Kathoey

Kathoey (กะเทย) is a Thai gender term. In older usage it was the third position in a three-way scheme of man, woman and kathoey; in current usage, particularly in urban Thailand, it refers principally to transgender women. It is the best-known Thai gender word abroad and one of the more contested at home, because it is simultaneously a description and, in many mouths, an insult.

That double life is the first thing to understand about it. Nothing in the term's grammar marks it as pejorative; its force depends entirely on who is speaking and to whom, which is why the polite alternatives exist and why they matter.

Definition & scope

The scope has narrowed within living memory. As Dredge Käng records, kathoey in Thai is "a general term encompassing all third gender categories", theoretically covering every non-normative gender presentation and sexuality beyond heterosexual male and female, but in practice it seldom refers to female-bodied people, and in cosmopolitan Bangkok among the middle classes it refers only to transgender women.

The register is the live issue. People described as kathoey may be offended by it, and more respectful terms are used in their presence: sao praphet song (สาวประเภทสอง), "second category woman"; phuying kham phet (ผู้หญิงข้ามเพศ), "transgender woman", promulgated in February 2010; or simply sao, "young woman", which is what many use among themselves. The borrowed English "ladyboy" is narrower and worse: it attaches to cabaret performers, pageant contestants and bar workers, and carries the assumption of sex work with it.

Kathoey is also not an orientation, though Thai usage links gender and desire more tightly than English does. The same source notes that among visibly gender-nonconforming groups in Thailand, kathoey are the most stigmatised, a fact that sits awkwardly beside Thailand's international reputation for tolerance.

Examples

Kathoey is simultaneously a description and, in many mouths, an insult, and the scope of the word has narrowed within living memory.

What the term covers. In older usage, the third position in a three-way scheme of man, woman and kathoey, theoretically covering every non-normative gender presentation and sexuality. In current usage, particularly among the middle classes in Bangkok, it refers principally to transgender women, and seldom to female-bodied people at all.

What the term does not cover. It is not an orientation, though Thai usage links gender and desire more tightly than English does. "Ladyboy" is an English coinage used about the group rather than by it, narrower and worse: it attaches to cabaret performers, pageant contestants and bar workers and carries the assumption of sex work. The polite alternatives are sao praphet song ("second category woman"), phuying kham phet ("woman who crosses sex", promulgated in 2010) and simply sao, "young woman", which is what many use among themselves. Hijra, travesti and fa'afafine are comparable categories, not equivalents.

How the word is used. Thai กะเทย, of uncertain origin; a Khmer derivation is proposed and unsettled. Nothing in its grammar marks it as pejorative; its force depends entirely on who is speaking and to whom, which is why the polite alternatives exist and why people described by it are often offended by it.

History & origins

• Pre-modern usage: kathoey denotes a person of either birth sex showing mixed sexual characteristics or behaviour deemed inappropriate to their sex, a genuinely broad third category, understood in Theravada Buddhist terms as karmic in origin rather than chosen.
• Mid-1960s onward: the category begins to split. New masculine, feminine, transvestite and intersex-adjacent terms differentiate out of it, driven in part by Thai-language newspapers and magazines.
• 1990s–2000s: Rosalind Morris and others describe a traditional three-sex system giving way to a four-position modern scheme built on the male/female and homosexual/heterosexual binaries; Peter Jackson counts at least ten gender terms in ordinary Thai discourse by 2000.
• 2010: phuying kham phet is promulgated as a neutral formal term for transgender women.
• 2015: constitutional protection against gender-based discrimination is enacted, without a third legal gender.
• 2024: the first draft of a Gender Recognition Bill is rejected by the House of Representatives by 257 votes to 154.
• 23 January 2025: the Marriage Equality Act comes into force, giving same-sex couples equal access to marriage; the UN human-rights office welcomed it and urged Thailand to follow with the Gender Recognition Bill.

In practice

The defining practical fact is that Thailand has social visibility without legal recognition. There is no procedure to change a recorded sex, so a kathoey's identity documents, prefix and conscription records continue to say male for life. Marriage equality arrived in 2025; gender recognition did not, with the consequence that marriages solemnised under the new Act can carry titles that contradict the parties' gender.

The visibility itself is also narrower than it appears from outside. Kathoey are conspicuous in entertainment, cosmetics and hospitality and largely absent from the professions, which is a pattern of channelled employment rather than of open opportunity.

Psychology

Being kathoey is not a clinical category. The ICD-11 removed gender incongruence from its mental-disorders chapter in 2019, and the DSM-5 diagnoses distress rather than identity, a shift that matters in Thailand chiefly for how the military's exemption paperwork has historically been worded.

The older Thai framing was Buddhist rather than medical: being kathoey was understood as the working-out of karma from a previous life, which supplied a kind of explanation without supplying acceptance. Käng's account describes the contemporary picture as a re-signification rather than a liberalisation: kathoey visibility is now read as modern rather than traditional, and the increase in it has provoked national anxiety about male effeminacy as much as tolerance.

Prevalence & culture

How common is kathoey identity?

The most-cited figure comes from a single study and its author was candid about its limits. Sam Winter's 2002 count tallied visibly transgender people passing through shopping centres in Bangkok and Chiang Mai and extrapolated to roughly 180,000 kathoey nationwide, or about 3 in every 1,000 people. Winter noted the method cuts both ways: shopping centres and cities over-represent the population, while strict counting criteria miss people who are not visibly identifiable.

Other estimates in circulation span from 10,000 to 300,000, a range wide enough to say that nobody knows. The 0.3% recorded on this entry is Winter's rate, expressed as a share of Thailand's population, and it carries low confidence for the reasons he gave.

Thailand's reputation as unusually hospitable to gender diversity is doing a lot of work in how these numbers get quoted abroad. Visibility is not the same as prevalence, and neither is the same as acceptance.