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Book Review: LeeRay Costa and Andrew Matzner, Male Bodies, Women's Souls: Personal Narratives of Thailand's Transgendered Youth. New York: Haworth Press, 2007. 214 pp. ISBN 13: 978—0-7890—31 14—3/ ISBN 10: 0—7890—31 14—0 hbk. ISBN 13: 978—0—7890—3115—0/ ISBN 10: 0—7890—3115—9 pbk

In this book, Costa and Matzner present an in-depth and sensitively carried-out analysis of the transgender phenomenon as experienced by Thailand’s transgendered youth who self-identify as sao braphet sorng (a ‘second kind of girl’), and also known as poo-ying braphet sorng (a ‘second kind of woman’). Rejecting the popular labels of ‘Ladyboy’ and ‘kathoey’ that are commonly used to describe Thailand’s transgendered ‘males’ which, the authors argue, are at best, ambiguous, at worst, derogatory, Costa and Matzner make a strong case for respecting the personal identity of those who were born with male bodies, but who possess ‘women’s souls’. Hence, throughout the book, the narrators are referred to exclusively as sao braphet sorng, despite the fact that some narrators, when writing their stories, refer to themselves as kathoey. Methodologically, the research is innovative. The authors went about collecting personally written life history narratives, from undergraduate students at Chiang Mai University, who challenge the male–female paradigm of gender classification as we know it, by taking on feminine identity and living in the female role. Costa and Matzner reject what anthropologist Anne Bolin, in the Foreword to the book (p. ix) terms the ‘hierarchical power relations’ that so often exist between researcher and ‘subjects’ or ‘informants’ in favour of a more equal, balanced relationship between themselves as researchers and the sao braphet sorng who wrote their own narratives for the study. Another innovative strength of the book is the authors’ destruction of the myth that Thai society is unflinchingly tolerant of the country’s transgendered youth. The book does this by allowing the voices of sao braphet sorng to be heard directly, through the narratives written by them. Chapter Four of the book is devoted to sao braphet song narratives. Collectively, the narratives of sao braphet sorng present an absorbing, fascinating and at times poignant description of their experiences of living as the third gender within Thailand’s system of sex and gender classification. The stories reveal the different levels of acceptance and non-acceptance as experienced by this social group and the instability that is so often a feature in the life of the sao braphet sorng in Thai society. For example, as ‘Phi’, one of the narrators argues, although social acceptance of the ‘third sex’ is increasing, the employment prospects of Thailand’s sao braphet sorng are compromised. Phi states,