Word: thailander
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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...
Forget about any honeymoon. Just four months into his tenure, Thailand's Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej is battling for his political life. For more than a month, thousands of street protesters have rallied in Bangkok, even besieging Government House last week and forcing the 73-year-old P.M. to sneak to work through a back door. On June 27, the veteran politician, who also moonlights as a television chef, suffered the indignity of a parliamentary no-confidence vote; although Samak's six-party coalition, which controls two-thirds of the lower house, shot down the motion by a vote...
...Sunny Thailand may once have been a political bright spot in a region overshadowed by autocrats and juntas, but the last few years have been nothing short of chaos. In September 2006, after months of street protests against elected Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, the military deposed him in a bloodless coup. (Thaksin, a billionaire tycoon, was subsequently banned from politics and now faces corruption charges, which he denies.) A year of uninspired army junta rule followed. In elections last December, voters, who had once handed Thaksin the largest mandate in recent Thai history, brought to power right-wing firebrand Samak...
...confidence motions; all of them survived the vote. But the fact that the ruling coalition held together doesn't mean that Thai politics are returning to normal. Coup rumors abound. Street protesters vow to continue their rallies, especially if Samak continues with plans to scrap the constitution passed by Thailand's military rulers last year. One of the most contentious parts of the charter is a provision that a political party can be dissolved if one of its executives is convicted of wrongdoing. In February, Thailand's election commission found the PPP's deputy leader, Yongyuth Tiyapairat, guilty of vote...