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.

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 and asked before leaving that the stones be set near the sea. 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. 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, and a Bishop Museum exhibition.

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. 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.

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 Glade Show Lounge in Honolulu's Chinatown, a drag club with brochures surviving from 1965, was where much of that generation worked and sheltered.

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 rather than merely narrow.

Why Tahiti and Hawai'i differ

Two colonial histories are routinely told as one. In Tahiti the word stayed in ordinary use, and a separate category, raerae, came into use in the 1960s for a more Westernised position; some māhū object to the newer word as an abject reference to sex. A survey of the medical and anthropological literature on French Polynesia, abstracted in PubMed, separates them 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 abstract notes that in the Hawaiian Islands māhū had come to work as a derogatory term for a gay man or a drag performer.

The Hawaiian word fell further and has come further back. Reclamation dates from the 1990s, and in 2021 Kānaka Maoli formed the māhūi, a subgroup of the Hawai'i LGBT Legacy Foundation, which now opens Honolulu Pride with a ceremony at the Kapaemāhū stones every October.

How mahuwahine was built

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.

Who the word belongs to

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, 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. Naming the categories separately keeps each of them from dissolving into LGBTQI.