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Identity

Hong Kong's Complicated, Bustling 'Lady Boy' Sex Industry

For trans sex workers, Hong Kong is one of the most lucrative places in Asia. But the city's attitude towards asylum seekers—and transgender people in general—makes life very hard for some.
A woman in lingerie lying on a bed
Photo by WAA via Stocksy

Glitter* has been coming to Hong Kong to work as a prostitute in 14-day spurts nearly every month for three years. A 27-year-old trans woman from the Philippines, she's a forever-tourist in the city, where a blatant sex industry thrives in the red-light districts Wan Chai and Mong Kok and apps like WeChat allow for hidden meetings amid billion-dollar high-rises.

For Glitter and many trans sex workers from mainland China and other countries in Asia, a unique combination of legal and financial factors has made Hong Kong an obvious place to work—for better or for worse. It's all thanks to the Automated Passenger Clearance System, or e-Channels: an airport turnstile for residents and frequent travelers that doesn't require going through an immigration officer. For Glitter, Manila is only a little over a two-hour flight away, and her visa allows her to stay for 14 days, during which she'll pack her schedule full to make the most of her time. Half of her clients are local Hong Kong Chinese, and the other half white expats. According to Glitter, what they have in common is that they're bi-curious, usually above 40 and divorced, and want Glitter to be on top.

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Read more: When You Are Trans and Undocumented, Few People Can Help

"Clients want a cock from a woman, and that's where a lady boy comes in," said Glitter. ("Lady boy" is a common term used throughout Asia to describe feminine-looking trans women, gay men, or non-binary/third-gender people with a penis.) We met at a local NGO, Midnight Blue, an organization in Hong Kong offering aid to transgender sex workers by giving them condoms, lubricants, STD checks, and warnings about police raids. "And you need to look like a woman."

Indeed, according to Eric Sin Man-hon, an advocate at Midnight Blue, trans sex workers face acute pressure—for multiple reasons, but a big one is that they can charge more if they have breasts and a penis. But staying as feminine as her clients want has proved difficult for Glitter. Progesterone and estrogen help keep her skin smooth, but she says the hormones often keep her from getting her penis erect and climaxing. They also make her sleepy, which is difficult since she's meeting at least five clients a day during her whirlwind trips. As a result, when she works in Hong Kong, she'll only take hormones on Sundays. Glitter said she's already had to shave the hair above her lip on this trip.

Glitter said that unlike in Hong Kong, where stigma against the LGBT community runs deep, trans women are celebrated in the Philippines. She looks forward to the passage of an anti-discrimination bill there—something that has been in the works since 1998—hoping it will allow trans women to work in traditionally male jobs. Still, she seems to fit into hyper-capitalist Hong Kong, where the city's identity centers on money; here, Glitter can make hundreds of dollars for jobs that wouldn't even earn her $10 in the Philippines. She charges some $500 for an outcall and is aggressive about networking on websites and apps in her free time—she's putting two kids in her family through college. "I'm open to my family that I'm a lady boy and a sex worker," she said. "It's our only way of surviving. We now have a house and a car because I send money back home, and we can buy what we want."

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You need to look like a woman.

Glitter says she'll continue her sex work until she's 30 years old, when she plans to put her savings into an apartment back home and start a small business. She'll be able to have gender confirmation surgery, since she won't need her penis to make money anymore.

"If I undergo surgery, I don't want to work as an escort," she told me. "I don't want to use my vagina for work."

Glitter's been lucky—she's encountered little trouble on the job. One of the few times she's run into a problem was in Malaysia, when she tried working on the street for a day. A group of other trans sex workers became territorial and scared her away—since then, she's taken comfort in being an online escort. She's never been physically threatened by anyone; she's never been forced into taking drugs with a high client. But for many trans sex workers in Hong Kong, the threat of danger is real and present.

Earlier this year, I met Saanvi*, another trans woman doing sex work in the northern commercial district of Wan Chai who escaped a near-death experience in her South Asian home country: While working at a resort, she was chased out by a group of men who tried to assault her. She hadn't yet had her breasts augmented or started hormone therapy. Because Hong Kong police had previously arrested her for soliciting, Saanvi says the UN denied her first claim under the city's system that screens refugees who seek asylum there because of torture, cruel or unusual punishment, or persecution in their home country. After, she became addicted to meth. She now survives on the roughly $230 monthly allowance from the government given to asylum seekers, waiting while her second torture claim is processed. The city does not permit her to earn money as she waits in limbo for the UN to help her, so she turns to sex work to support her hormone therapy. (An advocate at Midnight Blue said that little has changed for Saanvi since we first met.)

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Portland Street in the city's Kowloon district. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The picture isn't rosy for other trans sex workers, either. According to one of the city's prominent human rights lawyers, when trans sex workers are arrested, they're often sent to the city's maximum-security psychiatric prison, Siu Lam. Prisoners are assigned to a unit based on the sex listed on their identity documents—so even fully transitioned trans women might be put in a male ward.

Midnight Blue said that between 2013 and 2015, they received 37 complaints from trans female sex workers incarcerated at Siu Lam; they involved having their heads shaved, being given male uniforms, and being forced to share bathroom facilities with men. The human rights lawyer I spoke with—who asked to remain anonymous because a hearing for her client is upcoming—is handling the case of a young trans woman alleging she was grossly sexually assaulted by officers and that her hormones were cut off. She grew an Adam's apple while incarcerated.

Nevertheless, for some trans sex workers in Hong Kong, danger still doesn't scare them away from the job, for which there is significant demand. A woman who goes by the pseudonym Little White Fox, a Hong Kong local, just published a book in Chinese featuring the stories of 19 of her clients and their sexual desires, titled I Am a Shemale Escort.

"My clients love to be a bottom," Little White Fox told me in a fast-food Cantonese restaurant at the bottom of Amoy Gardens, a massive housing estate in Hong Kong. "They love to be fucked by a lady boy—it's their dream."

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When we were very small, we were taught to discriminate against the LGBT community.

Little White Fox explained that she doesn't take hormones because they kill her libido and shrink her penis; she has small breasts, and her face is rough. Little White Fox pulled out her iPhone and swiped through her photos to show me some of her favorite clients. "Some of them are fresh, young, and energetic," she said. First up was a policeman taking a selfie. Next up was a muscular white man taking a photo of himself in a locker room. Little White Fox said that he's a personal trainer.

Unlike Glitter, Little White Fox has no desire to stop being a sex worker. She said that through being a prostitute, she's helped to better realize her own sexual needs. "Once the sex was so good with one client, I texted him a month later and asked him if he wanted to have sex for free," she said.

But the stigma of being a trans sex worker in Hong Kong can be strangling for her. Unlike Glitter, she keeps her identity a secret from her family. When she sees them, she wears men's clothing. She said they might suspect she's a gay man. Little White Fox said that transgender people in Hong Kong have to hide their lives very carefully, and there aren't many of them. She blamed the stigma on religion—Hong Kong has significant Catholic and Protestant populations.

Read more: Beyond the Tyga Sex Scandal: The Real Life of Trans Porn Star Mia Isabella

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"Hong Kong is becoming more conservative because of Christianity," Little White Fox said. "When we were very small, we were taught to discriminate against the LGBT community. In China, not so—they just don't know about the LGBT community."

Whether this opinion about Hong Kong's conservatism is true, it's clear that Little White Fox is seeking her freedom. Before we met, she had spent the day at a pro-democracy protest against the visit of high-ranking Chinese official Zhang Dejiang, a symbol of state-sponsored communism in a city with ever-eroding independence from the mainland. Her life today is a dramatically different picture from her past: She said that she could make about $2500 in two days performing sex work in Hong Kong, whereas it used to take her a month teaching Chinese history in high school to make the same. And she's happy staying a lady boy: Little White Fox has no intention to undergo gender confirmation surgery.

"I have a penis and I will always keep it," she said. "To become a girl will bring great pain. If I regret it some day, I can't get my penis back."


*Names have been changed.