A transgender Thai model today showed off the Muay Thai costume she would have been wearing in Dubai were she not forced to fly home by airport officials because a different gender was listed on her passport.
Rachaya “Mix” Noppakaroon, first runner-up at the Miss Tiffany Universe pageant in 2014, said she was stuck nine hours Wednesday in Dubai immigration by officials who wanted to know why she looked female when her passport indicated she was male – and all about her boobs.
“I went into a room and when I handed in my passport, they asked me why does it say I am male?” she wrote.
After nine hours of questioning, Rachaya said she was forced to return to Thailand because her gender did not match her passport.
She described the entire ordeal as a “nightmare during which I’m fully awake.”
The model was scheduled to perform Muay Thai theatrics at Dubai’s Thailand Pavilion exhibition center at its annual World Expo event.
Rachaya took to social media to say she had everything ready when she arrived at Dubai International Airport including her hotel reservations, vaccine certificates, and event tickets.
Instead she was forced to wait hours before officials asked her questions such as whether her boobs were large or small. She was led to another waiting room where an airport official asked whether other officials had asked her to take off her shirt.
The man also noted that he knew “understood what Thailand was like,” she said.
Rachaya said she was wheeled into another interview with two officials where she was subjected to intrusive questions about whether she could have children, whether she did corrective surgery, and even the size of her breasts.
She was also forced to wait in male waiting rooms.
As she was about to board the plane back to Thailand, officials told her she should go back and change the gender in her passport. That’s the problem – Thailand does not allow transgender people to change their titles, sex or gender on official documents.
“I don’t blame the Dubai staff at all (but I am angry). I blame Thai law,” she wrote. “If they bothered to look at this issue that many people and I have to face, I hope they would see something that needs to be fixed.”
Despite the ordeal, she posted rehearsal shots of her Muay Thai performance today, thanking her fans for their support.
“If life is a struggle, then let’s put a smile behind it,” she wrote.
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