Thailand has become the global destination for people around the world haunted since birth by feelings they should be of the opposite sex.
Living in Thailand
BANGKOK: His last patient was 62, married with two kids. He showed up wearing his wife’s underwear, having come from the US to Thailand to make his life-long dream come true. “I make my patients happy. That’s my job,” says Greechart Pornsinsirirak, a plastic surgeon at Thailand’s most famous hospital for sex change operations.
Long accepted here but still a rare procedure abroad, Thailand has become the global destination for people around the world haunted since birth by feelings they should be of the opposite sex.
The entrance of Yanhee Hospital in Bangkok welcomes visitors in six different languages including Arabic, Chinese and French while young female staff on roller skates scurry among patients.
While sex change operations are far less common than breast implants, Greechart says the number of foreign patients seeking gender reassignment surgery in Thailand is rising.
Over 95 per cent of sex change operations are from male to female. Comments from foreign patients are posted across Greechart’s office wall, with many thanking the doctor. “I am sincerely grateful. Thank you for making my wish come true,” reads one from a Japanese man who had a sex change operation and breast implants.
In addition to Thailand’s reputation for quality, foreign patients come here for sex change operations because the price is much cheaper than in more developed countries.
“In the US, the price is 10 times higher,” he says. At Yanhee, a male to female operation, which takes about four to eight hours, costs $5,000 and patients stay there for two weeks.
To undergo a sex change operation, a patient must have taken female hormones for at least two years and pass a psychiatric evaluation. But most importantly, patients must have felt like a girl since their childhood and have lived like a woman for at least one or two years, says another renowned surgeon, Prayuth Chokrungvaranont.
The doctor, who has performed 300 sex change operations, says a gender reassignment operation is the last hurdle to become a full woman.
Prayuth says a decade ago less than 100 foreigners came for sex change operations each year in Thailand. “But today there are two or three cases of foreign sex change operations per day. The reasons are the good result, cheap cost, easy communication like emails and easy air transportation,” he says.
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