Fakaleiti

The Tongan term covers a range of positions that no English word covers. The ABC's Pacific Beat put the everyday description plainly in 2018: leitis often identify as women, or as men who dress and behave in a feminine way, but mainly do not identify as either men or women. Tongan usage keeps the emphasis on gender roles and behaviour rather than on sexual identity, which is why a translation that leads with orientation misses the category.

Why the word cannot predate English contact

The parallel terms across the region take an indigenous word for woman and put a manner-of prefix in front of it. Samoan Fa'afafine joins faʻa- to fafine, Cook Islands Māori Akava'ine uses vaʻine, and Māori whakawāhine uses wāhine. Tongan had the same material available and used it, since Wikipedia's article on fa'afafine lists fakafefine as a Tongan cognate built on fefine. The form that prevailed borrows its second half from English instead.

Four of those five build the category out of the language's own vocabulary and one does not. That puts a floor under the age of the word whatever the age of the role behind it: the compound cannot be older than sustained English contact in Tonga, and an account presenting fakaleiti as an untouched precolonial term has the etymology wrong.

None of the sources on file dates the first use. What they establish is a limit, and the ethnographic description of the role belongs to the twentieth century. The BU Anthropology Wiki, drawing on Sears and on Johanna Schmidt, glosses both the Tongan and the Samoan word as in the manner of a woman and treats fakaleiti as the Tongan term for the category the Samoan word names, which is how the two ended up in the same sentence in almost every English-language account since.

Why fakaleiti covers a range

The clearest finding in the literature is that fakaleitī are heterogeneous. Many are androphilic. Some identify psychologically and socially as women, others place themselves outside the male and female pair, and the classification lines up with none of male, female, homosexual, Transgender or Non-binary as those words are used elsewhere. Gender dysphoria may or may not be present, and surgical transition is not universally pursued, because the position rests on a social role.

Sue Farran, writing in the Liverpool Law Review in 2010 from a paper first given the year before, makes the same point about legal categories. Transgender, gender-liminal, transvestite and gay are all available as labels, none of them fully encompasses what it is to be fa'afafine or fakaleiti, and labels imported from elsewhere work as straight-jackets when they are applied in a different social and cultural environment. Her conclusion is that the people the words name live between two worlds, one gender enlightened and one gender repressed, and that they are simultaneously integrated and marginalised in their own countries and in the Polynesian diaspora.

The BU Anthropology Wiki records the practical consequences of that. Leitī and fa'afafine typically use feminine pronouns, generally do not call themselves transgender or gay, and have relationships with men who are not leitī, which are read locally as heterosexual rather than homosexual. That reading matters legally as well as socially, since it places those relationships outside the category the criminal law addresses even where the law is otherwise severe.

How leitī make a living in Tonga

The work is the visible half of the role. Joey Joleen Mataele, president of the Tonga Leitis Association, described its shape to the ABC: the role of leitis in Tongan society is more of a housewife's role, a domestic worker, known in the public eye in the churches and for helping the youth programmes, and the barriers begin at the point of personal choices. Schmidt's formulation, quoted in the BU Anthropology Wiki, is that the feminine identity is most often enacted through labour, with Western discourses of gender and sexuality entering the picture more recently.

Paid employment follows the same pattern and concentrates in tourism, hospitality and entertainment. Dress varies with the setting: masculine clothing is common by day and feminine styles appear at social events, and the feminine presentation draws on Western or cosmopolitan fashion rather than on traditional Tongan dress. That borrowing has a cost attached to it, since involvement in activities read as modern or foreign, among them nightlife and non-marital relationships, has attached leitī to the idea of social change and transnational influence in the eyes of people who oppose both.

The Tonga Leitis Association organises the Miss Galaxy Pageant, which is the most public expression of the role in the country. Wikipedia also records that some leitī from economically disadvantaged households are vulnerable to sexual slavery, a risk that falls unevenly and along the same economic line.

Where leitī stand with families and churches

Fakaleitī are generally accepted within their extended families, which are foundational in Polynesian societies, while being subject to discrimination and violence outside them, most sharply in youth. Within the Christian churches central to Tongan life, leitī may be accepted through their financial and social contributions even as their gender and sexuality remain contested.

Joe Wilson, who directed and produced the 2018 documentary Leitis in Waiting, described that arrangement to Pacific Beat as the thing that drew him to the story: Tonga is the most religious country he had visited, and the leiti community is also well integrated into its church communities, so leitis are accepted on some levels and not on others. He also described American-funded televangelists driving a campaign against LGBT people in Tonga, which in his account was creating an ugly division that had not really existed there before that approach emerged.

The documentary itself works as a record of the position. It follows Mataele for a year, includes Princess Salote Lupepau'u Tuita recalling her mother dressing a young Joey in a life-sized doll's clothes and taking him around, and closes on a national consultation organised by the association at which it publicly called for decriminalisation for the first time.

How Tongan law treats leitī

Tonga's Civil Offences Act criminalises cross-dressing and sodomy, each carrying a term of up to ten years, and the association's work includes reforming laws it describes as colonially influenced. Mataele works alongside that with the Pacific Equality Project, which advocates decriminalisation across the Pacific Islands, and she received a Commonwealth Points of Light Award at the London premiere of the documentary, an honour given by the British government and endorsed by the Queen, commended for using song, humour and dance to promote issues affecting the transgender community. The award carries no standing in Tonga, and she dedicated it to everybody who had helped fight the fight.

Samoa provides the comparison, and it is a partial one. Wikipedia records that the Samoan government's Crimes Act 2013 decriminalised female impersonation, so that being visibly fa'afafine is no longer an offence, while section 67 continued to criminalise sodomy with a maximum of five years where both people are male and over sixteen. Neither jurisdiction has repealed the whole colonial-era inheritance, and Tonga has not taken the first of those two steps.

Why nobody has counted the leitī

No published estimate of the number of leitī in Tonga is on record; the neighbouring category has been counted. Wikipedia gives fa'afafine as up to 3.5 per cent of natal males in Samoa, and the BU Anthropology Wiki quotes a BBC report from 2016 putting the figure between one and five per cent of Samoa's population of roughly 190,000. Those are Samoan numbers arrived at in a Samoan context and they are not a proxy for Tonga.

What the record for Tonga carries instead is institutional presence: an association with a named president, an annual pageant, a documentary, a criminal statute and a national consultation. Those establish that the category is living and organised without establishing how many people it holds, and no source on file closes that gap.