In the same week Jazell Barbie Royale won the Miss International Queen 2019 in the Pattaya pageant, a cheap-shot advert against transgender women debuted on Thai TV. (Reuters photo)

Picture this TV ad: in an ice cream parlour, a gorgeous woman with the looks of a super-model waits for her order. With her appearance, make-up and dress, she resembles the delicious strawberry fondue ice cream she ordered. Her stunning beauty turns heads, especially those of male patrons sitting nearby with their eyes ready to pop out.

As the men gawk and another male customer, coming from nowhere, shows up to sit next to her, the ad reveals that she is transgender. As she speaks in a low-key male voice, suddenly, the men act as though their world has crashed around them: jaws drop and a spoon hits the ground to the sound of breaking glass.

My jaw dropped and my eyes were ready to pop out as well when watching the ad — though for a very different reason. In this day and age, I could not believe that this represented the best that an ad agency could come up with: an appeal to discrimination, a sneering at a sexual minority, a joke at their expense.

The ice cream ad, introducing a new flavour of Swensen’s ice cream, failed to impress the audience and drew intense social media backlash as people interpreted it as an insult and in poor taste. It was launched in early February and caught quick negative attention. After being strongly criticised earlier this month, the brand’s owner, Minor Food Group Pcl, withdrew it.

This unbelievably insensitive ad was hardly the first.

In 1997, a TV commercial for an alcoholic drink was launched with the same story line. A man enters a nightclub and bumps into a gorgeous woman. He offers her a drink but she refuses, then whispers to him in her male voice Boy Mai Duem Kha (Boy, her nickname, is not drinking that), to convey that the brand exclusively targets women. As in the ice cream parlour, the man acts as if his world collapsed after realising that he was flirting with a transgender woman.

In 2019, 22 years later, here we go again with the ice-cream ad. This is what passes for creativity? Then and now I have to ask: who on Earth at the agency thought that was clever?

Even today, the Boy Mai Duem catch phrase still rings in the ears of many Thai people. It is often used when someone is offered an alcoholic drink and he doesn’t want to drink.

In 1997, when much of Thai society wasn’t familiar with the words “sexual discrimination” or the concept of “human rights”, few Thai consumers saw anything wrong with the Boy Mai Duem ad. Any complaints about it were answered with, “It’s just a joke,” while avoiding the key question: Yes, it’s a joke, but at whose expense?

Now in 2019, Thailand is moving to legalise marriage equality as a human right, proudly presenting itself as the first country in Asia to champion same-sex marriage. Never before has “sexual discrimination” been discussed like this in mainstream media. Schools are aware of bullying. Transgender persons are joining every political party to run in the upcoming general election.

I wondered how the 7,000-person Minor Group, the ice cream brand’s owner, could be caught unaware of the changing attitudes towards gender sensitivity. When Dentsu Thailand, one of the country’s top ad agencies, showed its client the storyboards, how could anyone have been so clueless as to think this was a great idea?

As the controversy over the ad’s bad taste grew and a protest letter from an organisation representing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people was made public, Dentsu Thailand released a letter explaining its non-discrimination policy, offered an apology and extended an invitation to meet with LGBTQ communities.

To the general public, transgender women are an easy target. In media, they are targeted with ridicule, being reduced to something subhuman. In the old days, when many transgender people had not yet attained a full physical female appearance, brands mocked their male looks in ads and audiences seemed to enjoy the petty feeling of superiority that comes from mockery.

These days, when they step up to compete with heterosexual beauty queens, they seem to have made progress in societal perception. Even so, you hear thinks like: “She is so pretty, but it’s too bad, she is not a real woman.” Or “If she were a woman, I’d fall for her.” And “Oh, she really looks like a woman.”

On a social media platform, an executive expat living in Thailand, wrote that the country is very supportive of LGBTQ people because “no other countries in the world have lots of transgender women working in convenience and department stores”. But the executive never questioned why he doesn’t see such people in high-paying, high-status jobs.

As long as transgender women have limited access to education and career choices, their status will remain as they were perceived in 1997, and as demonstrated today by the ice cream ad.

Advertisements come and go, but public opinion must be challenged. As long as the LGBTQ communities and the transgender people fail to create a new public perception, they will never be viewed differently.

And in the public’s eyes, we will remain just another fallen scoop of icecream