An interesting story discusses how educators in Bankok, Thailand have introduced a “transvestite toilet” for transvestite high school students. Despite the conservative character of the country, the Thais have a great deal of tolerance and acceptance for transgender students, which makes up a significant number of students at the Kampang school.
The unisex restroom is designated by a human figure split in half — part man in blue and part woman in red with the words “Transvestite Toilet.” More than 200 of the school’s 2,600 students consider themselves transgender.
Thai colleges have also accommodates transgender students. A 1,500-student technical college in the northern province of Chiang Mai set up a “Pink Lotus Bathroom” for its 15 transvestite students in 2003.
It should be pointed out that neither Thai or Western culture tolerates transgender individual of the other kind, i.e. Female to Male. In other words you can step “down” from the privileged position of being a “man”, but you can’t step “up” from being a “woman”. In fact I would argue that in any sexual-political system that privileges the penetrator over the penetratee is always by definition anti-woman?
The Ancient Athenian Greek — considered the architects of Western Democratic culture — had the same distinction between passive and active homosexuals as modern Thai. In that society which used drama to reinforce its sexual norms, men played the role of female characters who were almost always depicted as threats to society that need to be suppressed. So in Aristophanes’ comedies mocking women, you have men running around in costumes with huge phalloi (erect penises) playing the male characters and men effectively in drag representing oversexed, immoral and drunken women. Women weren’t even aloud to see these productions. Meanwhile in the loft genre of tragedy, men play the roles of famous heroines who are represented as simultaneous very intelligent and murderous (Medea and Clytemnestra) or stupid and sexually deviant (Phaedra and Jocasta). This is to be expected in any culture where a woman is treated as chattel. In modern development in the West (no doubt due to Christianity) is that homophobia is now based on equating homosexuality of both varieties (passive and active) with being womanish, i.e. deprived of being a man. Presumably this is because there is an assumption that the equality between the lovers means both have to “play the woman’s” role at some point. We should not pat ourselves on the back hypocritically thinking that we live in a society that is not anti-woman. Homophobia is just a symptom of this larger disease. Until women in the West truly have both the equal rights and the same privileges as men there will always be this kind of discrimination. We need to concentrate on getting rid of the beam in our own eye.
dundar:
That is an assertion worthy of some thought.
Not quite sure it is tolerance just another form of male dominance:
This strange phenomenon – largely unknown in the West, where active and passive homosexuals are generally equally disparaged – suggests that the predominant pattern of male sexuality in Thailand is not so much anti-homosexual as anti-woman, in the sense that dominant male sexuality is implicitly regarded as being more valid than female sexuality. Consequently, it may be that kathoey – passive male transvestites – suffer less opprobrium from being homosexual than from their ascribed feminine status.
In other words, homosexuality, like heterosexuality, is still basically seen as a “man” sexually dominating a “woman”, albeit a surrogate female or “woman of the second type”. Of course, what “women of the first type” – that is, the real thing – think of this interpretation is another matter – but it should at least give pause for serious thought.
http://www.cpamedia.com/culture/thailand_kathoey/