Palopa

Where palopa comes from

The derivation is not in dispute, and the date is unusually tight for a word of this kind. The University of Hawai'i at Mānoa's Pacific research guide records palopa as a Tok Pisin term for individuals who are openly effeminate, a neologism derived from Jennifer Lopez and in use from about 2005 to 2009. The guide credits Christine Steward at page 327 of Niko Besnier's collection Gender on the edge, of 2014.

That is the whole of the dated record. No earlier attestation appears in any source behind this entry, and nothing on file traces the word's spread from Port Moresby outward or names the person who first used it.

Why palopa displaced the English words

Clint Woolly, an LGBTQ+ activist in Papua New Guinea, has argued that Western words such as gay and lesbian are heard there as stigmatising, and has pressed for terms that come from the culture instead. The local alternatives were worse than the English ones. Geli-geli, girlie-girlie, and askan, an obscene compound, are both words used against people rather than by them.

Palopa arrived carrying none of that, and gay and transgender people in Port Moresby began using it of themselves. The case made for the word is a case about visibility: that it allows a stronger cultural identification than the imported vocabulary, and that it makes gender and sexual diversity legible from an Indigenous rather than a borrowed position.

Where palopa sits among the Pacific words

It is one of the seven terms in MVPFAFF, the acronym coined by the Niuean community advocate Phylesha Brown-Acton in 2011, which names Mahu, Vakasalewalewa, palopa, Fa'afafine, Akava'ine, Fakaleiti and fakafifine together. The acronym exists because Pasifika categories were being folded into LGBTQI and losing their own names in the process.

The company is instructive and it is also slightly misleading. The other six name categories with long histories in their own languages; palopa names a category in a creole and takes its form from a singer. The United Territories of Pacific Islanders Alliance has described palopa identity as an expression of gender diversity predating colonial influence, which is a claim about the people rather than about the word, and the two can both hold: the record dates the word to the 2000s and says nothing at all about how long the people it describes have been there.

The wider argument about Pacific continuity is unsettled and the disagreement is on the record. Niko Besnier, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Amsterdam, has said there is no evidence for people comparable to Tongan leitī anywhere in the Pacific except Tahiti and possibly Hawaii, while pointing to his own paper of 1994 for the counter-caution that little can be inferred from historical silence. Kalissa Alexeyeff, at the University of Melbourne, argues that the region's gender-diverse people do not constitute a third gender as they have sometimes been reported to, but a spectrum of expression and identity, with some considering themselves women, some trans and some both. Besnier adds a material observation to that: Western labels come with resources, and some groups have taken up LGBT because doing so opens access to outside funding.

What the record holds on violence against palopa

Nobody has counted how many people the word describes. There is no census figure, no survey estimate and no community count in any source behind this entry.

One set of numbers does circulate. A study conducted in 2011 found that 57 per cent of the transgender people interviewed, many of whom identified as palopa, had experienced physical violence, and 47 per cent sexual violence, with the rates higher among those doing sex work and police officers among the perpetrators in many cases. The study is not named in the source that carries those percentages, and no sample size or method travels with them, so they describe the people interviewed and nothing wider.

How palopa is glossed outside Papua New Guinea

The glosses do not agree with one another. Outright International, writing in 2023, has palopa describing those who are gay, transgender or of a cultural third gender. The Mānoa guide has it for individuals who are openly effeminate. OutLine Aotearoa lists it among Pacific terms best understood within their cultural context and declines to define it at all. The broadest reading is the encyclopedic one, covering anyone whose gender identity or sexuality does not conform to heteronormative standards, and who might in a Western context identify as part of the LGBT+ community.

The disagreement is the content rather than a fault in it. Palopa covers gender and sexuality at once, and English splits them, so every English gloss has to choose which half to lead with and each of these four chooses differently. Papua New Guinea holds other words that resist the same split: kwolu-aatmwol, used by the Simbari people for a third gender, is in some cases also used of Intersex people, and no English term does both jobs.