Posts tagged Thailand
Flying Ladyboys
Feb 4th
The new Thai airline P.C. Air isn’t just committed to getting you to where you need to be safely and on time. It also wants to make sure the flight attendants walking down the aisle represent the country’s trans community. The airline set a quota to ensure it would have trans staffers among its 30 new hires, and the company says it met its goal: three trans women are now part of the crew, alongside 17 cis-women and 10 men. That’s a 10 percent trans staff! Passengers have the best chance of recognizing Thanyarat "Film" Jiraphatpakorn (pictured), 23, winner of 2007′s trans beauty pageant Miss Tiffany. P.C. Air has purposefully been reaching out to trans job applicants, setting up shop in a Bangkok mall and encouraging members of the "third sex" to apply. Not that everybody will be so accommodating: So that MTF trans employees have fewer problems going through immigration, their name tags will be adorned with the "third sex" branding, because legally they are still considered men. More at The Telegraph. [via Queerty]
0Transsexual Toilet
Jul 30th
With its spacious, tree-lined grounds and slightly threadbare classrooms, there is nothing obviously unusual about the Kampang Secondary School. It is situated in Thailand’s impoverished north-east, and most of the pupils are the children of farmers. Every morning at 8 they all gather outside to sing the national anthem and watch the flag being raised. Then they have a chance to use the toilets, before heading off the first classes of the day. Kampang is proud of its toilets. Spotless, and surrounded by flowering tropical plants, they have won national awards for cleanliness. But there is something else about them too. Between the girls’ toilet and the boys’, there is one signposted with a half-man, half-woman figure. This is the transsexual toilet, and outside, in front of the mirrors, some decidedly girly-looking teenage boys preen their hair and apply face cream.
Whole article, video & photos [Found by Rimmer, thanks]
My first thought about that was “wow, that’s good, we won’t see that in western countries”. But there are some open questions… Isn’t the definition of transsexual that someone is male but born in a female body or vice versa? So it would be more consistent if these boys use the girls’ toilet. If I would see a sign like this on a toilet I would suppose it’s for both genders (that would be really progressive and cool) or for intersexuals but not for transgenders because transgender don’t mean you can’t decide or something but you have just the wrong body. But maybe they just don’t care so much about definitions. I just wonder what the female-to-male transgenders are supposed to do!?
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