‘Ladyboy’ Interviews Are Going Viral on TikTok

A year ago, Zugus went viral.

In a 30-second TikTok, she’s interviewed in the streets of Bangkok by a travel streamer called jaystreazy. After the host compliments her beauty, Zugus reveals she’s a “ladyboy”. The host responds in disbelief, and the two have a back-and-forth as he struggles to wrap his head around this fact. He captions the video “Conflicted…” and the comments range from men breaking down the elements of her appearance that give away her transness to people expressing confusion at their own attraction.

Jay uploads a different street interview on his account almost every day, but the ones concerning trans women are by far the most popular. Zugus’ clip has 82 million views. In another of his videos with 5 million views, a fellow male tourist states that “the Thai girls are nice, but the ladyboys are nicer”, and 2 million people have watched a third young man encouraging people to be careful about the Thai ladies. By contrast, a wasabi taste test video he recently posted has 60k views and only two comments.

Jay isn’t the only tourist making popular content about Thai trans women. Another user, the self-proclaimed ‘controversy king’ Trav J Barnett, interviews a tourist on his experience being ‘tricked’ during his holiday – the interviewee mentions how beautiful ladyboys are but says that, after kissing a trans woman (which he refers to as ‘it’), he couldn’t sleep for days.

British interviewer Taylor Jake Budd – also the host for Ace Working Holidays, a company providing working holidays across the globe to young British people – encourages a man on a Thai beach to share something his mum doesn’t know. After a moment of hesitation, he confesses he’s unknowingly received a blowjob from a ladyboy. The two laugh it off, with the interviewee adamant about making sure we know how fit she was.

The list goes on.

The term “ladyboy” – and the casualness with which these men use it – is contentious. Roughly translated from the Thai “kathoey”, which refers to trans women and effeminate gay men, the term emerged during the Vietnam War from American army men meeting trans women for the first time whilst on Rest & Recuperation breaks on Thai beaches. In the West, for most, it tends to now hold a pejorative connotation due to its association with pornography. Across the Southeast Asian region, the term seems to have been reclaimed by trans women – most specifically in their interactions with foreigners.

As the number of tourists and remote workers in Thailand edges back to pre-pandemic times, visitors show off their encounters with local trans women – whether in a gogo bar or as an escort – as attractive elements of their trip in the same vein as a ferry boat ride. “In Thailand, it seems like there’s an expectation that tourists are going to have completely exceptional experiences,” says Ben Murtagh, Southeast Asian Studies professor at SOAS, University of London, “And you need to embrace that ‘exceptional’ to go beyond the mundanity of the average tourist experience. And maybe the encounter with trans people is evidence of having truly discovered the exotic.”

Tourists treating an experience with a ladyboy as a box to be ticked on a lad’s holiday to-do list contributes to a misconception of Thailand as this liberal paradise where everything goes, but that isn’t necessarily reflected in the conditions of actual trans people in the country.

“LGBTQ+ identities are only conditionally accepted in Thailand,” says Best Chitsanupong, founder of the LGBTQ+ youth community organisation Young Pride Club. She says the Thai government has historically capitalised on LGBTQ+ people – primarily through the entertainment industry – without providing welfare or protection. In 2015 the country introduced the Gender Equality Act, which aims to protect Thai transgender people from discrimination, but a 2021 report highlighted how insufficiently it’s been put into practice, and trans people’s gender identity still isn’t legally recognised.

To complicate things further, sex work remains criminalised: “The burden is all on the sex worker,” says Best. “If you’re exploited on the job, for example, if your income is deducted because you don’t look good enough on the day, it can’t be investigated or protected. Criminalisation also impacts corruption: sex workers have to give money to the police to maintain their businesses, and if they don’t, they’re fined or put in jail.”

This lack of protection from local authorities works in tandem with objectifying, discriminatory attitudes promoted by tourists. A common argument that’s made in those videos and echoed in the comments is how deceitful these women are. “Starting to scare, if I didn’t listen to the voice I wouldn’t know,” says a user on one of the videos. “I’m never getting drunk in Thailand,” says another.

“It’s an Orientalist trope,” Murtagh tells VICE, “that one of the dangers of Southeast Asia is that you can’t even trust gender. It involves deceit in some way. The male tourist gets caught up in something they don’t realise and feels cheated somehow. But something is alluring or titillating about it nonetheless.” And this trope surrounding deception has real-life consequences. Joseph Pemberton, a US marine, murdered Filipina trans woman Jennifer Laude in 2015, his defence being he didn’t know she was trans. He was convicted but later pardoned and left the Philippines.

So the mocking in these TikToks and their comments is not innocuous, nor is the attitude behind them. What’s ultimately lacking is any portrayal of Asian trans women as real people, worthy of more than having their appearance dissected online or satisfying a Western man’s sexual fantasy.

In a 20-minute follow-up interview on Jay’s YouTube channel a year after her viral TikTok, Zugus expresses how she’s in a better financial status and shares her ambitions for her future. Though Jay’s fascination with her transness still dominates the conversation, she’s able to portray herself on her own terms in a personal, humorous and humane way – which is reflected in the comments, which show a lot more empathy towards her.

What’s apparent is that these encounters aren’t inherently detrimental to the women – Zugus, for instance, has used the video to her advantage – but the Western cultural context in which they exist often is. Instead of approaching Southeast Asian trans identities with knowledge-seeking curiosity, we’re seeing Western tourists apply a colonial lens to their trips, where personal gain trumps everything and any form of meaningful connection not even attempted.