All their World’s a Stage: Transfeminine Experience in Rural Thailand
Jesus Christ, butchery was never so funny.
Every morning, at 7.45, the school would convene in the assembly hall. Rows of students sat in wilted lotus positions on the ground. They stared at their phones in a daze or gabbed with friends. Their teachers walked around with Gestapo airs, glaring at them. Their sticks promised lethal prods to anyone whose posture was wanting.
At 8am, in a surge of choreography, we all rose as one to stare at the blue awning of the Northeastern sky. Its banks of bushy clouds like the unlandscaped eyebrows of a heavenly senate. The place felt awash with devotion. The Thai peeps were getting ready to celebrate their nationality. It was a moment of pause to reflect on things. I could feel the piranha snap of my fears flickering up inside me. Dread had roused me hours earlier, well before my alarm went off. I’d put the duvet over my head in response. My world was falling apart and I couldn’t stop it. I blundered on.
The school band launched into a dog rough rendition of the Thai National Anthem. It had all the elan of two cats fucking. The first time we beheld such a performance me and my friends, Ashley and Sarah, couldn’t help stifling guffaws. It was like a fart during the rosary. We clung to our outward displays of solemnity but we shook with laughter regardless. Our eyes streamed, our faces contorted, our viscera in spasms of mirth. A great way to start the day. Things aren’t as bleak as all that if you can still belly laugh.
I was teaching at a school in a place called Prathai, a one elephant town in Northeast Thailand. It had all the allure of a shantytown at the lip of a vast jungle. I’d left Beijing to come here. Left to my own devices I’d walked away from one of the most happening cities on the planet. To set up shop in yet another rural shithole. This was a sleight of hand I couldn’t resist performing. It was a part of my programming. My wits scattered from all the boozing but my old tricks were as keen as ever. I was a well-oiled Fuck-up machine.
The Nakon Ratchasima region reminded me of West Cork. The landscape over-relied on fields and sky. Both stretched as far as the eye could take. The tropical weather salsified the place. The exotic flora and fauna were delirious with their alien energies. Iguanas rested in the rafters of my front porch. Geckos zipped out of my underwear drawer of a morning. Dogs prowled the area like rabid sentries. In a fog of fleas and mange, they blazed with hatred of me. If I was to come a cropper, it was going to be here. That much was obvious to me. I felt as exposed as a worm at the end of a hook.
Despite my Independence developing a palsy, I didn’t regret my move from China to Thailand. Prathai, with all its agrarian sass, was one of the most radical places I had ever experienced. It was the nearest I had got to living in the forest from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Being Trans or Gay was acceptable in that neck of the woods. I was teaching English to teenagers at the local school but it was I who got a masterclass in Being.
My classes teemed with Trans girls. Some were as young as 12. I’d see them flit through the halls with a coterie of gal pals and they held court with a giddy regality. Their spirits were as high as their voices. They soared in their impenetrable language, berserk with fabulosity. They still wore boy’s uniforms but their breasts and make-up told a different story.
They fascinated me.
I was envious.
They bemused me in the way they’d look at me. They’d stop mid “bye bitch” hand gestures to study me. They did so with kindness. Their smiles were warm and knowing. Fuck what the scribes say. Wisdom can be found in youth.
English classes were forever cancelled due to more important fare like inter-school soccer tournaments or science fairs. I’d set up the classroom and no one would turn up. I was more relieved than anything else. Thai students were lazy lumps. Their apathies were puncture-proof despite my charm offensive. It ground me down.
It happened again one morning and with nothing else to do, I took a stroll over to the hall to check on what was happening.
Oh sure, major activity. The place was abuzz. I looked at it all in a haze, my mind on other things and I drifted through it all like tumbleweed. I saw one of my students over in the corner in a flame-red sari and a silver top. Their face sported maquillage that could have graced the cover of Vogue. The conservative buzz cut screamed thirteen-year-old boy but the rest of her jib was ready for Paris. I stood in a corner and watched this discourse on exoticism.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
A Transgender Beauty pageant. It was fully endorsed by the school and had attracted a huge audience that bayed for glamour.
Another boy I knew was so trans he was like a human stereopticon.
A male and female image superimposed on one another and lit up with the transgender color code. He was tiny and ballsy and in a constant glitter fever. We’d stage mock Voguing battles in the hallways on seeing each other. A crowd would gather to watch us make a fool of ourselves in style. After all the cartoon-cunt posturing we’d go our own ways and her parting smile was beautiful. Its energy felt like a badge of sisterhood aimed at me. I belonged somewhere after all.
Girlfriend dressed herself up to the nines today. Transfigured in a long sleek brown wig, diaphanous blouse and platform heels. The spirited runt who ruled the hallways with an imperious form of ADHD was now graceful and demure. She had the poise of the self-possessed. All the girls made passing a spiritual experience. I felt knurled and scorched by comparison. They didn’t need a loch’s worth of beer for the courage to put on their hotpants.
Like I did.
Each contestant sashayed to the microphone, buoyed by their own fierceness and none of them over 15.
Jesus, what I would have given to have had some of that when I was their age.
I was that boy-girl too at one point and it had gone against me.
Toxic masculinity was the norm where I came from. You don’t fit in that bracket, you were ludicrous.
I was happy for those girls. The mistake nature had made in making them male was no biggie. They had friends and family to support and cheer them on. They revelled in their hyper femininity, sizzling Lady Marmalades one and all. It was so beautiful all I could do was feel grateful that they had that. They’d never know what it was like to be a freak.
Meanwhile, Muggins here stayed quiet in her corner. Her tenuous ruse of being male worn like a cancer shop pashmina. Had she but known it, her jig was up. It was time to take centre stage but she was drawing a blank. She looked forward to the evening. A lash of beer and a walk to town in her favorite hotpants. Then the great nothingness of her night could swallow her whole. Hung, drawn and quartered by her own dysphoria.
