WHY THE WORRY AT SUANKULARB?

No news last week from the LGBT community was bigger than the story about Suankularb Wittayalai School transferring a transgender intern because it felt her personality was somehow not “proper”.

Suankularb has been nationally famous as a leading school for boys since I was a child. When I was at university I had many katoey friends from there, and of course they were keen to express their identity since they’d been kept “behind the fence” at Suankularb.

I really don’t understand what the school’s director and spokesman meant when they were quoted using the word “proper”. It’s not as though they think all their students are straight. 

Everyone knows the school has many transgender students, although its rules prohibit cross-dressing. Most of these kids wait until after school before they don makeup, but some wear light powder and lip-gloss in class. My friends said they saved their cross-dressing for the weekends, and I’m sure that’s still the case today. 

So how can the school officials say the transgender intern didn’t fit in? She might not have been an ideal fit for the straight boys who make up the majority of students, but what about the katoey students? 

One supposes that the officials worried that the boys would be so impressed by their intern teacher that they might want to “turn into katoey” themselves. To this ancient nonsense I can only say that I have straight parents, and yet knew I was gay in childhood. In primary school and my first years of secondary I never had a class with a gay or transgender teacher, and yet I remained gay. 

I’ve always been surrounded by straight people, but I have never desired to be like them.

Perhaps the officials at Suankularb imagined that the intern might have inspired their transgender students to want gender-changing surgery too. However, I can assure them 100 per cent that those kids already wanted surgery the first time they caught sight of a Miss Tiffany pageant contestant.

I see no reason why the intern would not fit in at the school. All I can see, instead, is the societal dysfunction being encouraged by this leading school as it reinforces the myth that heterosexuality is the only normalcy and everything else is improper. Many members of the Thai elite attended this school and have gone on to leading roles in a patriarchy that embraces hetero-sexism. 

The intern was transferred out and opted not to make an issue of the matter, but it’s important that we avoid compromising our beliefs and endangering our rights. This is just one more case of inequality and lack of understanding, not just at the school but throughout society. 

If we consent to allow this school to continue educating students in the midst of such dehumanising concepts, it’s like willingly letting ourselves be raped by the heterosexual norm.