Fa'afafine

Fa'afafine is the third of the four genders recognised in Samoan culture, alongside woman, man and fa'afatama. The word means, almost literally, "in the manner of a woman": fa'afafine are Samoans assigned male at birth who live and are addressed as fa'afafine, holding a defined place in the household, the village and the extended family.

The category is not a Samoan translation of a Western one, and the community says so itself. The Samoa Fa'afafine Association, in its 2021 submission to the UN Universal Periodic Review, went on record that fa'afafine and fa'atama are "NOT all transgender" — some are, but grouping the two ignores the cultural belonging, fa'asinomaga, that the association describes as the essence of the identity.

Definition & scope

Fa'afafine is a communal status rather than a private fact. The Samoa Fa'afafine Association characterises it as a "social and communal gender fluid-based status" conferred within the Samoan cultural context, with fa'atama — sometimes written fa'afatama — as the corresponding fourth gender for masculine-presenting Samoans assigned female at birth.

Because the status is conferred socially, the questions Western gender vocabulary asks of it mostly do not apply. There is no transition to complete, no document to amend, and no threshold of medical treatment; a fa'afafine is a fa'afafine because the family and village treat her as one. The Natural History Museum's account makes the further point that applying Western LGBTQ categories to these roles distorts them, because within Samoan society a fa'afafine is acting inside her gender norm, not against it.

The role carries expectations as well as recognition: caring for elders, work within the household, and a licence in public life — including the frankness about taboo subjects that fa'afafine are known for — that neither Samoan men nor Samoan women hold.

History & origins

• Before the missions: gender-diverse roles are described across Polynesia, with the Hawaiian and Tahitian māhū the closest analogue outside Samoa.
• 19th century onward: Christian mission influence reshapes Samoan public morality; the category survives inside family and village life rather than in law.
• 1961–2007: the Mental Health Ordinance treats sexual orientation and preference as mental illness, until the Mental Health Act 2007 repeals it.
• 1987: the Samoa Fa'afafine Association forms informally, in response to the stigma directed at the community during the HIV/AIDS epidemic; it registers as an incorporated society in 2006.
• 2013: the Crimes Act repeals the offence of a male "impersonating" a female in a public place, and the Labour and Employment Relations Act prohibits employment discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation.
• 2016 onward: Fa'afafine Week, running from World AIDS Day to Human Rights Day each December, becomes the community's main national advocacy platform.

In practice

Social standing and legal standing diverge sharply. Samoa has no legal gender recognition — there is no procedure to change a recorded sex — and the Samoa Fa'afafine Association notes that while the 2013 repeal removed the "female impersonation" offence, sodomy remains a criminal offence and the constitution names neither sexual orientation nor gender identity among its protected grounds.

The association's own framing of the resulting position is that in Samoa fa'afafine "do not need to choose between the safety of their family and cultural environment, and their identity" — a security that is cultural rather than statutory, and that the diaspora communities in New Zealand, Australia and the United States carry with them unevenly.

Psychology

Fa'afafine identity is not a clinical category and no diagnostic manual treats it as one; the ICD-11 removed gender incongruence from its mental-disorders chapter in 2019.

Samoa has nonetheless become one of the most-studied settings in the cross-cultural literature on gender and sexuality, largely through the work of Paul Vasey and colleagues. That work reports that fa'afafine recall markedly more female-typical and fewer male-typical behaviour in childhood than Samoan men do, and it has been used to test evolutionary hypotheses about male androphilia — most prominently the kin-selection account, which examines investment in nieces and nephews. The findings are contested as explanations; as descriptions of a population that Western samples cannot supply, they are unusually well documented.

Prevalence & culture

How common is fa'afafine identity?

No census counts fa'afafine, and the figure here is derived from a study of something adjacent.

Semenyna, VanderLaan, Petterson and Vasey (2017), working with 382 Samoan participants, put the prevalence of male androphilia in Samoa at 0.61% to 3.51% of birth-assigned males. In Samoa that orientation is publicly expressed as fa'afafine identity, so the range is the closest available proxy — but it is a proxy, and the two are not the same measurement. Taking the conservative end of the range and expressing it against the whole Samoan population rather than the male half gives roughly 0.3%, which is the figure this entry records and the reason its confidence is low.

The base matters more than the number. The figure describes Samoans, not any wider population, and it should not be read across to the world at large — nobody outside the Samoan cultural world is a candidate for the category in the first place.