Hiya! crystal here, latest member of TechTransThai and maintainer of the App Localization project.
Today’s post isn’t a technical writeup or the likes you would see on the TTT blog, it’s a personal #transgender story of mine (and my friend’s) that Yanagi herself was really impressed by, so I’ll be yapping about it here.
Background
First, a bit of background about me. I am 18 years old when I’m writing this, but was in the early months of 17 at the time the story took place. Like other TTT members, I am transgender. I have known this as early as mid-2024, but ended up flip flopping between numerous other identities (demiboy, non-binary)…
Case in point: the “beware of the pipeline!” meme
…before landing on being a mostly binary trans woman. At the time, while I was starting to get comfortable about my identity, I was still too scared of coming out to anyone outside my small friend group of 2 others (I still am close friends with them!), much less the school faculty.
How it started…
One day I wanted to try how the women’s uniform felt like, so I decided to “borrow” my transgender man friend’s female uniform, trading his with my male uniform.
I say “uniform”, but really it’s just the bottom garment and the neckwear that differ between both, tie w/ pants or bow w/ pleated skirt.
p.s. Yanagi told me there were apparently also differences in how the blouses are buttoned up… damnit!
The first time I wore the full female uniform I was OVER THE MOON with how euphoric it was. I really love how it looked on me, so I really wanted an excuse to actually wear it to school. However I was scared of the faculty’s reactions since my friend tried it first (wearing my male uniform) and he got into a bit of a pickle with the teachers and school faculty.
I remember him getting called out in class (the professor was also head of student discipline). He got warned about it the next day, and he was really scared that the student discipline would report (and thus, out) him to his parents, which aren’t really open to his transness. Thankfully that didn’t happen, and despite the warning (and reminding him of his birth gender, rude!), the administration told him they already had a policy drafted to allow students to use the uniform of their preferred gender.
A bit paradoxical between reactions and policy, but a welcome one.
…How it’s going
Regardless, I really wanted to try wearing it to school, and with my ex’s encouragement, I had a plan to wear it in classes where the professors didn’t care much about what I was wearing, and to wear my male (ew) uniform when classes whose professors did care. The first couple days were met with praise from my girl classmates.
“She’s so cute!”
“I didn’t recognize you at first.”
“Who’s that girl?”
Which was really nice to hear from them, they were supportive of me! However, it also seemed to stir a bit of the faculty too, but notably they kind of kept it to themselves and I only heard about their chatter through one of my old homeroom teachers. (She was always nice, and looking out for us!)
Coincidentally (at least from my persepctive at the time), after a week of me wearing my swapped uniform, the school policy officially came out! I’d like to think that they pushed it out so soon because we were already roaming around the school, if not they might have been sitting on it for a while longer.
One caveat initially is that you had to write a special request to apply for it at the time — something that they didn’t keep around, thankfully!
The world rejoiced… and kept on ticking
Turns out letting trans students dress how they want to present doesn’t affect anything related to learning! Who would’ve thought?
Interestingly enough, they explicitly called out this new policy to next year’s new students too! Which I suppose makes it like a real school policy, and not just something they put in there for just the existing students; better than most Thai high schools already, something I’m glad for.
Hopefully, more schools in Thailand in the future will relax their uniform policy, (notably also universities, Thailand might be the only place where universities still mandate a dress code) and more transgender students will find more acceptance in dressing how they like.