New Thai campaign ad appeals to transgender voters
Bangkok's leading candidate for governor believes they constitute an untapped voting bloc VIDEO
Topics: Video, GlobalPost, Thailand, Bangkok, Asia, News
Is there a hidden, transgender voting bloc ripe for a political awakening?
At least one Thai politician seems to think so.
“Our modern world increasingly accepts varied genders… Bangkok must be a city that understands sexual differences, not just accepting different lifestyles … it must be a friend to every difference.”
So goes the latest campaign ad for Pongsapat Pongcharoen, a U.S.-educated police general. Polls suggest he’ll soon become Bangkok’s next governor.
Slick, minimal and set to a twinkly backbeat, the video showcases a stream of cheerful faces. Many of them belong to “kathoeys,” male-to-female transgender Thais more commonly known by a cheaper term: ladyboys.
Is this the dawn of a new trend: courting the transgender vote?
Even Nok Yollada, Thailand’s first transgender office holder, didn’t pitch herself to this demographic. When I interviewed her last year, prior to her election victory, she said, “I don’t even focus on gender in my campaign. I barely bring it up.”
Feeling unqualified to grade this ad’s effectiveness, I reached out to a politically acute transgender friend.
This was her response to the campaign:
“Great move,” I would say… I do enjoy seeing something like this. Anyway, it’s politics. The main question that comes to my mind is that I would love to see concrete policy to make BKK (Bangkok) a friendly city for LGBT.
Since there’s no mention of policy in the ad, perhaps Pongsapat’s campaign regards this ad as a promotional stunt. (If so, congrats! It worked on me.) Only in recent years has Thailand’s military stopped labelling transgender draftees “insane,” a phenomenon I profiled in a 2010 piece titled “The Lovely Conscripts.”
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