Fa'afatama

The description of record comes from the community's own organisation. The Samoa Fa'afafine Association, quoted by Outright International, holds that fa'afatama is a social and communal gender fluid status rather than a private identity, that fa'afatama often embody masculine traits and may live or identify as men, and that some also call themselves transgender or use other LGBTIQ labels while others do not.

What the word fa'afatama says literally

The prefix is the same causative fa'a that builds fa'afafine, and the difference between the two words is the noun after it. That construction is what makes the pair look symmetrical in English, and the symmetry is real in the grammar whatever else differs.

Underneath the modern word sits an older one. Fa'afatama is described as a contemporary expression of the earlier term fa'afatane, and nothing on file dates either form or records when the newer one displaced the older. The etymology is complete and the attestation is missing, which is the ordinary condition of a Pacific word that entered English through general-audience writing without passing through a dictionary.

Why the sources place fa'afatama differently

The sources do not agree on where fa'afatama sits in the Samoan scheme. Outright International, taking the Samoa Fa'afafine Association's wording, calls the term specific to Samoa's third gender. The Natural History Museum and the travel writing that repeats it count four genders and make fa'afatama the fourth, with fa'afafine third. Both statements are in print and both come from people with a claim to know, and the disagreement is about how to number a set rather than about who belongs to it.

The second disagreement is about identity, and here the sources are consistent in refusing to settle. Fa'afatama may live and identify as men. Some are also transgender by their own account and some are not, and any English sentence that resolves that for all of them is going further than the record does.

What the pageants ask of a taupou

The most closely described thing fa'afatama and fa'afafine do together is a dance. The taupou is a village's ceremonial hostess, chosen by the high chief to receive and entertain visitors, and her performance traditionally expressed an ideal of female conduct that Christian missionaries particularly approved of for its virginal and virtuous qualities. In pageants, fa'afafine and fa'afatama take that role, and the museum's account is that they perform the grace and the femininity while turning the Christian and colonial ideal into caricature through sexual humour and body language.

The costume carries the same doubled history. The taupou wears an 'ie toga, a finely woven mat wrapped tight around the body with an unwoven fringe and a strip of red feathers at its edge, and an ula nifo, a whale-tooth necklace of sliced sperm whale teeth that was a status object restricted to chiefs and their children. One such necklace was collected in Fiji in the 1890s, and the collector recorded that it carried the relative value of a diamond necklace. A finely woven mat in the same museum's collection was gathered before 1925. The dancer also carries a light replica of a nifo'oti, a large club modelled on the cane knives of nineteenth-century English and American whalers, and the twirling of it recalls the pre-battle displays in which heirloom clubs were thrown and caught. The museum's example was collected in Samoa between 1908 and 1910.

Proceeds from the pageants go to charities including Mapuifagalele, the home for the aged in Western Samoa, which is one of the ways the two categories carry out the elder care attributed to them. The other duty the sources name is sex education, a subject held to be taboo in public conversation between men and women, and this is the role the categories are described as being trusted with because they move between the two.

Why Western categories do not carry over

The Natural History Museum states the objection plainly: filing a cultural third gender under LGBTQ distorts it, because that classification comes from a society recognising two genders in which anybody acting outside the norm for their assigned sex has to be sorted as homosexual, queer or Transgender. In a society that recognises more, the person is acting within a gender norm rather than against one.

The sexual argument follows the same line. Fa'afafine and fa'afatama cannot be classified as homosexual, since they hold a separate gender position and their partners may be men, women, fa'afafine or fa'afatama. The Samoan terms are described as identifying separate genders rather than orientations, and the Samoan value the sources keep returning to is a tolerance of what individuals like and choose that does not press children into conformity.

Why the record follows fa'afafine instead

Almost every source on fa'afatama is a source on fa'afafine that mentions fa'afatama in the same sentence. The association is named for one of the two. The autobiographical collections are by and about the other: Samoan Queer Lives, edited in 2018 by Dan Taulapapa McMullin and Yuki Kihara, gathers fa'afafine accounts from the 1940s onward, and Memoirs of a Samoan, Catholic, and Fa'afafine, published in 2007, is a fa'afafine memoir. Neither has a fa'afatama equivalent here.

The consequence is a thin record for a category the same sources call one of four. Nobody has counted fa'afatama. No source on file dates the word, describes a fa'afatama childhood in the detail the fa'afafine literature manages, or names a fa'afatama writer. The category is documented as living, as recognised inside the extended family, and as carrying named duties, and beyond that the record stops. Calling it a third gender or a fourth one describes the shape of the Samoan scheme and says nothing about the depth of the record about this part of it.