Transexual with an umbrella. Flag of Thailand. Bangkok. IT IS, one imagines, every sex-tourist's nightmare: the go-go bar, the tuk-tuk, the hotel room and then...the discovery that there is rather more to the lovely lady than had been bargained for. Thailand's ladyboys have struck again. Richard Totman, a theatre director-cum-psychologist, has taken the trouble to get to know several kathoey over a period of years, and his book is a gentle and fascinating account of their lives. Kathoey, he maintains, genuinely are neither male nor female, but something in between that he calls a “third sex”, though in truth his belief is that sex is really more of a continuum. Their origins are traced far back in Buddhist, and even into animist, scripture, and there is a canter through some of the biology—but Mr Totman's studies do not reveal any genetic or biological difference between kathoey and normal males. Most of the kathoey he interviewed, however, say that they have felt like women trapped in men's bodies from an early age. Where Thailand differs from most countries in the West is that such people have historically been accepted in a way which Europeans generally would find impossible.