I think you are onto something, Cap. Like the old Avis ads says, when you are number two, you try harder. Trannies try harder. (Hey, that would fit on a tee shirt!)
Your Thai reverie reminds me of a passage from an online FTM memoir I read a couple of years ago called The Greatest Lie. Here is what the the memoirist wrote.
I think that if you could get honest answers, a lot of heterosexual guys would probably admit to having had at least a passing desire to be a girl. If they were honest, they would probably admit they thought of it "when I first noticed a girl's breasts" or "when I first felt a girl orgasm with me," but of course, most men would lie and deny it for fear of impugning their masculinity.
I think that's the reason why most therapists who treat male-to-female transsexuals believe that their transsexual patients are really gay, and that their claimed transsexuality is really just a defense against powerful feelings of guilt about their homosexuality. Thus, therapists make transsexuals jump through flaming hoops such as the so-called "one-year real-life test," the requirement that a patient live as a woman and undergo intense psychotherapy for at least a year before for sexual reassignment surgery.
Therapists have incorporated this dogma into the so-called "Harry Benjamin Standards of Care." But they adopted the real-life test without any empirical evidence, based solely on their supposition that many self-described transsexuals must be liars or delusional, reasoning that: "If anyone ever asked me if I wanted to become a member of the opposite sex, I would lie. Therefore, when this purported transsexual claims to be a girl inside, and wants a sex change, he is probably lying, because that's something all men lie about."
This logic is ridiculous: who could endure the expense, pain, humiliation, discrimination, and victimization that transsexuals experience unless she really felt her outward gender was wrong? But just try telling your therapist you're transgendered, and see what he does.
The real-life test makes even more intolerable the cruel dilemma that confronts the MtF transsexual: should the transsexual attempt to pass through a life of misery masked in the outward appearance of her birth gender, or should she adapt her outward appearance to her soul's gender, and attempt to "pass" in the eyes of the outside world?
It would help an unsympathetic world understand this dilemma, and incidentally reduce the incidence of spousal abuse, divorce, and sexual assault if all guys had to dress and live as girls for a week as a rite of passage: let's call it "GenderWeek." After a "femme initiate" had lived under the sexually interested gazes and intimidating physical presence of males, and learned to live with the expectation that the appropriate response to these pressures are indulgent smiles and responsive flirting, he would learn to moderate the extremes of his subsequent masculine behavior.
On the other hand, if you made boys live as girls you would probably increase the incidence of transsexuality in the population, as some guys got addicted the tug of a satin thong catching in the crack of their buttocks.
Perhaps a secret, latent tendency found in the male population explains the overwhelming numbers of transsexuals you meet in trans-tolerant climates like Thailand. By some estimates there are three hundred thousand male-to-female transgenders in a population of sixty million.
Perhaps more boys become MtF transsexuals in Thailand because it's more easily done in a country where nine-year-olds can buy female hormones over the counter and young adults of eighteen can get their surgeries without first having to justify themselves to two shrinks for at least a year.
Or maybe it's a product of the influence of the Thai creation story: a love triangle between Itthi, the first woman, Pullinga, the first man, and Napumsaka, a hermaphrodite. Itthi preferred Pullinga to Napumsaka, who becomes jealous and kills Pullinga, and thereby loses Ithhi's love and dies, leaving Itthi and her children alone, to repeat the love triangle of creation in the next generation. Perhaps these stories explain the Thais' tolerance for, and discrimination against, their transgendered minority.
This fascinates me because I am an American post-op MtF. I was on my way to Thailand to investigate Thai transsexuals as I continued my academic research on the behaviors of transsexual sex workers, in the steamy, tawdry cabarets and bars of Chiang Mai, Bangkok, Phuket and Koh Samui.
See http://nifty.guiltygroups.com/nifty/transgender/college/greatest-lie/
Thanks for starting an interesting thread, Cap
though usually the roleplay does not involve disguising their gender.