Fakaleiti

The Tongan word covers a range of positions that no English word covers, and the ABC's Pacific Beat put the everyday description simply in 2018: leitis often identify as women, or as men who dress and behave in a feminine way, and mainly identify as neither.

Why the word cannot predate English contact

The parallel terms across the region take an indigenous word for woman. Samoan Fa'afafine joins fa'a to fafine, Cook Islands Māori Akava'ine uses va'ine, and Māori whakawāhine uses wāhine. Tongan had the same material and used it: Wikipedia's article on fa'afafine lists fakafefine as the Tongan cognate, built on fefine. The form that prevailed borrows its second half from English instead, which puts a floor under the age of the word whatever the age of the role behind it. Sources that present fakaleiti as an untouched precolonial term have the etymology wrong.

None of the sources on file dates the first use. What they establish is a limit rather than a date: the compound cannot be older than sustained English contact in Tonga, and ethnographic description of the role belongs to the twentieth century.

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 does not line up with male, female, homosexual, transgender or non-binary as those words are used elsewhere. Tongan usage has kept the emphasis on gender roles and behaviour rather than on sexual identity, so gender dysphoria may or may not be present, and surgery is not universally sought, because the position rests on a social role rather than on anatomy.

The BU Anthropology Wiki, drawing on Johanna Schmidt's work, records 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. Sue Farran, writing in the Liverpool Law Review in 2010, makes the same point about legal categories: transgender, gender-liminal, transvestite and gay are all available as labels and none of them fully encompasses what it is to be fa'afafine or fakaleiti, and labels imported from elsewhere work as straight-jackets. Nobody has published a count of leitī in Tonga.

Where the role is visible

Joey Joleen Mataele, president of the Tonga Leitis Association, described the working shape of it to the ABC: "The role of leitis in our society is more of a housewives role, a domestic worker, we're known in the public eye in our churches and for helping the youth programs, but when it comes to our personal choices, that's when the barriers start." Employment follows the same pattern, concentrated in tourism, hospitality and entertainment, and dress varies by setting, with masculine clothing common by day and feminine styles at social events. The feminine presentation draws on Western and cosmopolitan fashion rather than on traditional Tongan dress.

Churches, which are central to Tongan life, accept leitī through their financial and social contribution while their gender and sexuality stay contested. The association's Miss Galaxy pageant is the most public expression of the role. Acceptance inside extended families sits alongside marginalisation, discrimination and violence, sharpest in youth, and Wikipedia records that some leitī from economically disadvantaged households are vulnerable to sexual slavery. Farran's summary is that they are part of tradition and at the same time read as symbols of change, integrated and marginalised at once.

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. The 2018 documentary Leitis in Waiting followed Mataele for a year and closes on a national consultation at which the association publicly called for decriminalisation for the first time.

Its director, Joe Wilson, told Pacific Beat that Tonga was the most religious country he had visited and that the leiti community is well integrated into its church communities, "So they're accepted on some levels but not on other levels." He also described American-funded televangelists driving a campaign against LGBT people in Tonga, which in his account was "creating an ugly division that I don't think had really existed in Tonga prior". Mataele received a Commonwealth Points of Light Award at the London premiere, an honour with no standing in Tonga, and she works with the Pacific Equality Project on decriminalisation across the region.

What MVPFAFF names

Fakaleiti supplies one of the letters in MVPFAFF, the acronym the Niuean advocate Phylesha Brown-Acton assembled so that Pasifika categories would be listed under their own names. Its neighbours in that list are Mahu in Hawai'i and Tahiti, Fa'afafine in Samoa, Akava'ine in the Cook Islands and Vakasalewalewa in Fiji. Farran's formulation for what the acronym is answering is that the people it names live between two worlds, one of which is gender enlightened and the other gender repressed, and neither of which supplies a word that fits.