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By Anna
Certain “women” in Samoa are not honored as a part of Women’s History Month, but are shunned every month of the year and have been traditionally segregated into their own communities because of their unfamiliar sexual orientation.
Hazy Pau Talauati holds her dog in her village in Samoa. Talauati is a fa'afafine, a man who was raised by her parents as a woman.
The fa’afafine are Samoan boys raised as girls because their parents already had too many boys in the family and need girls to do the “woman’s” chores. While families are aborting girls in China, Samoans are deciding the gender of their boys because they recognize women are vital to their culture. On the other hand, if Samoans would not segregate work as female and male they would not need to raise their male children as females.
Traditionally fa’afafine are the caretakers of their parents after their other siblings have started their own families, but, if they do marry, they often marry women because they are not necessarily gay. Today, however, many fa’afafine have chosen to become so later in life and are homosexual. They also have become more accepted in modern culture and can have ordinary jobs and careers, but still face much discrimination.
Because of organizations like GLBT, fa’afafine are integrated and appreciated in culture today, but how would the culture function if it hadn’t accepted institutionalized sexism hundreds of years ago? Discrimination would have decreased and boys could go about doing “women’s work” without actually becoming women just because the work needed to be done.
A fa'afafine man poses before a luau in Samoa.
What has fa’afafine culture done to the girls of Samoa? Though women are highly respected in Samoan culture, they still have few options when it comes to jobs because there are certain village chores not for men. Yet now the fa’afafine often have more options than naturally born women because they can work in men or women’s roles.
God forbid women use their month to actually make change for women instead of playing into the institutions’ hands. Maybe then men and women throughout the world would stop denying people the opportunity to be nurses or secretaries or hairdressers because that’s “women’s work.”
All facts from http://www.abc.net.au
