Mahu

The kumu hula Kaua'i Iki sets out what that position carried. Māhū were respected as teachers, usually of hula and chant; in pre-contact times they performed the roles of goddesses in dances held in temples closed to women; they kept genealogies, and parents would ask a māhū to name a child. Joan Roughgarden's account supplies the limit on it, that māhū had no route to political power and could not aspire to leadership.

What the healer stones record

Four boulders on Waikīkī beach are the surviving monument. The Healer Stones of Kapaemāhū commemorate Kapaemāhū, Kahaloa, Kinohi and Kapuni, who according to National Geographic voyaged from the Tahitian island of Raiatea more than five hundred years ago, became known across the islands for curing the sick, and asked before leaving that the stones be set near the sea and filled with their power. The Hawaiian historian Mary Kawena Pukui called them pae māhū, a row of māhū.

The stones spent years under the foundations of a bowling alley and were restored from 1963 onward, but no signage said the healers were māhū until county officials confirmed an addition in 2023, timed for Honolulu Pride in October. Hinaleimoana Kwai Kong Wong-Kalu found the first written account of them in a forgotten box at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa in 2015. It had been written in English by a former colonel of the Hawaiian Kingdom during a period when the Hawaiian language was banned, and printed in the Hawaiian Almanac in 1907. That document produced the Oscar-nominated animated short Kapaemāhū, made by Wong-Kalu with Joe Wilson and Dean Hamer, broadcast on PBS, and a Bishop Museum exhibition that survives as a virtual tour. The chant in the film was composed by the hula practitioner Kaumakaiwa Kanaka'ole, who learned about the stones at a Hawaiian immersion school as a child and only later learned that māhū were involved.

Wong-Kalu's own framing of the site, given to Ka Wai Ola, is that what some people call legends are elements of a history, and that the stones carry an understanding of male and female, life and healing, rather than a tourist attraction.

Where the first written description appears

Captain William Bligh's logbook of the Bounty, at Tahiti in 1789, carries the first published description: a class of people very common in Otaheitie called Mahoo, one of whom Bligh was certain was a man but who had great marks of effeminacy about him. Paul Gauguin was taken for a māhū by Tahitians on his arrival in 1891, on the strength of how he dressed, and his 1893 painting Papa Moe shows a māhū drinking from a waterfall. The American painter George Biddle's Tahitian Journal, covering 1920 to 1922, describes māhū friends and the flight of one of them, Naipu, from French colonial law that sent māhū and homosexuals to hard labour in New Caledonia.

A survey of the French Polynesian literature notes that māhū were exempt from sacrificial rites whose victims had to be men, which places the category inside the ritual system.

How the law made māhū punishable

In Hawai'i the sequence runs from mission to statute to licensing. Biblical law arrived with the missionaries in the 1820s, and the islands' first anti-sodomy law followed in 1850. From the mid-1960s the Honolulu City Council required trans women to wear a badge identifying themselves as male; the buttons read I AM A BOY, and for a decade anyone found without one could be fined under an intent to deceive clause, rescinded in 1972.

The same period produced a refuge. The Glade Show Lounge in Honolulu's Chinatown, a drag club whose brochures survive from 1965 to 1968, was where much of that generation worked and sheltered, with Prince Hanalei among its headliners. Brandy Lee, one of the first drag performers in Hawai'i, began in the 1960s and was still singing live in her eighties.

The writer and historian Adam Keawe Manalo-Camp, researching because he could find no place for māhū in the Native Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement he grew up in, recovered the figure of Kaomi, a māhū who excelled in healing and hula and was the aikāne, or same-sex, lover of King Kamehameha III, who ruled from 1825 to 1854. Aikāne relationships were an ordinary part of Hawaiian society and conflicted with missionary values in the same way māhū did. When the relationship was discovered Kaomi was exiled, and he died of injuries after an attempt on his life.

Why the old dictionary entry misleads

Pukui and Elbert's Hawaiian dictionary defines māhū as homosexual, of either sex, and as hermaphrodite. Both halves fail in the same way. The first collapses gender into sexuality, which was ordinary practice when the entry was written. The second reflects an older technical use of hermaphrodite for anyone with the attributes of both, which put homosexual, bisexual and gender nonconforming people into the medical literature under a word that belongs to Intersex.

The correction from inside the community goes further than the dictionaries have. Wong-Kalu, interviewed by Outright International in 2023, says māhū is not restricted to males and is also female, although neither the historical documentation nor the oldest dictionaries record it that way, which leaves the definition of record skewed. She adds that a māhū in Hawai'i may look more female or may look male, and that being māhū is not only physical: the Pacific reading of a person, as she puts it, looks for a mental, emotional and spiritual place rather than a physical one. She makes a grammatical point alongside it. Hawaiian has no gendered third-person pronoun, ia covering he, she and it alike, so the fluidity English speakers reach for a new pronoun to express is already in the language.

Why Tahiti and Hawai'i differ

Two colonial histories are routinely told as one, and the shared spelling hides the divergence.

In Tahiti a separate category, raerae, came into use in the 1960s for a more Westernised position, and some māhū object to the newer word as an abject reference to sex. A survey of the medical and anthropological literature on French Polynesia, drawing on twenty articles and theses, separates the two by what each involves: māhū retains the traditional social role in education and tourism, and raerae extends the change to hormone treatment and surgery. The same survey states plainly that being māhū has a cultural meaning recognised in the history of Polynesian society and cannot be treated as a medical or psychiatric condition, and it notes that both are accepted in local professional and cultural life as long as their sexuality stays unspoken, which is harder for raerae. It also records that in the Hawaiian Islands māhū had come to work as a derogatory term for a gay man or a drag performer.

Reclamation of the Hawaiian word dates from the 1990s, which is when Manalo-Camp says he first learned what the word had meant. In 2021 Kānaka Maoli formed the māhūi, a subgroup of the Hawai'i LGBT Legacy Foundation, and the Nā Pōhaku Ola ceremony held on the Waikīkī shore that year now opens Honolulu Pride every October.

Who the word belongs to

Mahuwahine was coined inside Hawai'i's queer community in 2003, joining māhū to wahine, woman. Its construction copies the Samoan fa'a plus fafine, and the borrowing is a statement about the regional connection as much as about the person. Mahukane, with kāne, man, is the corresponding form. The coinage arrived with the Hawaiian cultural renaissance and describes something close to a transgender identity, which the bare word does not: māhū in current use covers all genders.

Use of the word outside Kānaka Maoli culture is contested. National Geographic quotes the Honolulu performer Anna Mei, who is not Kānaka Maoli and declines the word for that reason, and records that it has for decades been applied to anyone in the LGBTQ+ community regardless of ancestry. Wong-Kalu's argument runs alongside that: the Euro-American vocabulary is not wrong, and she does not ask outsiders to stay out of it, but in Hawai'i it arrives ahead of the Hawaiian one, and she declines to carry it first.

The same reasoning produced MVPFAFF, the acronym assembled by the Niuean advocate Phylesha Brown-Acton, in which māhū is the M, beside Vakasalewalewa, palopa, Fa'afafine, Akava'ine, Fakaleiti and fakafifine. National Geographic describes it as covering Hawai'i, Tahiti, Fiji, Samoa and Tonga among others. Naming the categories separately keeps each of them from dissolving into LGBTQI, and it is the same argument Native Hawaiian health advocates make when they write materials for clinicians: acknowledging distinct histories is what stops the erasure going further.