Word: maling
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Life can be complicated enough for members of the transgender community - the last thing they need is to have to choose between two bathroom doors: male or female. Fortunately for students at the Kampang high school in rural northern Thailand, there's now a third option. Introduced in May, the third bathroom features a symbol on its door of a human figure divided vertically, its blue side wearing pants and its red side sporting a skirt. The Kampang school's principal says he decided to build the new bathroom after a poll found that nearly 10% of the school...
...Buddhist-majority Thailand displays what may be the world's most tolerant attitude toward what locals call kathoey, loosely translated as "ladyboys." The term, which does not have an exact counterpart in English, refers to people who are born physiologically male but, as one Thai saying goes, "have a female heart." Kathoeys include everyone from occasional cross-dressers to those who have completed gender-reassignment surgery...
...pupils. Several years ago, a technical college in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai unveiled what it called "pink lotus" bathrooms, reserved for kathoeys. Now Thailand's Education Ministry is considering introducing similar bathrooms and dormitories on the university level, even though many colleges require ladyboys to wear male clothing on campus. (For the most part, however, kathoey students can choose feminine hairstyles and wear jewelry, nail polish and makeup...
...Some kathoeys say they don't need specially designated bathrooms, arguing they should be able to use either male or female toilets. Others would rather have educational funds go to combating the stereotype that the only jobs kathoeys can expect to excel in are in the beauty or entertainment - read sex - industries. Certainly, career prejudice is a lingering problem: one Thai teachers' college, for instance, refuses to enroll kathoeys. Nevertheless, Thailand is a far more open-minded place than even the United States. And the tolerance isn't just a liberal, urban phenomenon. Kathoey beauty pageants are popular in Thai...
...commemoration ceremony, followed by a seminar and a protest rally, started calmly, but as the crowd grew, tensions rose. Former students, both male and female, demanded the release of Ghazi's brother and Mosque head Maulana Abdul Aziz, who has been detained by government forces since his capture a year ago on July 4. Aziz had been caught trying to escape the madrassa complex dressed as a woman, wearing the all-encompassing black hijab. His wife, headmistress of the woman's madrassa, was released...