Fakafifine

The one dated event attached to the category happened in another country. In 2011 Phylesha Brown-Acton, a community worker and human rights activist in New Zealand who is herself fakafifine, assembled the acronym MVPFAFF so that Pasifika gender diversity had a name of its own alongside LGBTQI. The last of its three Fs is her own community's word.

How Niuean builds the word fakafifine

The compound is faka-, in the manner of, and fifine, woman. The Niue Language Dictionary defines it as to behave like a woman, or to be effeminate, which is a description of conduct rather than a noun for a person, and every English gloss since has had to decide what to do about that. Niuean carries the matching form for the other direction, fakataane, to behave like a man.

The construction is the regional one and no Niuean invention. Samoan Fa'afafine joins the causative fa'a- to fafine, woman, and the Samoan word is a cognate of Tongan fakafefine, Cook Islands Maori akava'ine and Maori whakawahine. What differs between the islands is what each society does with the position, and the shared grammar is why the words look like translations of one another when they are not.

Who put fakafifine into MVPFAFF

MVPFAFF unpacks as mahu, vakasalewalewa, palopa, fa'afafine, akava'ine, fakaleiti or leiti, and fakafifine, with a plus added later for the categories the letters miss. The stated purpose was to enhance Pasifika gender diversity awareness in addition to the term LGBTQI, and the University of Hawai'i at Manoa's guide dates the coinage to 2011 and traces the citation to Christine Steward, writing in Niko Besnier's Gender on the Edge in 2014.

Brown-Acton, born in 1976, is listed as fakafifine in the record of her own community, so the grouping was made from inside the categories it names. Besnier supplies the pressure it answers: across the Pacific there is increasing pressure to fit Western LGBT categorisations, and in his words the labels come with resources, so some communities have adopted LGBT vocabulary because it opens funding that a Niuean word does not. An acronym built from the words themselves is the alternative move, and it is the reason this catalogue prefers MVPFAFF to a regional label.

Why the English glosses keep hedging

Wikipedia's own entry lists the associated terms as Fakaleiti, Two-Spirit, trans woman, akava'ine, Mahu and pinapinaaine, which is a set of neighbours rather than a set of synonyms. Outright International describes fakafifine as people who may take on traditionally feminine roles or expressions and are often considered to be of a third gender.

Kalissa Alexeyeff, who works on Pacific gender and sexuality at the University of Melbourne, rejects the third gender framing for the region as a whole, calling it a spectrum of expression and identity instead. Her examples are Tongan, Samoan, and Cook Islands categories, none of them Niuean, and what she says of them is that some of the people concerned consider themselves women, others trans, and others both. No source on file reports which of those positions fakafifine take, and the honest reading of a set of glosses this soft is that the English record has not asked.

Why the record on Niue stays thin

The reference article on fakafifine runs to a few hundred words. It carries an etymology, a dictionary gloss, a place in an acronym and one named person, and that is the whole of it. Nothing in the material dates the word, describes what fakafifine do in a household or a village, or counts them.

The argument about how far back these Pacific categories run is regional and it reaches Niue only by implication. Besnier holds that there is no evidence for people of this kind in any Pacific culture other than Tahiti and possibly Hawai'i, where European voyagers did record mahu, and Tahitian mahu were conspicuous enough by 1827 for an English missionary to call the island the filthy Sodom of the South Seas. Besnier also made the counter-argument himself, in a paper of 1994: little can be inferred from historical silence. Leuli Eshragi, a Samoan-Iranian artist and curator, put the sharper version of it to the ABC, asking whether pre-contact societies had any reason to record who was cisgender and who was not.

Neither position is a statement about Niue in particular, and neither supplies a date. What Niue has instead is a dictionary entry, an acronym and an activist, which is a thinner record than its neighbours have and a different thing from a thinner category.

What the Pacific neighbours share

Alan Weedon's survey for the ABC in 2019 sets the terms side by side: fa'afafine in Samoa, fakaleiti or leiti in Tonga, vaka sa lewa lewa in Fiji, fakafifine in Niue, pinapinaaine in Kiribati and Tuvalu, akava'ine in the Cook Islands and whakawahine among Maori in New Zealand. Eshragi's account of what holds them together is social rather than sexual: in Samoan and neighbouring cultures people whose lives are not heteronormative are not treated as a minority, everybody has a role, and the contribution to the community is what counts.

Besnier is blunter about the reputation the region has abroad. The stereotype of intense respect is not true, in his account, and life as a gender diverse person in the Pacific begins with a considerable disadvantage, even where the older Christian denominations have no objection to the people concerned. Amao Leota Lu, a Melbourne-based fa'afafine performer, describes the diaspora version of the problem as the reverse of the one at home: in Australia the pressure is to find a box to fit into, and among her Samoan counterparts there is no box to find.