Overview
What fa’afafine means.
Fa'afafine is a Samoan word for a Samoan person. Fa'a means in the manner of. Fafine means woman. Assigned male at birth, living in a feminine place in Samoan life — not a man, not making the same claim a woman makes, and under no obligation to explain the difference to anyone in the village.
It is not rare and it is not new. Fa'afafine turn up in outsiders' writing about Samoa from the 1800s and in Samoan memory long before that. The Samoa Fa'afafine Association was founded in 2006 by ten fa'afafine — teachers, public servants, professionals. There is a Fa'afafine–Fa'afatama Week with a national pageant at the end of it. In Pago Pago the Miss SOFIAS pageant has run since 1979. This is an organised, arguing, funeral-attending community, not a term someone made up online.
Now the closed part, plainly. If you are not Samoan, this is not your word. Not by feeling, not by admiration, not by having read a good article about it. Fa'afafine is bound to aiga, to fa'a Samoa, to a village and a language and a set of obligations nobody can opt into. Other Pacific peoples have their own words and those are not transferable either.
It is also not a neat translation of anything. Fa'afafine is not the Samoan word for gay. It is not the Samoan word for transgender. Some fa'afafine also call themselves trans women and mean it. Others say no, firmly, and mean that. The community argues about this openly — especially about surgery, and about diaspora kids raised on English vocabulary.
One warning about what follows. A great deal of this page is about duty, and that is not decoration. For many fa'afafine the identity arrives already attached to work: cooking, caring, staying, sending money. Being recognised and being loved out loud are two different things, and Samoan families are much better at the first.
People assigned male at birth who embody both masculine and feminine traits in Samoan culture. A recognized third gender.
Fa’afafine in one line
Origin
Where the word comes from
Fa'afafine is a Samoan term, from fa'a- ('in the manner of') and fafine ('woman'), naming a recognised gender role for people assigned male at birth who live in a feminine social position within Samoan family and village life. Outsiders' accounts of fa'afafine appear in European writing about Samoa as far back as the 1800s, and the role is understood within Samoa to predate that contact entirely, embedded in fa'a Samoa (the Samoan way) rather than originating as a response to it.
Organised community life around the identity is well documented in the modern era: the Miss SOFIAS pageant in Pago Pago has run since 1979, and the Samoa Fa'afafine Association was founded in 2006 by ten fa'afafine professionals, later running an annual Fa'afafine–Fa'afatama Week. Academic study of fa'afafine, including comparative work with Aotearoa/New Zealand's whakawahine and Tonga's fakaleiti, has grown since the 1990s and 2000s.
Signs people describe
Common experiences
None of these is a test. Most people recognise a few and shrug at the rest.
Nobody ever sat you down about it.
The aunties simply started handing you the women's jobs at family events, and you took them.
You were seven and already in the kitchen at the fa'alavelave, and no adult treated this as a problem needing a solution.
Your father has never used a word for you and has also never thrown you out. That silence is the arrangement.
You are the one who stayed.
Your siblings married and moved. You look after your mother.
Palagi people ask whether you are trans.
"I'm fa'afafine" is the honest answer, and they hear it as a dodge.
In one weekend you carried umu stones and wore a puletasi to a funeral, and neither one felt like a costume.
You have a boyfriend who is not gay, according to him.
His mother is already choosing his wife.
Church every Sunday.
You are in the choir, you cooked for the faifeau, and the sermon was about people like you.
"Fafa" from one mouth is affection and from another it is a slap, and you can tell which within a syllable.
Someone's school fees have come out of your wages more than once, and no one has thanked you in words.
You are wanted at every family occasion and you have never once been discussed at one.
The forms in New Zealand or Australia give you boxes, and none of them is the box you actually live in.
Older relatives call you he in Samoan-accented English and it does not sting the way strangers assume it should.
Day to day
What it looks like on a normal Tuesday
Take a Tuesday.
You are up before the house because someone has to be. Your mother's tea. Her tablets counted into the lid. The washing out before the heat, or before the bus.
Then the shift. The rest home, the shop, the classroom, the warehouse floor. You are good at it and everyone knows you are good at it, which is exactly how you ended up covering somebody else's Saturday.
At work a colleague uses a name that is nearly yours. You let it go, because correcting it costs more than the thirty seconds it takes.
The evening is not yours either. Choir practice. Somebody's fa'alavelave and the contribution you cannot afford and will pay anyway. A message from home with an amount in it and no question mark.
Around ten you get twenty minutes. That is where the rest of your life lives — the phone, the group chat, the one person who texts you like a person rather than a service.
Then bed, because the tablets need counting again at six.
Across the parts of a life
Open the area you came here for.
Straight answers
What people get wrong
Samoan families raise a son as a daughter when they run short of girls.
No. Outsiders have repeated this for over a century and fa'afafine have denied it every single time they were asked. Nobody is assigned. Families notice early and arrange life around the child instead of against them. The myth turns a person into a household staffing decision.
Fa'afafine just means gay in Samoan.
Different axis entirely. Fa'afafine is about how you live in Samoan life, not who you go to bed with. Some fa'afafine are with men, some with women, some with nobody. And Samoa has plenty of gay men who live as men and are not fa'afafine.
It is the Samoan word for trans woman.
Overlapping, not identical. Some fa'afafine use both words comfortably. Others say fa'afafine is a place in the aiga rather than a claim about being a woman, and that translating it flattens it. Both positions are held by people who are not confused.
Samoa has a third gender, so it must be a good place to be one.
Being visible is not being safe. Sex between men is still a crime in Samoa, up to five years, rarely prosecuted and never repealed. Churches preach against it weekly. Being wanted at the funeral is not the same as being protected on the road home.
The law changed, so it is all fine now.
What changed in 2013 was the removal of the offence of a man impersonating a female — a law that had been used against fa'afafine specifically, with fines and prison. That was real and it mattered. The sodomy provision stayed exactly where it was.
Anyone who feels this way can call themselves fa'afafine.
No. It is a Samoan word carrying Samoan obligations, not a gender option on a menu. Taking it because it sounds better than the words already available to you removes something from a community still fighting for basic legal protection.
Fa'afafine are all pageant queens and hairdressers.
Some are, and those women built the association that does the sexual health work and writes the law reform submissions. The rest are nurses, teachers, aged-care workers, public servants, plantation workers, factory night shift, and people who lift heavy things for a living.
Take care
On the hard days
Sermon Sunday. You cooked the food and sang the descant, and the man you fed spent twenty minutes on people like you while your mother sat beside you looking straight ahead.
His wedding. You may have helped with the catering.
The particular tiredness of being useful. Everyone needs you, everyone relies on you, and no one has asked how you are since you were a teenager.
And the violence, which is not hypothetical. Fa'afafine get harassed, beaten and worse, in Samoa and in the diaspora, and it often goes unreported because reporting means explaining your whole self to a police officer first.
If tonight is one of those nights, you do not have to solve any of it. Ring the person who uses your name without hesitating first. If there is no one, the Samoa Fa'afafine Association exists, and so do Pacific rainbow support services in New Zealand and Australia, and they have heard your exact story before yours.
Pronouns
Pronouns
Samoan does not gender its pronouns. "Ia" does the work of he, she and they all at once. The question that tortures English speakers barely exists in the language many fa'afafine grew up in.
In English, most fa'afafine use she/her. Plenty use he/him with older relatives and do not take it as a wound. Many switch by room — she at work in Auckland, he at the family fono.
A lot of fa'afafine are simply called by their name, which is its own answer.
If you are unsure what someone uses, use their name and follow the family's lead. Do not audit anyone in front of their mother.
Consider another path
This might not be your word if…
- 1You are not Samoan. That is the entire answer and it is not a soft no. Look for your own people's word, or use one of the many that are open to you.
- 2You are Samoan, attracted to men, and live as a man with no feminine social role. You may well be a gay Samoan man, which is its own thing and not a lesser version of this.
- 3You were assigned female at birth. Fa'afatama is the word people would reach for.
- 4You are drawn to the idea of a society with a third gender more than to any of the actual content — the church, the funerals, the money, the sermons, the nursing, the silence.
- 5You are a Samoan trans woman who wants the medical and legal route and does not want the fa'afafine social position. Some people in your situation keep the word and some put it down. Nobody is obliged to carry it.
- 6You want a label for being feminine and male-presenting with no family, no village, no obligation and no church attached to it. Fa'afafine comes with all four whether you wanted them or not.
- 7You are part-Samoan and unsure. That is a real question and a fair one, but it belongs to your family and your community, not to a page on the internet.
Close by
Related identities
Fa'afatama (fa'atama)
Same culture, opposite direction — assigned female at birth, living in a masculine role. The association covers both and the annual week is named for both. Not the same as being a Samoan lesbian.
Fakaleitī / leitī (Tonga)
The nearest neighbour and the one most often confused with fa'afafine. Different country, different word, different church and legal politics. Tongan people use it. Swapping the two words is sloppy, not respectful.
Māhū (Hawai'i and Tahiti)
An older Polynesian category for people in between or both. Belongs to Kanaka Maoli and Mā'ohi people, and is closed in exactly the way fa'afafine is closed.
Akava'ine (Cook Islands)
Cook Islands Māori term used by Cook Islands trans and gender-diverse people. Sibling category, separate people, separate history.
Fakafifine (Niue), Vakasalewalewa (Fiji), Palopa (Papua New Guinea)
More siblings across the Pacific. Each belongs to its own people and none is a synonym for the others, however similar they look on a list like this one.
MVPFAFF
Not an identity — an acronym coined by Niuean fakafifine activist Phylesha Brown-Acton to hold these Pacific words together without dissolving them into LGBTQIA+. You can sit under the umbrella and still be specifically fa'afafine.
ReadTrans woman
Genuine overlap, different framing. Trans woman is a claim about gender backed by medicine and law that travels to any country. Fa'afafine is a position inside Samoan life that does not travel and never required a clinic. Some people hold both without contradiction.
Gay man (Samoan)
A Samoan man attracted to men who lives as a man. Common, and not fa'afafine. The two get merged mostly by outsiders who assume feminine and gay are the same fact.
Two-Spirit
A parallel rather than a relative. Also culturally specific, also not open to outsiders, but it belongs to Indigenous peoples of North America. Useful for explaining the principle, useless as a translation.
ReadNon-binary / third gender
Fa'afafine gets translated as "third gender" for outsiders' convenience and the fit is loose. Non-binary is an individual claim about the self. Fa'afafine is a social position with chores attached.
Questions people ask
Frequently asked questions
Is fa'afafine the same as being transgender?+
Not the same, and not unrelated. Trans is a claim about gender backed by medicine, law and paperwork, and it travels to any country in the world. Fa'afafine is a position inside Samoan family life that does not travel and never needed a clinic. Plenty of fa'afafine use both words. Plenty use one and refuse the other. Both are ordinary positions in the community rather than a sign that anyone is muddled.
Can a non-Samoan be fa'afafine?+
No. It is a Samoan word for Samoan people, tied to aiga, village, language and obligation. Being feminine, being trans, loving Samoan culture or having Samoan friends does not open it. If you are Pacific, your own people very likely have their own word. If you are not, the rest of the vocabulary has plenty of room in it, and none of that room requires taking something from a community still fighting for legal protection at home.
Is it true Samoan families raise a boy as a girl when they have no daughters?+
No. Outsiders have repeated this since the 1800s and fa'afafine have denied it every time they were asked. Nobody is assigned the role to fill a gap in the housework. What actually happens is that families notice early and then arrange life around the child rather than against them. The myth is popular because it makes a person sound like a staffing decision, which is easier for outsiders to file away than a gender is.
Is being fa'afafine accepted in Samoa?+
Recognised, mostly. Accepted, unevenly. Safe, not reliably. Fa'afafine are at every family event and in most workplaces, and the law criminalising a man impersonating a female was removed in 2013 after being used against fa'afafine for decades. But sex between men remains a criminal offence carrying up to five years, rarely prosecuted and never repealed, and the sermons do their own work every week. Visibility and safety are two different things, and Samoa has far more of the first.
The flag
Lgbtqia.wiki records an anonymous Tumblr submitter (19 Dec 2016) and the design carries a hibiscus emblem; designer anonymous.
Sources
- Faʻafafine — Wikipedia Etymology, related Pacific terms and cultural classification; fetched 2026-09-06.
- Migrating Genders: Westernisation, Migration, and Samoan Fa'afafine (Johanna Schmidt) Ethnographic and historical background on fa'afafine; fetched 2026-09-06.
- Ia e Ola Malamalama I lou Fa'asinomaga (Feu'u, Victoria University of Wellington thesis, 2013) Comparative Samoan/Māori research supporting cultural context; fetched 2026-09-06.
Still figuring things out?
Twenty questions, four minutes, and a few words worth trying on.