Transcript of the above video:

You know I never thought in a million years I would be doing a video on this channel where I would be discussing the fact that transsexuals of Filipino and Thai origin basically got into a street battle royale here in Bangkok. This first came to my attention via the Thai Examiner, that is thaiexaminer.com, the article is titled: Huge street battle in Bangkok's Sukhumvit area between Thai and Filipino transsexuals being probed. Quoting directly: "Authorities probe violent clashes in Sukhumvit. Filipino trans workers under scrutiny. Concerns over Visa abuses and organized crime." Yeah, there is a whole Immigration component to this. We are making a video contemporaneously with this one where we discuss that in more detail but I wanted to make this video to do an overview first. Quoting further: "Tourism Minister reassures that the impact will be minimal." Quoting further: "On Tuesday Thai officials, police and even a senior Minister were conducting a post-mortem on serious disturbances in Bangkok's popular Sukhumvit area beginning on Monday night and extending into the early hours of Tuesday morning. Large groups of Filipino and Thai transsexuals did battle on Sukhumvit Soi 11. The conflagration saw multiple injuries and complaints filed with nearby Lumphini Police Station. On Tuesday, Immigration Bureau Police and Tourist Police were probing further into the nature of the large groups of Filipino transsexuals who appear to be regular visitors to the area. Senior police suspect that this may be part of an organized racket linked with the sex industry. In addition, there are concerns that it may be orchestrated by influential people or criminal Mafia groups." Quoting further: "In the bustling streets of Bangkok’s Soi Sukhumvit 11, popular with many Western tourists, tensions flared on Monday night. The incident extended well into Tuesday morning culminating into street battle. At length, a chaotic, violent expanding brawl erupted between Thai and Filipino transsexuals." 

Yeah look this is one of those headlines that when I read it, it just kind of made me for lack of a better term happy that I had made the decision to live over here in Thailand because we certainly do not get headlines dealing with what basically amounts to a lady boy street battle back in Kansas. We definitely are not seeing those headlines; it wasn't anything I particularly grew up with. 

Now we can kind of laugh and there's kind of an exotic sort of aspect to all of this or novelty to it. That said, this really got out of control. If you look at the footage and the photos and you read, and I urge those who are watching this video go check out that article in the Thai Examiner, thaiexaminer.com, if you read the reports from those on the ground, this thing again it really got out of control. Police were called in. They were sort of barely able to at the end of the day finally contain it and if you will put it down, and then in the aftermath people were talking about what a big deal this was and it also seems to involve a lot of foreign nationals, Philippine nationals to be specific and they seem to be in some kind of altercation with a number of Thai nationals who are of the same persuasion. 

So at the end of the day and the thing to take away from this video is that what starts off if you will as an article that looks like just kind of a novel, basically run down of news, turns out to actually be a pretty important piece when you are looking at the possibility that this could lead to major scrutiny on the part of Thai Immigration Officials looking at foreign nationals who are in the Kingdom of Thailand and that scrutiny could lead to possible Immigration crackdown in the future.