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Government officials in Thailand have issued an edict banning "cosmetic castration," a procedure reportedly often sought by that country's many "ladyboys." The ban follows reports of a botched procedure on a teenage boy in the northern city of Chiang-Mai.

Reuters says the Thai Public Health Ministry sent letters to 16,000 private health clinics warning that doctors performing castrations "outside formal sex-change therapy" faced up to six months in jail.

But according to the website of the Telegraph, some surgeons remain defiant. "I want them to be happy with what they want to be, and will remove their unwanted organs," says

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Dr. Thep Wetwisit of Pratumun Clinic, one of Thailand's top transgender clinics.

Bangkok has become an international center for all types of discount plastic surgery, including sex-change operations, with transsexuals from all over the world visiting Thai clinics for sex-reassignment surgeries.

The new ban on simple castration follows concern in local Thai press that "impressionable" young men were seeking the procedure in efforts to be trendy. "Many youths may misunderstand the situation and see transgenderism as a fad. But the irreversible procedure may later become nothing but a grave mistake," warned Jetsada Taesombat from the South-East Asian Consortium on Gender, Sexuality and Health in an opinion piece in local paper The Nation.