The Trans Women's Anti-Violence Project

Inthukorn Sitthiwong would make an excellent teacher, not only because it’s her life-long dream to help others improve their lives through education but also because she’d be a good role model to many students.

Unfortunately, she’s being asked not to teach - at least not in any way that she could maintain her honesty and dignity.

In her third year at Chiang Mai University’s Faculty of Education, Inthukorn was “advised” to start getting used to the idea of wearing a male uniform for her final year of training as a teacher - despite the fact that she’s been a woman all her life.

Yes, she’s one of many transgender women across the country who aspire to become teachers. The difference is that, while everyone before her obeyed the dictates of the regulations and bowed to social pressure and the threat of being flunked, she’s not going to pretend to be someone else.

Fifteen years ago, Rajabhat teachers’ institutes announced they would reject “sexual deviants”. The resulting public uproar forced them to back down, but it’s an open secret that many applicants fail interviews or are steered to other fields because of their gender identity.

Inthukorn’s case has brought back to the surface the debate over whether LGBT people should be allowed to teach.

The basis of the opposition is the fear that children will “copy” their transgender teachers. Science is beginning to understand the roots of gender identity, and there is so far no evidence that this fear has any basis.

An eight-month-old boy whose penis was accidentally severed during circumcision in 1965 was raised as a girl, the parents following the advice of a doctor who believed gender identity could be nurtured.

But “Brenda” Reimer never considered himself a girl, and at puberty threatened to commit suicide rather than see the doctor again. Finally his father told him what happened when he was a baby, and David Reimer decided to resume life as a male. His experience serves as a cautionary lesson that gender identity cannot be changed at will.

By now we should acknowledge that the way we express our gender can be taught and learned, but gender identity is innate. Inthukorn and other transgender women were born with an intuitive sense that they were female, regardless of their physical characteristics. Which gender they identify with should be their choice, a matter of sincere personal feelings, not social expectations.

Even in the US, a society far less familiar with transgender people than Thailand, there has been growing acceptance of transgender teachers. In addition to serving as role models for students who wonder if they too are in the wrong gender category or have already decided, it affords all students a lesson in tolerating diversity.

“The world is full of people and beliefs that not all of us agree on,” one Thai parent was recently quoted as saying. “You can’t just tell your kids that if they don’t like it, they should leave. You need to teach them that they don’t have to agree with another person’s beliefs, but they must respect those beliefs.”

A century ago our education system was a male monopoly. Then King Rama V built schools for girls too - although only women were allowed to teach there. Today no one bats an eye about girls having male teachers, or about female teachers deserving the same salary as the males and same chances for promotion.

It’s time our education system also embraced transgender teachers, affording them equal legal protection, and take its turn as a role model for Thai society as a whole.