It's OK to slip up sometimes
Ikea's television commercials usually make me laugh, including the latest, "Leum Ab" ("Forget to Be a Woman"). It has a transgender woman so surprised by store discounts that she forgets to speak and act like woman.
The Thai Transgender Alliance didn’t see the humour in it, though, and accused Ikea of trampling on human rights, earning an apology from the furniture chain.
Surprisingly, my katoey friends didn’t take it that seriously.
No one wants to be derided, but we routinely laugh at other people’s foolishness. My katoey friends want to be women and they’ll do anything to be more feminine, but eventually they all realise they just weren’t born female. No matter how hard they try, the best they can manage is “close”.
So they face up to this fact, and once they do, they enjoy crossing back and forth over the gender frontier. Sometimes they get all dolled up as women and still behave in manly fashion, like one of my theatre-design students who wore a fluffy skirt while sawing wood for a stage backdrop.
In front of guys they admire, these girls strive to act like real women, but in the end there’s always something that shows they are still men, or at least were before.
I have a singing student who speaks like a woman and I thought her voice was natural, only to discover she couldn’t sing in that voice. I just told her to face the truth if she wanted to sing. She decided to sing in her male voice – while still dressed as a woman. It looked funny, she agreed, but she got an “A” in the final exam.
Such situations might be a shame, yes, and they can hurt deeply at first, but eventually the embarrassment gives way to a funny anecdote they love telling again and again.
Being able to exercise the free will to live like women is crucial for transgender people, and they must be respected for making a difficult choice, even when there are occasional mistakes and foolishness.
Of course we don’t enjoy see our tribulations played out in television commercials, because we know most people are laughing at us rather than with us.
But these things really happen in our lives, so they’re sure to be depicted in the mass media.
Humour is a basic human characteristic that science continues to probe for the ultimate answer as to what makes us laugh.
I see one profound benefit in it – laughing at our past silliness means that we can cope with bad memories.
And making a foolish blunder is simply more proof that we’re just like everybody else.
