Raerae

The literature is small and most of it is French. A review published in Santé mentale au Québec in 2015 searched the medical, social and anthropological databases and found twenty articles and theses on raerae and māhū together. The fullest description in English, by Jessie V. Ford and Eli Coleman in the International Journal of Transgender Health in 2023, rests on forty-seven participants across ten islands of the Society, Tuamotu and Marquesas groups, with the most recent fieldwork dating from 2014.

Why raerae is not another word for māhū

Ford and Coleman put the relation in one line: raerae is a more recent type of māhū who express themselves more overtly as women in society. The 2015 review draws the same line through what each involves. Being māhū carries a cultural meaning recognised in the history of Polynesian society and is not a medical or psychiatric condition; being raerae extends the change to possible hormone treatment and surgery, while the social role māhū hold in education and in tourism is retained.

The older category is defined by position rather than direction. Māhū is glossed as in the middle, and the role carried healing, teaching and family duties without full female presentation. Raerae present and are addressed as women, which is a different arrangement and not a further stage of the same one. The distance shows up in where the two live: māhū are found across the islands, including the rural ones, while raerae are concentrated in Papeete and the urban parts of Tahiti.

Some māhū reject the newer word outright, reading it as a degradation. That objection is part of the record and has not been settled by anybody with standing to settle it.

Where the word raerae came from

Nobody has traced the word to a first use. The accounts on file agree that it appears in Tahiti in the 1960s and that its origin is uncertain, with one line of anthropological explanation deriving it from the nickname of a māhū who did sex work during the arrival of French military personnel in the nuclear testing years. In Tahitian the word began with derogatory associations, tied to slang for prostitution, and it has not entirely lost them.

That makes raerae unlike its Pacific neighbours in construction as well as in date. Fa'afafine, Fakaleiti and Akava'ine are all built out of older vocabulary meaning in the manner of a woman. Raerae is built out of nothing recoverable, which is consistent with a word that started as street slang in one town.

The book-length treatments are Tahitian and French. F. Bauer's RaeRae de Tahiti: Rencontres du 3e type was published in Papeete by Haere Po in 2002, and S. Campet submitted a dissertation the same year on the Tahitian rae rae as an encounter with a third sex. Both predate every English-language study on file.

What anthropologists mean by gender liminal

The word that recurs in the ethnography is liminal. Niki Besnier's chapter on Polynesian gender liminality through time and space, published in Gilbert Herdt's Third Sex, Third Gender in 1994, set the term for the region, and Ford and Coleman gloss it as an anthropological word for being on the border of social categories or outside their restrictions. Robert Levy's Tahitian fieldwork of the 1960s and 1970s is the study cited most often for the continuity of the māhū role, and Douglas Oliver's reconstruction of ancient Tahitian society, published in 1974, places that role before European arrival, which reached Tahiti in 1767.

Raerae sit outside all of that. They appear in the same decade Levy was working, they are absent from every account of the precontact system, and the literature therefore treats them as a recent category inside a much older arrangement, and not as a survival of it. Kuwahara, Matzner, Elliston and Bauer are the names that recur for the contemporary material, and between them they cover a period of about twenty years.

What the Papeete economy did to raerae

French Polynesia's economy is dominated by tourism, and Papeete is expensive to live in. Raerae work in hospitality, entertainment, hairdressing and in some cases government, and they migrate from the outer islands to Tahiti for those jobs, against family rejection, workplace discrimination and an absence of unemployment benefit.

Sex work runs alongside that, and it is the part of the picture that reaches print most often. In Papeete raerae make up the majority of the people in street prostitution, put at around a hundred people overall and about twenty active on a given night in the middle of the 2010s. Ford and Coleman's forty-seven participants included thirty-six per cent who had done sex work at some point and nine per cent who did it regularly, described as driven by survival, by the speed of the earnings and by the cost of transition rather than by coercion.

Accounts of raerae lead with the sex work far more often than accounts of māhū lead with the teaching, and both categories contain people doing both.

How families in Tahiti receive raerae

Polynesian identity is determined largely through family relationships, and Ford and Coleman found acceptance within the family to be the thing that mattered most. It came more readily from mothers and siblings than from fathers, and it grew as participants aged, particularly among fathers, tracking their own self-acceptance. Taking on the care of ageing parents and relatives, and in some cases adopting young relatives in need of care, reinforced it. Kuwahara reported the same pattern in 2014, and Ikeda described it among māhū in Hawai'i in the same year.

The vocabulary of the clinic did not travel. Ford and Coleman record that transsexual, transvestite, gender dysphoria, gender incongruence and homosexuality did not resonate with their participants, being twentieth-century Western psychiatric categories that described nothing the participants recognised. The Tahitian words did the work instead.

Acceptance has a condition attached to it. The 2015 review states that raerae and māhū are integrated into local professional and cultural life and accepted so long as their sexuality remains unspoken and invisible, which is harder for raerae than for māhū. Paul Vasey's warning, quoted by Ford and Coleman, runs against the idealised reading from the other side: there is a danger in glamorising cultures where a third-gender status is institutionalised, and thereby missing the violence, the stigma, the structural inequality, the poverty and the family rejection that people in them also live with. Ford and Coleman say their own results can support the possibility that raerae and māhū fare better than gender-diverse people elsewhere, and no more than that.

Why no count of raerae exists

There is no population figure, and the numbers that circulate are counts of something else. Forty-seven people took part in the study that covers the most ground, across ten islands, and its authors describe it as a baseline for later work. The Papeete figures count participation in street sex work in one city on a given night. Territorial HIV surveillance carries no raerae-specific figure at all, and the reports state plainly that the gap is in the data.

What can be said is where the category is found. Raerae are a Tahitian phenomenon, largely confined to French Polynesia and concentrated in and around Papeete, which is also where the word was made.