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Bangkok has become a hot destination for sex-change surgery. Sian Powell talks to two Australians about their experience
She sits in a bamboo chair in the steaming Bangkok heat, slim and elegant in a long skirt and a black sleeveless vest. Her eyebrows are delicately plucked, her ears pierced, her hair long and wavy. She turns and smiles sweetly. She has been a woman for less than a fortnight.
Tara was never happy with her masculinity. After years of taking hormones, she finally decided to take the plunge and change gender. Earlier this year she had a series of operations to remove her male genitalia, construct a woman's genitals, augment her breasts and reduce her Adam's apple. She flew to Thailand from Australia's east coast for the surgery, her mother in tow for moral support. At the age of 33 she became a woman, and left the detritus of her manhood behind her in Bangkok. A short time after surgery the only outward indication that she was ever male is a faint pink line on her neck where her Adam's apple once protruded. Now she wishes she'd done it when she was much younger. "I've never doubted it," she says, with a wide smile. "It's always been the right thing that I needed to do."
Gender, it seems, is becoming malleable. Recently a NSW resident was accorded the right to avoid the male/female distinction. Born a male, he/she became a female via surgery and drugs, got fed up with the time-consuming physical and pharmaceutical maintenance, and reverted to someone in the middle of the gender arc. Increasing numbers of people around the world are turning to surgery to manipulate gender; others spurn the surgery and simply use drugs to restrict hair growth and encourage breasts, or vice versa.
The authorities are becoming accustomed to the gender changeover. Cuba has instituted state-sponsored sex-change operations, and the US Tax Court has handed down a decision agreeing that sex-change operations and procedures should be tax-deductible. In Australia, the Family Court permitted a number of children to embark on hormone treatment to ward off the sexual characteristics that begin to burgeon with puberty. Decades after Briton James Morris, who fathered five children, took his first tentative steps towards femininity...