OLDEST PERFORMING LADYBOY IN THE WORLD

This week the 114 year old Californian Gertrude Baines is due to be crowned the world’s oldest woman by the Guinness Book Of Records. Gertrude, born to former slaves in a small town south of Atlanta, Georgia in 1894 and now living in a Los Angeles nursing home told the Los Angeles Times she spends most of her time "doing nothing but eating and sleeping". Asked to explain how she’d managed to live for so long she said that she took good care of herself “the way (God) wanted me to”.


Some of us here at PDN were wondering whether any such records exist for the increasingly ubiquitous “third gender” here in Thailand, otherwise widely known as the katoeys or ladyboys. While we attempt to track down the oldest katoey in Thailand we can for now reveal an interview we made in February 2008 with someone claiming to be the oldest performing (in the theatrical sense) katoey in the world. She is known as "Grandmom Nong" but her ID Card showed a name of Mr. Sawing Nisakornsen [ 73].


She’d been performing since the age of 14 and at the time of the interview was going through a difficult period. Recently she’d had problems with her bones and was falling over frequently but had luckily been invited to a TV Show.