Akava'ine

The construction is the one that produces Samoan fa'afafine and Fijian vakasalewalewa, across languages that separated centuries ago. What does not carry across is the age of the sense. The word is old; the identity it now names is not.

Why the word outdates the identity

The use of akava'ine for a transgender or third-gender person appears to be recent. No established gender role of that name shows up in the detailed written encounters with Cook Islands Māori society running from before Christianity through to the early twentieth century, and those accounts were set down almost entirely by Westerners and missionaries. Comparable people are named in the records of Samoa, Tahiti and Hawai'i, which is what makes the Cook Islands gap conspicuous rather than expected.

What the current sense took shape through was cross-cultural contact between Polynesians living in New Zealand, and particularly contact with Samoan Fa'afafine. As late as the 1990s the commonest local word for the category was laelae, a borrowing from Tahitian raerae, used typically where feminine behaviour in a man is being criticised or ridiculed. A third word, tutuva'ine, meaning like a woman, is used less often and normally of a cross-dresser or a drag performer. Neither is a word a Cook Islander would now reach for to name the identity, and the displacement of laelae by akava'ine inside about three decades measures how quickly the current sense settled.

A category reshaped abroad and carried home is a different object from an unbroken local tradition, and sources presenting akava'ine as an ancient custom preserved intact describe something the record does not show.

What akava'ine meant before it named anyone

The word had a life before it had a referent, and it was not a compliment. Kalissa Alexeyeff records akava'ine as a Cook Islands Māori term for women who have an inflated opinion of themselves, who draw attention to themselves in ways that disrupt the group, who do not heed advice, or who act in a self-serving or self-promoting way. That is a charge of self-promotion levelled at women, and it says nothing about men at all.

The literal reading and the insult are the same word: to behave as a woman is what the morphology says, and whether that lands as a description or as an accusation has always depended on who was being described. The reclamation is correspondingly local and recent, done inside one language against one specific slight.

What the old ethnographies actually recorded

Ethnographic description of people who might now be called akava'ine runs further back than the word does, and none of it uses the word. Marshall denied in 1971 that Mangaia had any homosexuals, and in the same pages counted two or three men on the island who liked women's work, could have a feminine figure and might dress to some extent as women. He found no social disapproval attaching to it, recorded that such men were asked often to help with cooking, with feasts, and with sewing and cutting out dresses, and noted that they showed no apparent wish for male sexual partners.

Beaglehole had written in 1938 that there was no word in Pukapukan for homosexuality and that informants could not say it had ever occurred, then described a youth of sixteen or seventeen in Yato village who was said to wakawawine, to be like a woman. The description is unusually close: a fully grown boy with a high voice, in men's clothes, who did not stroll the village with the other young men, who did the general run of women's work, made plaited and beaded objects, sewed more than was usual for a man and cooked, and whose behaviour the village noticed without ever remarking on it aloud. The local verb he was given, wakawawine, is built exactly as akava'ine is, from a prefix of resemblance and the word for woman.

Nearly two decades later, in 1957, Beaglehole wrote of Aitutaki that homosexuality was unknown there, recalling only two adolescent boys who had given up fishing and gardening for housework, embroidery and mat-making, at which the community rated them highly. One married and settled into a man's role; the other left the island. The pattern in all three accounts is the same: an observer denies that the category exists in the sentence before describing the people in it, reaching for vocabulary now recognised as a slur rather than for any local word, and recording the local word only in passing when an informant supplies it.

Why the Pacific record is disputed

How far back categories of this kind run in the Pacific is an open argument among the people who study the region. Niko Besnier, an anthropologist of the Pacific at the University of Amsterdam, told the ABC in 2019 that there is no evidence for people of this kind in any Pacific culture other than Tahiti and possibly Hawai'i. He pointed in the same interview to his own 1994 paper on gender diversity in the region, where the absence of such people from European records is explicitly not treated as evidence that they were absent from the islands. His formulation is that little can be inferred from historical silence, and it cuts against reading the Cook Islands gap in either direction.

Léuli Eshragi, a Samoan-Iranian artist and curator, put the question from the other end to the same reporters: whether societies before contact had any reason to set down who was cisgender and who was not. The colonial archive is the only written archive most of the region has, and it was compiled by observers whose categories did not match what they were describing.

How akava'ine got organised

Te Tiare Association was incorporated at the Rarotonga High Court on 30 November 2007 and formally launched on 21 June 2008, together with a partnership with the Pacific Islands AIDS Foundation, to bring akava'ine in the Cook Islands together and to help them strengthen and educate one another. Its president, Valery Wichman, told IPPF that akava'ine are accepted culturally and socially, contribute to the community and are considered masters of an art, a privileged position to hold in the culture.

The content of that position is practical rather than ceremonial. Dean Tangata of the Cook Islands Family Welfare Association told the same reporters that the first people sought out for any event are the transgender community, who have to be booked early because they are the costume makers, a high-status role in the culture. Some akava'ine take part in making tivaevae, the appliqué quilts traditionally made by the women of a community. IPPF's account puts the same point in terms of what is held rather than what is done, describing akava'ine as holders of knowledge, culture, compositions and choreography.

The legal position moved late and moved unevenly. Sex between men remained a crime in the Cook Islands until April 2023, while sex between women had never been criminalised at all. The law had never been applied, and its removal was read locally as symbolic, since what it carried was a message of intolerance rather than a record of prosecutions. Talia Lajpold, born in New Zealand to Cook Islander parents and raised in Australia, was refused permission to wear the girls' uniform in her last year at school and was moved by her family to a beauty school instead. She now lives in Rarotonga, and she named her jewellery line Akava'ine.

Where akava'ine sits among its Pacific neighbours

Several Pacific languages carry a term of the same shape, and the ABC's 2019 survey of the region sets them out as a group. The categories are not translations of one another and the columns below are not equivalences. The third column is thinner than the second because the roles it names are documented less.

Several of those categories were gathered into an acronym, MVPFAFF, by the community worker Phylesha Brown-Acton in New Zealand: Mahu, vaka sa lewa lewa, palopa, Fa'afafine, akava'ine, Fakaleiti and fakafifine. It exists so that Pasifika gender diversity has a collective name of its own beside LGBTQI, and akava'ine is the clearest case in the set of a category whose present form was made in the diaspora rather than at home.

Alexeyeff, in the same piece, rejects outright the assumption that most often stands in for this history in Western writing, that akava'ine and fa'afafine are boys raised as girls by families short of daughters. Her second caution is against the label Third gender itself, which she says misdescribes what is better read as a range of expression and identity across the region: some akava'ine, fa'afafine and fakaleitī consider themselves women, others consider themselves trans, and some both. Outright International's 2023 glossary takes the loosest formulation available, calling akava'ine a community of people who may present themselves, live or identify as women.

Two cautions sit on the other side of the acceptance those interviews describe. Besnier told the ABC that the region's reputation for respecting these categories does not survive contact with how life actually starts for a gender-diverse person there, and Alexeyeff observed that the admiration extended to hyper-femininity as performance can withdraw sharply when a person acts on sexual desire. Besnier's other observation is about the vocabulary: Western labels arrive attached to funding, so presenting a Pasifika category to the outside world as LGBT can be the condition of being resourced at all.