Whakawahine

The definition of record is a glossary line rather than a study. English Wikipedia has no article under the word at all. What defines it are three New Zealand glossaries, one from the Public Service Commission, one from the community organisation OutLine Aotearoa and one from the University of Auckland, each of which reaches for a slightly different English phrase and then says the English is not sufficient.

How the word whakawahine is built

The construction is ordinary te reo. Whaka- is the causative prefix, roughly to cause to be or to make into, and wahine is woman, so the University of Auckland glossary renders the whole loosely as in the manner of a woman. The Public Service Commission is more careful with it: there is no direct English translation, the entry says, it roughly translates as trans woman, and more literally it is being or becoming, in the manner or spirit of a woman.

The counterpart is whakatāne, in the manner of a man, and the Auckland glossary attaches a warning to it. The town of Whakatāne is not named after transgender men. The original use of the word is the ordinary one, and the place name comes from that.

Neither the prefix nor the noun is unusual, which is part of why the word resists a date. Nothing on file records a first written use, and the earliest dated text in the material is an ABC News article of 31 August 2019, quoted in the Wiktionary entry and retrieved there in May 2020, which lists the Pacific terms and does not discuss this one.

Which words sit beside whakawahine in te reo

The coordinate term is tangata ira tāne, a person of male essence, which the glossaries render roughly as trans man; the University of Auckland pairs it with tangata ira wahine for a trans woman. OutLine Aotearoa lists hinehī and hinehua alongside whakawahine for people assigned male at birth with a female gender identity, and the Public Service Commission adds taahine, which it describes as close to mixed gender, sometimes non-binary, sitting at the intersection of Māori and non-cisgender identity. Irawhiti is the te reo word the Auckland glossary gives for Transgender.

Above all of them sits takatāpui. The Public Service Commission describes it as a traditional term reclaimed by Māori to hold culture and spirituality together with diverse sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions, and sex characteristics; the Auckland glossary adds that it denotes a spiritual and cultural connection to the past and may mean something different to each person. OutLine records the older sense the reclamation works from, intimate companion of the same sex, and notes that many Māori use it instead of or in addition to lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer or transgender.

One grammatical fact underlies the whole vocabulary. Te reo Māori has no gendered singular pronoun: ia covers he, she and it, whatever the gender or sex of the person referred to. A distinction English speakers have to build into their pronouns is simply absent from the language these words are made in.

Why the Pacific comparisons are drawn carefully

Whakawahine is routinely listed with a set of Pacific terms, and the New Zealand glossaries keep it out of the acronym they use for them. MVPFAFF+ stands for māhū in Tahiti and Hawai'i, vaka sa lewa lewa in Fiji, palopa in Papua New Guinea, fa'afafine in American Samoa, Samoa and Tokelau, akava'ine in the Cook Islands, fakaleiti in Tonga and fakafifine in Niue. Whakawahine is defined a few lines away from those entries and marked as belonging inside a Te Ao Māori context rather than inside the acronym.

The formula the Auckland glossary uses for every one of these words is the same and it is a positive instruction rather than a hedge: the term is best understood within its own cultural context. Mahu is glossed as in the middle rather than in the manner of a woman, and Fa'afafine, Fakaleiti and Akava'ine are all built on the same in the manner of construction that whakawahine uses. That shared construction is a fact about morphology across related languages, and it is not evidence that the categories behind the words match.

What the record on whakawahine does not hold

No scholarship on the word has been traced. The definitions come from a government commission, a university and a community organisation, all of them in Aotearoa New Zealand and all of them writing for readers rather than researchers. The Auckland glossary states its own method plainly: it was compiled from definitions contributed by students, community members and organisations including InsideOut and Gender Minorities Aotearoa, and it is not exhaustive.

Work that would fill the gap exists. A comparative study of the fa'afafine of Samoa and the whakawahine of Aotearoa New Zealand is held in the open access repository of Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, and it has not been read for this entry. Until material of that kind is read, this entry records a word, a construction, a set of neighbouring terms and the institutions that define them.