeminate / camp gay men and most ‘straight’, feminine transwomen (HSTS in Blanchardian typology).
Transwomen of a kind are obviously very common. I understand there is still some social discrimination, but probably 70% of Sephora sales assistants in Thailand are ladyboys/transwomen/kathoey/your preferred term here. This is even more common than in Seattle, which I wrote about previously. In my local Sephoras (London Westfield - Shepherd’s Bush NOT Stratford, please - and Soho on Broadway I guess) there are some transwomen and a large number of very feminine, makeup wearing gay men, but something about the experience in Thailand just underscored to me how similar the two are.
It reminded me of a pioneering British local TV documentary I’d written about before, produced in the 1980s about gay life in London in the 1930s. One of the things the men make very clear is that the gay community, such as it was at the time, consisted entirely of camp, effeminate men who were to the man, in terms of sexual role, bottoms. Often they described each other, semi-ironically, with female pronouns or roles (queen etc) which are still used by many camp gay men today. The tops they had sex with were not considered part of this community. In a very real sense, they were not considered gay at all, even and perhaps most clearly by the men they were having sex with.
This wasn’t a legal distinction - a ‘top’ was still committing a crime at the time under British law in having sex with another man, and would flee the night club in the event of a police raid all the same - but it was a clear social one. The femme men themselves didn’t have sex with each other (this is, at least, implied in the documentary), only with the ‘straight’ or ‘topping’ men whom they solicited in clubs, parks, outside barracks and so on. More broadly, the sexual and communal landscape the men discuss seems to be by far the most common way in which human societies have historically understood effeminate or camp males who are primarily sexually attracted to other men. The ladyboys don’t have sex with each other for the same reason that the gay ‘queens’ of 1930 London didn’t. And then men who have sex with ladyboys - or who had sex with those men in the thirties - aren’t or weren’t gay in the same way that they were. That isn’t to say they’re straight, or not bisexual, or not anything else, but it’s clearly not the same thing. The modern Western gay identity, in which tops and bottoms (and indeed lesbians and gay men) are grouped together is essentially a consequence of the civil rights movement and AIDS crisis; it is ahistorical and unusual compared to all historical treatment of non-mainstream forms of gender and sexual identity.
Blanchard’s key contribution to the understanding of transsexualism was that he acknowledged - based on his own practice - that homosexual transsexuals or HSTS and autogynephilic transsexuals or AGP constituted two clearly defined, vastly different populations of males who identified with womanhood or female-ness. HSTS fundamentally existed along the spectrum of camp male femininity, expressed both sexually and generally. As I understand it, the gay man at Sephora who wears a skirt, a full face of makeup and speaks in a camp, exaggerated feminine voice is - even if he is not on hormones - considered a kathoey in Thailand. And this makes sense - camp femme gay men who are sexually submissive, may wear drag etc and HSTS transwomen are often divided solely by the extent to which they are committed to presenting as female (that commitment ultimately expressed in medical intervention), and nothing else in terms of dress, presentation, sexual preference, interests and so on.
The reason why Blanchard is controversial is not his categorisation of HSTS, of course, but its inverse. The non-HSTS, the top-who-transitions, the man (often in Blanchard’s own experience) who decides after 30+ years of normal heterosexual life, marriage, children, relationships with only women etc, that he is actually a woman, is not part of this long continuity of effeminate homosexual males. He is something different, something new, something comparatively unusual. He is a product, it seems to me at least, of modernity. In naming the autogynephilic transsexual man, Blanchard acknowledged a sexual identity largely divorced from sexuality (consider that many if not most AGP are attracted to women at least before heroic doses of female hormones, meaning their sexual identity is not a key part of their transition). The AGP male is closer to the archetypal modern fetishist (I won’t name examples because inevitably that will devolve into a pointless argument), except that the object of his attraction is inverted. His motivations for womanhood are completely different to those of the HSTS, but our understanding of trans identity doesn’t allow us to acknowledge this essential difference.
If an argument one occasionally hears about clearly differentiating HSTS and AGP is that it is impossible to tell the difference, I think the Thai example is a good counterargument. Perhaps someone else can correct me if I’m wrong, but I find it hard to believe that these transwomen are particularly interested in lesbian relationships with ciswomen. They are, of course, interested in relationships with men, with males, because they are gay males, but that is about it. They have their own bathrooms (at least in some Thai malls and bars I saw clear male, female and other (with the gender icons overlapping) bathrooms, which seemed - above all else - reasonable.
I agree with the distinction, I disagree that it's new, but the expression technologically is.
Human sexuality is pretty broad and subject to a lot of social context. In many societies today, homosexual contact isn't considered gay for the top. This is historically the case, from ancient persia and greece on to modern afghanistan. There is a typology of feminine gay men, but there is also a typology of hyper-masculine bisexual men. The modern agp phenomenon is just the latter run through modern technology, legal codes, academic cant and social hysteria. Several thousand years ago, olympic athletes and professional soldiers who liked a bit of dude wouldn't pretend to be chicks, they'd just join the Sacred Band or whatever. Le Monsieur had special armor made so he could assault cities in a dress.
The only thing that's new is the religious and legal aspects of the metaphysical claims made by these dudes.
? My understanding is that the lumberjack-type gay men, while outnumbered, are not the same thing as AGP transgenders.
There's several takes on what exactly AGP are, but the lumberjack-type bearded gays are not one of them. I'm personally partial to the idea that they're mostly newish, a product of endocrine disruptors, and historical examples of AGP like Elegabalus are severe mental illness, with things like the hijras and other third genders being something totally different. But there's another school of thought which merges the phenomena.
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