Book Review

Reviewed by Tracie O'Keefe

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Male Bodies, Women's Souls

Personal Narratives of Thailand's Transgendered Youth

by LeeRay Costa & Andrew Matzner
Published by the Haworth Press, New York, 2007
I.S.B.N.0789031143

This is an interesting book of some of Thailand's university students' experiences of being as sao braphet song or what is sometimes described by Westerners as katoey, or Thailand's Lady Boys. These first-person narratives are illuminating to Western ignorance of Thailand's gender constructs and how non-normative males with female type behaviours fit into Thai social, family and personal constructs.

The whole book is really structured like someone's postgraduate thesis and the stories themselves are not the main part of the book; instead its mass is taken up by the researchers' discourse around the stories. This, however, is forgivable since their ethnographic logic and exploration is handled with reasonable sensitivity and logic, even though it produces stories of university trans students whose middle-class views can at times obscure many of the realities that face sex and gender-variant males in Thai society.

Where the book makes research headway is that the stories show the linguistic differentiation between the identities of kathoey (queer), sao braphet song (boy with female soul) and gay (men-identified-men who sleep with men). These interpretations become fluid according to region, subjective interpretation and the shifting emergence of Thailand's gay liberation awareness. It seems that effeminate males or males who have less than macho identities make a space for themselves in this society as non-gay female-souled boys who generally expect to fall in love with heterosexual-type men.

These comments, however, are insufficient to cover the ideologies and pragmatics that accompany the semantic disclosure in these stories. The researchers wisely acknowledge the limitations of objectifications of researchers seeking to distil typology from cultural disclosures that are very different from those we can understand through the English language.

I do take issue with the researchers' broad use of the word "transgender" to describe these experiences which at times are plainly no such thing.

Since Thailand is ninety-five per cent Buddhist, there seem to be enormous pressures within the psyche of the storytellers not to disappoint their parents and to subjugate their own desires for female identities in order to conform.

Also there is the concept of karma to consider, with some of the storytellers saying that they may be kathoey for the bad deeds they had committed in their last life. What is also surprising is the sheer number of sao braphet song and one is left with the deep suspicion that if being gay was more acceptable, many of these ladyboys might embrace more male-identified identities, although I am aware that this might be an arrogant Western comment to make.

This book is for the seriously-minded sex and gender diversity student and a useful addition to an academic bookshelf. Its observations are closer to the anthropological works of Margaret Mead than the psychiatric works of Freud or even the endocrinological studies of Louis Gooren. What it is, however, is another nail in the coffin of solely pathologising the medical model of transsexualism.

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