| Re: "Thai Fair Ladies: Alberta could take a lesson in same-sex tolerance from open-minded Thailand," by Ashifa Kassam, Travel (March 31 - April 6, 2005).
Please tell me this is an April Fool’s joke. Thailand is Alberta’s moral check? This is a country where child prostitution is an insistent and growing problem – a problem inflamed by the country’s relative tolerance for prostitution in general. If you were looking to make a case against the narrow-mindedness of Albertans, you certainly know how to alienate even the most moderate logic.
So you like lady-boys. Whatever, that’s your bag. But turning some article about such into a misguided chide on Alberta’s moral stance is truly incomplete and irresponsible.
You say this article is about same-sex relations and sexual diversity and Alberta’s struggle to embrace difference. But this is more of a Disney World version of reality in Thailand that ignores the enormous role the sex trade has on the culture and mentality – indeed, poverty provides the undercurrent for such an opportunistic climate.
I don’t think I’m wrong to see child prostitution and at least a portion of the lady-boy culture as part of the same mechanism. You did mention the stigma lady-boys still receive in Thai culture – a reason why they are relegated to the service industry, an industry you earlier lauded for providing abundant opportunities for lady-boys, such as beauty contests, cabarets, hair salons, restaurants, bars and hotels. But the service industries don’t end there. Was it a deliberate omission to not include prostitution? Was it a deliberate omission to never mention the children involved in this lifestyle as prostitutes? It’s an awfully bright picture you paint when you restrict the colours to the lightest hues.
It seems your aim was to highlight the charms of an accepting culture, but with a culture steeped in poverty and heavily dependent on the dollars of travellers – many of whom make the trip to dip into their own gross vices via the rampant opportunities – it seems that accepting is an inappropriate descriptor. We are talking about the collision of great poverty and cultural tolerance and foreign expectation and plain old opportunism – that collision is going to affect social thought, ideas about what is acceptable or not, and who participates or doesn’t.
By no means do I think Thailand is merely a house of prostitutes, perverts and opportunists. I know it’s beautiful, the people are beautiful, and I know travellers to Thailand are not all going for the romp. And I don’t think all lady-boys are such just to profit or survive off the sex trade, but it’s foolish to prop an argument for toleration on an example where abuse runs rampantly – and at a much faster pace, too. Tolerance should be based on understanding, not allowance, and not on a feeble, skewed view.
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