Thai transgenders are considered a lot luckier than their counterparts in Asia. That’s because the country is considered the Asian hub for sex reassignment surgeries.
Shifting gender from man to woman or woman to man does not stop at the surgical table. It would still involve hormone therapy to address chemical process within the body that still functions according to a person’s gender at birth, despite physical changes in reproductive organs.
Tangerine, a pioneering clinic, recently opened in downtown Bangkok, which provides medical services for transgender such as testosterone injection and blood tests. By making available physical and mental follow-up treatments, Tangerine aims to fill in the gap left by surgery centers which often only provide short-term post-surgical care, said Tangerine head doctor Nittaya Phanuphak.
The opening of Tangerine would address a health risk that Thai transgender face because most of them buy hormones only from the Internet or local drugstores based on the advice of friends or on the Internet, reported China Daily.
The U.N. estimated that Asia-Pacific has around 9 million transgenders. Asia Catalyst, an NGO in the U.S, placed the number of Chinese transgenders at 4 million. However, unlike their Thai counterparts, majority of Chinese transgender men and women are not out because of the conservative outlook in China when it comes to other forms of sexuality such as being transgender or gay.
Although sex reassignment surgery is legal in China and homosexuality was removed in 2001 as a mental illness, members of the LGBT community in China still face discrimination. Many parents still force their gay sons to undergo electric shock in illegal gay therapy clinics so their sons would bear them grandchildren.
Although sex change is legal, China has no established legal procedure to change information on their national identity cards causing problems for transgenders in boarding trains with specific coaches by gender.