“Can anyone tell me the date when Sonya Lyudin died?” Jones wants to know.
“Twelfth December 1997, during the night, so I suppose it could have been the thirteenth,” Iamskoy says. “Now get out, please.”
In the back of the car again, Jones says: “Warren was in Thailand between December 5 and 15, 1997. I forgot to tell you I checked his dates.”
On the way back to the Pattaya beachfront we pick up the Monitor, who is waiting outside the shop with his new PlayStation 2 under his arm. We set him up with some fried chicken and more sausages from a stall and join the traffic jams for the trip back to Krung Thep. While the Monitor is munching away Jones does it again with her hand on mine, which is resting on the seat.
“Don’t you think it’s time you told me about that hospital? Vikorn told Rosen you went there and asked Rosen to ask me to find out why. I’m being straight here. Those are my orders.”
I look at her. I wonder if she’s ready for this. I draw a breath and say okay. While I’m telling her I’m replaying the visit in my own mind.
41
No one was ever in any doubt about how Charmabutra Hospital acquired the capital to buy that fine twenty-story complex and all the state-of-the-art medical equipment it stores, even though its main product never appears on the glossy brochure.
“What is a transsexual?” Dr. Surichai asked me, raising his arms and hunching his shoulders. “Opinions differ, even in the medical profession. Especially in the medical profession. Is she a fully functioning human being who has finally achieved the gender identity which should have been hers at birth, or a freak, a medieval eunuch pumped full of estrogen?” Dr. Surichai placed a forefinger across his lips as if he were considering the question. His face brightened. “Some shrinks think my patients are all psycho. To them there’s no such thing as a woman born in a man’s body. They think what I do is criminal.” With a brilliant smile: “Or ought to be.”
“What is your opinion?”
A frown. “My opinion is that the whole issue is complex beyond anyone’s capacity. As you would imagine, I’ve thought about it a lot. You have to start with the question: What is gender? There’s anatomical gender: breasts, vagina, womb, ovaries, penis, testicles. Then there is chromosomal gender, which is as fundamental as you can go. Here you’re talking about the nuclear building blocks of the body, but the outcome of chromosomal analysis is not without ambiguity and doesn’t necessarily conform to the anatomy. You can have a chromosomal male with a woman’s genitals, in other words. At the end of the day, the chromosomal approach is only really used in tests for professional sportsmen and -women-you have to have some criterion to decide if your champ is top of the men’s league or the women’s. Then there’s hormonal sex, which is purely a matter of chemistry and can be changed simply by taking a few drugs. And there’s psychological sex. In other words, what gender do you feel yourself to be? How do you respond to the world, as a man or a woman? The big question is, what comes first? For most of us, it’s never an issue, we conveniently experience ourselves as being the gender of our bodies. But supposing you don’t? Supposing you have a nicely functioning, full-size penis, and spend your waking life believing yourself to be a woman in the wrong body? This is not a new phenomenon, there are records from ancient times, especially in Asia, of people who were basically transsexual in an age without the technology to make the change. The only difference today is that we have developed the technology. All I do is to adapt the body, in such a case.”
“What do you do exactly?”
“I cut off their cocks and balls. It’s called vaginoplasty, meaning to make a vagina. I use the skin inversion technique. Basically, we skin the penis-deglove it-invert it and sew it into the vaginal cavity. All men have a vaginal cavity, by the way. We open it, line it with the skin of the penis, use the leftover skin to mold a mucosal flap for the clitoris, even give the little darling a hood and Bob’s your uncle. Well, not quite, but that’s the basics. There’s a lot of preparatory work, mostly involving hormone injections and psychiatric tests.”
“Tell me about the tests.”
“Well, like I say, there are psychiatrists who just don’t buy the whole ‘woman in a man’s body’ argument, but they’re considered square. The profile of a true transsexual is really pretty simple. The perception of being the wrong gender starts amazingly young-between the ages of three and five. The need, interestingly, seems not to be sexual. A lot of transsexuals are not interested in sex at all. In the M2F-sorry, male to female-category, which is the only one that really matters at the moment, the desire is simply to be accepted as a normal woman, which is almost perverse, because there is nothing more challenging to normal identities than a transsexual. They are the true revolutionaries of our time, the ones who make even gender a flexible proposition.
“It’s quite sweet really. A gay queen who cross-dresses goes to pubs and clubs to show off-he’s really simply a showman, an extrovert. But a true transsexual cross-dresses and takes the dog for a walk on his own-he really feels more at home in women’s clothes and does all his ordinary things in them. In his dreams he is a heterosexual female, and by the time he comes to me he will do anything-absolutely anything-to live inside the body of a woman. Since these men are often husbands and fathers, the whole thing can mean giving up his kids as well as everything else he’s made of his life as a man.”
“It doesn’t happen the other way-women who think they should be men?”
“Sure, but up to now the operation is much more complex. It’s really quite easy to make an artificial vagina out of a cock, almost impossible to make a fully functioning penis. Generally F2M is pretty messy at present. I have no doubt that once we learn how to produce a full-powered dick and stick it on, they’ll be lining up in the street. This is the age of dissatisfaction after all. Everyone wants to be something they’re not.”
The doctor didn’t look as if he’d ever wanted to be anyone else. He was slightly plump, in his forties, but what impressed most was the golden glow that seemed to emanate, a man for whom poverty was not even a concept. When he spoke of his work his Thai was interspersed with Western medical terms and often American slang as well; sometimes he broke entirely into English, once he saw that I understood.
“And in this case, did she/he satisfy all the requirements?”
An almost imperceptible hesitation. “Of course.” A wave of the hand. “He was shemale when he came to us.”
“Shemale?”
“A horribly trendy-sounding word, I know. We’ve taken to using it, since everyone on the street knows what it means. Basically, a shemale is a man who has taken all the hormone treatment, started to develop breasts, but has no present intention of following through with the operation. The hormones are there to give the appearance of femininity and to make him feel feminine, but he retains his sexual organs for the purpose of orgasm. Naturally, in a homosexual relationship he would tend to take the passive role.”
“And your patient-Fatima-she was in this intermediate condition when she came to you?”