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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.
What occasioned this reflection?
For what it's worth for me, I'm not wholly convinced of the Blanchard typology, if presented as something like a law of nature, but just extensionally I find it has the ring of truth. The two basic categories he lays out - I think of them, perhaps a bit crassly, as the more-gay-than-gay camp, and the heterosexual camp, that is, the one so obsessed with/attracted to women that they want to become one - can be roughly applied to trans women that I've known. It may not be wholly perfect, but it feels close enough that I hear Blanchard's descriptions and think, "Yeah, I've seen people like that" and "Oh, just like this other person I know".
I agree that it has the ring of truth. Where I think it collapses some is that:
Quillette did a series talking about, among other things, social contagion among boys. I agree that there's a lot of heavily sexualised, fetishised social contagion, but with younger boys there's also the anime-influenced variant, which, though sometimes about sex, is also sometimes a longing for a kind of 'soft' world full of coddling and gentleness.
I'm in this picture and I don't like it.
Never considered gender transition, though. I think my cohort was a bit too old for that. I'm also enough of a weirdo that I'm suspicious of putting myself in any category, even the weird ones, which I guess was protective.
I do increasingly notice it in these kinds of, for lack of a better term, autistic, socially inept, geek-intellectual kinds of spaces. That's a demographic that naturally tends to inhabit a kind of fantasy world of the imagination, and online it is easier and easier to disconnect from a sense of one's own physical body. Reinventing yourself as an imagined cute girl - pretending to be the thing you want - seems easy. I'd be lying if I said I didn't understand it, though it is a helpful reminder that, as FiveHourMarathon says and I've commented also, the grass always seems greener on the other side.
I think the answer is probably some combination of firstly male role models, affirmation of masculinity, or just implicitly communicating to these boys that a man is a good thing to be, and that manhood is possible, attractive, and in reach for them; and secondly, just getting out and touching grass. Getting off the computer and doing real, physical work in the world makes you more aware of your own body. Successfully doing things with your physical body feels great and is inherently affirming. Some level of fantasy is healthy, but the kind of obsessive, body-negating, self-fleeing fantasy that you get in these demographics is poison.
I think this is the "draw the rest of the owl" kind of problem.
Another issue is that a lot of people who grow up with these sorts of traits have trouble making friends, especially in youth. I think the cause of the kind of fantasy we're talking about is a disconnect from the social world as much as from the physical one, and atypical traits make that more difficult. Motion/body disconnect is often part of a syndrome with social phobia; I myself often have experienced a kind of hyper-body awareness in certain social situations that are particularly anxiety-provoking, where you kind of move manually and are dissociated from the normal coherence of your body, like when you consciously start to control your breathing -- as you are now, that I've mentioned it. That's common among people with social phobia.
I think masculinity is fundamentally a good thing, but I think there is a real tension between the broad male phenome -- the sum of all the ways in which men are like -- and various models of masculinity. A common underlying set of traits is hierarchical competition, or resource provision, or physical strength... but the issue is that many, if not most, of the ways we describe the social role of men are in some sense zero sum, and in such an environment there will be social defeat. IMO, a great deal of the extremely online stuff we see is caused by people who have suffered (or perceive themselves to have suffered) social defeat trying in some sense to construct a social hierarchy where they can win. See, for instance, NEETs playing competitive online games.
I think the main issue with any model of masculinity is that it's typically enforced in one of two ways: the carrot of women's attention, and the stick of men's violence. You can see that, for instance, in the military, where boot camps, strict regimentation, and obsessive hierarchicalism force men into a mold. In World War I, the British government ran a program allied with prominent suffragettes in which women gave unenlisted men white feathers in a shame ritual calling them cowards. I hold that one of the major reasons the USA became unable to run a successful conscription campaign for the Vietnam War is that the military lost the support of young women, who began rewarding rebels against the system with adulation for their courage. The same I think is true of gang violence in minority neighborhoods; men enforce compliance with guns, and, often, the women from these communities reward status in organized crime with attention. You get from men what men enforce and women reward.
So any model of masculinity and positive male role models have to have women and girls on board. The issue is that, in the West, it's not clear what women and girls are on board with, and in fact the dominant social mode of discussions of masculinity are to discuss its abberations and possibility for harm, or occasionally to praise men for doing things according to what women desire of them (and not praising them for being masculine on its own terms). The people who do talk about masculinity on its own terms are often selling their own inane fantasy, like the bodybuilder RAW MEAT influencers. The social inflection behind "man" as a category is incredibly negative; it's no wonder to me that some young men are going, "well, that's not me! Teehee!"
I don't think it's just about wanting to be with women, but I also think the kinds of men we're talking about place a high premium on being seen as fundamentally good by women; the "creep" designation, in a sense the white feather of the day, carries so much stigma precisely because "being a threat to women" is considered deeply wrong by both men and women writ large, for good reasons. But I think young men feel like there's no stable and broadly-recognized way to do this. Sometimes religious subcultures do a better job at this than the secular world -- I often noted when I spent time with the young Catholics group at my college that the men and women got along much better than those outside, and generally considered each other trustworthy and worthy of respect -- but it's not guaranteed, and in a world where the Church is optional as a social institution and increasingly at odds with secular assumptions, "just leaving" is an option that many people are going to take. As, obviously, transitioners tend to do.
The grass, of course, is never greener on the other side. I never struggled with gender identity issues -- clearly I'm a man, the idea of being a woman seems nebulous and foreign to me, and has no appeal. I know enough from having female friends that women are entangled in their own thorny world of backstabbing and status competition about which I'm not jealous. Even if someone could transition perfectly, magically, I don't think that men would find women's social world astounding or grand in the way they imagine.
Certainly if I think about the way I've encountered some of this, there's, albeit usually in inchoate form, a desperate attraction to or craving for the feminine, and a sense that the masculine is ugly, violent, repulsive, brutish, or otherwise undesirable. The confused, sensitive young boy knows that he does not want to be his image of 'a man', which is probably a heavily jock- or pop-culture-inspired vision of a brute, and that he is attracted to things that are soft, gentle, and female-coded. But he cannot exist in a predominantly female space as a man, because he has come to see masculinity as, by its mere existence, a kind of violence or degradation upon that space. He wants the innocent and feminine, but sees himself as something that cannot coexist with that. He probably also has a Scott-like terror of engaging with women, of expressing male heterosexual desire, and so on. His picture of femininity and of women's lives is highly idealised - he's not actually hanging out with or spending much time with girls, and therefore does not know what they are really like. But he knows the glittering facade, and he wants it.
The result is a drive to purge himself of masculine traits, to expurgate the taint by any means possible, in the hope that through reinventing himself (possibly with chemical or surgical assistance, at the higher end), he can get himself out of this cursed category, and enter the idealised female one. This is how I interpret some of the drama you sometimes get around women's spaces, or businesses or services for women - there's a kind of trans woman who needs to constantly press into those spaces, for the sake of constant affirmation that, yes, he really has left masculinity behind entirely. The deeper you are into the process of transition or feminisation, the more important it is that every last sign of acceptance be validated, every last scrap of the male be rooted out and denied.
There's a lot of personal variation in this, but I do thus see, in my experience, a kind of performative misandry that you sometimes get in toxic trans spaces. (This is, it's fair to say, entirely AGP as a phenomenon.) It doesn't always present very strongly - sometimes just in the form of casual jokes about how male things are gross - but sometimes it does a lot more. I usually try to be charitable, on the basis that someone who has spent years and a great deal of effort trying to appear less male is not going to be a big fan of male-looking things, and it doesn't need to mean any actual malice towards men, but I've come to think there's a bit more to it than that. Masculinity is the problem, in this world.
To me one of the ways around this or out of this has to be via promoting a positive model of masculinity, but there are a few issues here. Firstly, it can't be just a dudebro model, so to speak. These boys already know they don't like that. There have to be ways to be strongly masculine and capable that are nonetheless in some way sensitive, courteous, intellectual, compassionate, and so on. Those are good traits and they need to take on appealingly masculine forms. Secondly, it has to be approved of by women. Female approval does matter. Now this probably isn't as hard as it actually sounds, because most real women do like men, but remember that the boys in this position don't have much contact with actual women; and also the media is a very unhelpful distorting factor here. But regardless, it must be something that women like.
Unfortunately, put like that it's obvious what the failure-state is - it's feminist messaging about 'good men', the kind that feels corporate and sanitised and frankly just wussy. It's that Gillette ad that everyone hated. So perhaps to this we should add a third requirement: it should be something that men themselves like. It has to appeal to men. If it feels like being lectured by an HR lady, it won't have any traction.
Recently I read an essay by Oliver Traldi about the portrayal of masculinity, and female sexual desire, in films, and in particular about the role of the 'monster'. It's fair to say that the monster, the compelling, sexually charismatic brute, is something that the sensitive boy flees from. I cannot blame him for that; I don't want to be the monster either. But there is nonetheless something in many women that thrills to imagine just a bit of the monster. Just a bit. Is reconciling those desires the problem? That the attractive, desirable man is supposed to combine two impossible things, firstly the polite, obliging, non-threateningly capable man who does everything a woman wants, and secondly, the powerful, dominating, or ravishing man, who makes the woman feel like the object of this compellingly rough desire? I'm a bit skeptical here because I think it might be rolling together the diverse desires of many women together into a single uber-woman, and then acting confused when they turn out to be contradictory, but even so, I am very struck by his conclusion:
Maybe so. And if so, then I feel like what's going on with plenty of boys - certainly something that was going on with myself, though fortunately I never took the trans path (thank heavens I grew up before trans was a thing among teenagers!) - is that they struggle to find a way to unite their desire for the feminine with their identity as the masculine. Maybe they need a bit of what Eneasz Brodski talks about - liking and valuing the feminine, as the feminine, yet without seeking to become the feminine.
Maybe we need more honest-to-goodness complementarianism, that Robert-Jordan-esque understanding that the male and the female need each other, that they complete and enhance each other, and recognising and even loving that difference is the only way forward.
But maybe I'm just a cranky ageing Christian romantic. Who knows?
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