When Thai model Rachaya Noppakaroon arrived at Dubai International Airport with her team of 14, she was looking forward to putting up a grand performance at Expo 2020, where she was set to appear at a Muay Thai event.
But despite possessing all the necessary travel documents, Noppakaroon never made it to the months-long world fair currently being held in the United Arab Emirates. After being unceremoniously stopped at immigration and interrogated at the airport for nine hours, she was allegedly forced to fly back to Thailand less than a day after she first touched down in Dubai.
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In a Facebook post on March 16, the runner-up at the 2014 Miss Tiffany Universe—a beauty pageant for transgender women held in Pattaya, Thailand—said that UAE immigration officials turned her back because she lives as a female, but her passport states she is a male.
“The reason is because I’m a woman, but I’m a man,” Noppakaroon wrote in her Facebook post, the details of which VICE World News was unable to independently verify.
In the UAE, transgender people are not recognized and presenting as anything other than your birth sex is illegal.
Describing the ordeal as a “nightmare during which I’m fully awake,” in her Facebook post Noppakaroon recounted how she was made to sit in the men’s waiting room and subjected to intrusive questions by an airport employee, such as whether she was able to have children, whether she had “done it all” and the size of her breasts.
Noppakaroon tried her best to prove her identity by showing them clips of her work. “But he didn’t really care and was more interested in sex,” she wrote.
Despite pushing through the interrogation, during which Noppakaroon says she broke down in tears, the model said that she was ultimately rejected at the border and made to return to Thailand.
Members of the LGBTQ community face serious social and political challenges in the United Arab Emirates, where gay sex is punishable by up to 14 years in prison and crossdressing is punishable with up to one year in prison. In 2017, a transgender Singaporean woman and her friend were arrested in the capital Abu Dhabi and sentenced to a year in prison “for attempting to resemble women.”
While the country’s commercial hub of Dubai is known to be more liberal, there have also been reports of transgender individuals being prosecuted or turned away at its airport. In 2016, Canadian YouTuber Gigi Gorgeous was similarly denied entry into Dubai for being transgender.
For Noppakaroon, who said that she still finds herself in tears because of her distressing experience, it was hard to accept that she would not be able to perform at Expo 2020. But despite the intrusive and inappropriate questions she faced at the airport, Noppakaroon’s post noted that there were employees who were kind to her, including one who tried to look out for her safety and expressed sympathy.
Known for its vibrant transgender community, gender-affirming surgery and transgender culture is widespread in Thailand. However, rights groups still point to the fact that the country is lagging in transgender recognition and welfare. A major structural barrier facing transgender people in Thailand is that while they are allowed to change their legal name, there remains no option for them to change their gender on official documents.
In a report released in December 2021, Human Rights Watch noted that the lack of legal gender recognition means that transgender people in Thailand have to hold identity documents that list a different gender from their lived identity—often a source of humiliation or harassment when these documents have to be assessed publicly, like in Noppakaroon’s case.
“We don’t blame Dubai employees at all (but we’re angry),” Noppakaroon said in her Facebook post, adding that she blames the Thai authorities for not providing pathways for transgender people to change their passports. “I hope they will see that it’s something that needs to be fixed.”
