I’m not sure if you are familiar with this term, but you definitely will after a visit to Thailand. Despite the huge ethical controversy it raises, the “shemale culture” is the cornerstone of Thailand’s tourist industry. Many tourists travel all the way from Europe only hoping to have a look at real shemale.
In Thailand, there is a whole system to produce shemales, who have full male bodies yet also female breasts. Shemales are from poor families that hope to make more money by turning their boys into shemale performers. There are special schools in Thailand that turn two-to three-year-old boys into shemales, and then train these shemales on their performing skills.
I’m appalled at the fact that such derogatory practice goes on without being banned from outside pressure. I’m also surprised by the fact that millions of tourists watch shemale performances and leave, getting entertained without a sense of guilty. Yes, the shemale industry is a commercial chain with managers leading their transsexual performers and putting on shows. However, thi s doesn’t justify people’s watching them for their own good feeling.
Almost all shemales lead a poignant life. Born as boys, they are raised as if they are girls. They are trained to dress, act, speak like girls. Meanwhile they take female hormone estrogen to stop the development of male genitalia and turn the metabolism towards the female side. After ten years, they look just like women with smaller muscle, thinner waist, larger breasts and extremely small genetalia. Because there are so many of them in Thailand, they are not discriminated in society, however, that doesn’t mean they are respected either. They just bear this “in-between” identity until they die in their forties or fifties, which is the life expectancy for shemales.
As the moral value of the whole world advances, one could only hope that the misconduct of turning boys into shemales can be banned.
2 comments:
I was very intrigued and disgusted by this article. I have never heard about “shemales” as a tourist attraction. After reading Peiwen’s piece, I found myself curious as to what psychological effects are tied to being raised as a female while born a male. Personally, I have two brothers and grew up in a very male dominated environment. I credit love of sports and videogames to my household situation. My older brother often dominated the spotlight. For the first years of my life, I was only exposed to Power Rangers and Ninja Turtles. Everything from Pokemon to Mortal Combat (a show about fighting) sparked my interest. My mother, treating my brothers and I as equal, would often end up treating me as if I was boy. For example, my older brother Mike and I were on the same all male soccer team simply because of convenience. I was very interested to read an article about this concept taken to the extreme.
While I was shaped by my masculine environment in a great way, obviously being raised as a “shemale” would have damaging mental effects. I found numerous transgender blogs and support sites. These sites are the closest insight I could locate. One crucial difference to note is that transgender people make their own choice. “Shemales” in places like Thailand are choose by their families and exploited heavy for money.
The key term in the transgender material that I found was identity. These people struggle with settling the conflict between their physical sex and their gender identity. Because of this loss of self, transgender people often slip into suicide or depression. Their desire to be respected and accepted in the world for who they truly are can result in intense stress. Pair with a lack of social support, transgender people are highly vulnerable to anxiety about the uncertainty of their lives. I was disappointed with the lack of information that I could find on the particular idea of “Shemales”. Hopefully, this exploitation will soon be relieved.
She-males certainly aren’t the average tourist attraction—in the United States at least. The she-male culture in Thailand is shocking, not so much because of the transformation of males into females, but more because of the idea that families are pressuring boys as young as two to three years old to enter into this less than respectable field in order to have a steady flow of income.
If these young boys are voluntarily undergoing estrogen doses and training to dress, speak, and act like females, then there would be no issue of ethics involved. But their families’ economic situations have created unjust pressure on them, so that even if they prefer to remain males, they eventually relent and agree to gender transformation because of their respect and love for their families to the extent that they will compromise their entire identities for their families’ well-being.
How can members of society just sit on the sidelines as passive observers, some of us even encouraging this she-male culture when we visit Thailand? How can we not speak out against this atrocity when young boys, without any inkling of what they’re getting into, only aware of the fact that they’re making an important contribution to their families’ welfare and feeling grown-up as a result, are relinquishing the rest of their lives to be people who they don’t want to be? No one has the right to dictate the rest of these boys’ lives. How can any parent put his or her son through a lifelong self-conflict, in which his or her son will experience uncertainty with regards to his true identity and purpose in life? The she-male culture is a testament to the decline in society’s morals and values.
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