Fa'afafine

What separates the category from a Western identity label is where it sits. Fa'afafine is a role inside the extended family, with work attached to it, and it is generally recognised by that family rather than declared against it. None of the figures attached to it is a census. Estimates put fa'afafine at up to 3.5 per cent of natal males, close to the proportion of androphilic males reported in Western populations. Ymania, technical director of the Samoa Fa'afafine Association, told SBS there were up to 3,000 fa'afafine in Samoa and at least 100 in Australia on the official count.

Why the family story is disputed

The commonest English-language account of fa'afafine is that a family with many sons and no daughters raises one of the boys as a girl. The sources here do not agree about it.

The Feed on SBS put the claim plainly in 2013, reporting that Samoan gender identity is largely a matter of a person's role in the family and that raising a boy as a girl where there are no daughters is not uncommon. Its case was Leo Tanoi, nominated as the fa'afafine of his family by his mother and rejecting the role: he described beatings meant to bring him back to manhood, petrol sniffing through his teens, and football from the age of eleven as the thing that kept him alive. The same report set Phineas Hartmon beside him, who felt he was born with the spirit of fa'afafine, took the role, describes a happy childhood in a loving family, and lives today as a man with the femininity a fa'afafine has.

Wikipedia's article rejects the framing outright, holding that fa'afafine are not assigned the role at birth and not raised as girls for want of daughters, and that the femininity emerges in early childhood, with Samoans recognising them as distinct from other boys. Kalissa Alexeyeff, who works on Pacific gender at the University of Melbourne, told the ABC in 2019 that the lack-of-daughters explanation is nonsense. Alexeyeff also declines the label this catalogue files the entry under, calling Pacific gender diversity a spectrum of expression and identity rather than a third gender, and reporting that some fa'afafine, fakaleitī and akava'ine call themselves women, some trans, and some both.

Whether the role predates European contact

How far back the category runs is argued over, and the argument is over evidence, with the people themselves not in question. Niko Besnier, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Amsterdam who specialises in the Pacific, told the ABC that there is no evidence for people of this kind in any Pacific culture other than Tahiti and possibly Hawaii, where early European voyages did document māhū. Tahitian māhū were conspicuous enough by 1827 for an English missionary to call the island the filthy Sodom of the South Seas.

The counter-argument is that colonial records are the wrong instrument. Besnier made it himself in a 1994 paper: little can be inferred from historical silence. Léuli Eshragi, a Samoan-Iranian artist and curator, put a sharper version of it to the ABC, asking whether pre-contact cultures had any reason to record who was cisgender and who was not.

What Samoan history does carry is female authority. Queen Salamasina, who held four of the highest chiefly titles, came to power in the sixteenth century through the manoeuvring of the female chieftains around her, and there is no restriction on chiefly titles passing to women or to fa'afafine. Nafanua, the female warrior and chief of early Samoan history, is sometimes held up as an icon of fa'afafine. Since the 1980s the Samoan diaspora has given the category a far higher profile outside Samoa.

Why neither English translation works

Rendering fa'afafine as transgender woman or as gay man fails in two different directions. Most fa'afafine self-identify as fa'afafine and not as men, a small number identify as women, and they generally hold that they are distinct from women, so the first translation imports a claim about identity the category does not make. Fa'afafine are described in the literature as androphilic, attracted to men, and have sexual relationships almost exclusively with men who are not themselves fa'afafine, so the second reduces a social position to a sexual one.

What the category is identified by instead is closer to work. Ulrike Schuerkens wrote in 2004 that fa'afafine have traditionally been, and generally still are, initially identified in terms of labour preferences. A fa'afafine quoted in the Transgender Studies Reader in 2006 put the ordering the other way round from an English label: culture first and then sexuality, with Samoan the first thing he wanted known about himself and fa'afafine the second.

Besnier notes a practical reason the English words spread anyway: Western labels come with resources, and communities that adopt LGBT vocabulary reach funding a Samoan word cannot. Samoan supplies a hostile term of its own as well, the slang mala, devastation, which comes out of fundamentalist-influenced hostility, with no root in the traditional vocabulary.

What fa'afafine do inside an aiga

Samoan popular culture reads fa'afafine as hard-working and dedicated to the family, in the tradition of tautua, service to family, and fa'afafine are traditionally trained in the daily women's work of an aiga, the Samoan family group. Fa'afafine describe having loved feminine activities in childhood where women in the same research said only that they liked them, and a number recall believing in childhood that they were girls. One study found twenty per cent of parents trying to stop the behaviour, and a significant share of fa'afafine report having hated rough games and sport more than girls of the same age did.

One ceremonial function is set out in detail. The taupou, the ceremonial hostess chosen by a village's high chief, receives and entertains visitors, and her dance expressed an ideal of female conduct that Christian missionaries particularly favoured. Fa'afafine and fa'afatama now take that role in pageants, performing the grace and at the same time making a caricature of the Christian-colonial ideal through sexual humour. The dress carries the same doubled history: the finely woven 'ie tōga wrapped tight around the body, and the ula nifo whale-tooth necklace once restricted to chiefs and their children. Proceeds from the pageants go to charities including Mapuifagalele, the home for the aged in Western Samoa, and care of elders is among the duties the role carries.

Paul L. Vasey, a psychologist at the University of Lethbridge, has argued that fa'afafine support the kin-selection hypothesis that androphilia persists because relatives who are not raising children of their own have time and resources to spend on their nieces and nephews. That is a claim about why the pattern recurs, and it leaves the role itself undescribed.

How the law changed in Samoa

The laws came in under New Zealand colonial rule, and the campaign against them has run through the Samoa Fa'afafine Association, founded in Apia in 2006, with fa'afafine lawyers including Alex Su'a and Phineas Hartson Matautia. The association works with government, churches and youth organisations, and Samoa's prime minister has been its patron. The Crimes Act 2013 rewrote the sexual offences, defined sexual connection broadly and in gender-neutral terms under section 50, and decriminalised female impersonation, so it is no longer an offence to be visibly fa'afafine.

The repeal went half way. Sodomy remained criminal under section 67, carrying up to five years where both parties are male and over sixteen, and up to seven years for keeping a place of resort, so it is lawful to live as fa'afafine and unlawful for two people assigned male at birth to have sex with each other. Same-sex marriage is unlawful in Samoa and unrecognised in American Samoa. That gap is where Besnier locates his objection to the reputation the islands have abroad: the stereotype of universal respect does not match what people report, and Alexeyeff heard from fa'afafine who were celebrated as performers and beaten by relatives for acting on desire. The Society of Fa'afafine in American Samoa runs the Miss SOFIAS pageant in Pago Pago, held since 1979.

Where fa'afafine sits in MVPFAFF

Fa'afafine sits inside a set of Pacific categories grouped under the acronym MVPFAFF by the community worker Phylesha Brown-Acton, so that Pasifika gender diversity had a name of its own alongside LGBTQI. The grouping was made from inside the communities concerned, which is why this catalogue uses it in preference to third gender. The words are cognates, built on the same causative construction in related languages, and no one of them translates another.

Its closest neighbours in the catalogue are Tongan Fakaleiti, Cook Islands Māori Akava'ine, Fijian Vakasalewalewa and Hawaiian and Tahitian Mahu. Outside the region the comparison most often reached for is Transgender, and fa'afafine writers tend to reach the other way: Samoan Queer Lives, edited in 2018 by Dan Taulapapa McMullin and Yuki Kihara, collects autobiographical accounts from the 1940s onward, and its royalties go to the fa'afafine organisations in Apia and Pago Pago. Amao Leota Lu, a Melbourne-based fa'afafine performer, describes the diaspora problem as the reverse of the one at home: in Australia the pressure is to find a box, and among her Samoan counterparts there is no box to find.