Across Pacific Island cultures — Samoan fa'afafine, Hawaiian māhū, Tongan fakaleiti, and others — there are long-standing traditions of gender identities beyond the binary, embedded in community life, family structure, and spiritual practice. These traditions were not imports or inventions; they were, in many cases, suppressed by missionary contact and colonial governance and are now subjects of ongoing recovery and reassertion. They constitute living evidence that gender diversity is not a Western modernity but a human constant.
Juana