The Greatest Lie Part 15

I roused myself from my jet-lagged reverie and turned to my friend Tran. She was just waking from her second nap of the long flight from L.A. to Bangkok, via Singapore. I tried to bounce my ideas off her, but she wasn't in the mood for an intellectual exchange. She tried to rouse herself to full alertness with a start, shook her head dramatically, and then said, "Tell me that it was all just a dream."

I replied, "You want to know whether it's a dream that I have a baby girl, you have a transsexual little sister, and that even though we're young, broke and transsexual ourselves, we have to support them?"

"Yeah, I dreamed that, right," Tran asked with a sleepy, hopeful smile.

"Dream on," I replied. Tran looked confused, so I said in a resolute voice, "No, that's reality, about eight thousand miles east of here."

"Oh, Alexandra, how are we going to do it? We could barely afford to get to Thailand to finish our sex-change operations, and now we have to support your baby and my little sister. I don't want to do escorting and make porno movies for the rest of my life! Let's just get our operations, move back to L.A. and find rich guys to support us like your mom did," Tran said sarcastically.

"Post-ops don't get paid that well in porn or escorting, and I doubt we'd be highly prized on the West L.A. singles scene. We just have to survive until the church pays off on your priest-abuse lawsuit, and I can get another grant for another transgendered sex-behavior study. Now, no more fantasizing: we need to listen to more of these." I pointed to the tape player in the seat pocket, which was loaded with a Thai language-study tape. Tran sighed wearily and put on her own earphones.

We needed to work on our Thai language skills because we were going to doing field research amongst the numerous Thai katoey, as the Thais rudely referred to their male-to-female transsexuals.

I had written a well-received research piece on the sexual behaviors of transgendered sex workers in the U.