Māhū names a person who holds both masculine and feminine within them, in Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) and Tahitian tradition. The word is usually translated as "in the middle".
Māhū traditionally carried specific responsibilities as teachers, healers and keepers of knowledge, and the role predates European contact by centuries.
Māhū describes a position rather than a deviation. The translation people who hold the word use most often is "in the middle", and the emphasis falls on what that middle is for. In Hawaiian tradition māhū were entrusted with things that required someone standing between: genealogies, chants, healing practice, and the teaching of hula, including dances performed in temple contexts that were otherwise closed to men.
Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, the kumu hula and cultural practitioner who has done more than anyone to bring the word back into public use, describes māhū as occupying "a place in the middle" between male and female. She has also been explicit that this is not a translation exercise: māhū is a Hawaiian category that existed before anyone in Hawaiʻi had encountered Western gender vocabulary, and it does not need to be converted into that vocabulary to be real.
It is worth separating māhū from aikane, which describes intimate same-sex relationships in Hawaiian tradition. The two overlap in some lives and are not the same category.
Hawaii and Tahiti are not the same context
Māhū appears in both Hawaiian and Tahitian societies, and the two are related but not identical.
The earliest published European description comes from William Bligh's log of 1789, written in Tahiti. Twentieth-century anthropology, particularly Robert Levy's fieldwork in the Society Islands, described a Tahitian model in which each village recognised a small number of māhū occupying a defined social role. That model has been criticised since as too tidy, and as a description shaped by what a visiting researcher was in a position to see.
In Tahiti from the 1960s onward, rae-rae emerged as a separate category, generally associated with feminine presentation, urban life and, in some framings, sex work. Some māhū regard rae-rae as a distinct thing and some regard the distinction as one imposed from outside. In Hawaiʻi the word carries the ceremonial and knowledge-keeping associations described above more strongly. Treating the two as one word with one meaning is a mistake, and so is assuming the Hawaiian sense is the original and the Tahitian one a variant.
An important note
Māhū is a Kanaka Maoli and Polynesian identity held by Kanaka Maoli and Polynesian people. It is not a label available to outsiders, and it is not an exotic synonym for transgender, non-binary or third gender. Some māhū also identify as transgender women, as Wong-Kalu does. Others do not, and the fact that some do is not permission to assume it of the rest.
Kapaemahu: the four healer stones
On Waikīkī Beach stand four large stones known as Kapaemāhū. The tradition attached to them says four healers travelled from Raiatea, in what is now French Polynesia, more than five hundred years ago, brought healing practice to Oʻahu, and transferred their power into the stones before departing. The tradition also says they were māhū.
That last detail vanished from the plaques and the public accounts for most of the twentieth century. In 2015 Wong-Kalu located a 1907 Hawaiian Almanac account at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in which the healers' māhū identity was recorded plainly. The recovery of that account led to the animated short film Kapaemahu (2020), directed and narrated by Wong-Kalu with Dean Hamer and Joe Wilson, told in the Niʻihau dialect of Hawaiian and shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. A Bishop Museum exhibition and revised signage at the site followed.
It is a useful case because it shows the mechanism precisely: not a tradition destroyed, but a detail edited out and then forgotten, and then found again in a library.
What did colonisation do?
Protestant missionaries arrived in Hawaiʻi in 1820 and brought a legal and moral framework in which māhū had no place. Hawaiʻi's first anti-sodomy law was enacted in 1850. Kaomi, a māhū healer and aikāne of Kamehameha III, was driven out of court and attacked. Over the following century the word itself was degraded from a respectful term into an insult, which is the ordinary fate of a category a colonial administration has decided is shameful.
The suppression continued well into living memory. Into the 1960s, Honolulu authorities required trans women and māhū in some venues to wear badges reading "I am a boy", with prosecution under an "intent to deceive" provision for those who did not. That requirement was rescinded in 1972.
The current revival sits inside the broader Hawaiian renaissance: the return of the Hawaiian language after decades of suppression in schools, the revival of navigation and hula, and the reassertion of Kanaka Maoli authority over Kanaka Maoli knowledge. Māhū coming back into respectful use is part of that, not a separate LGBTQ+ story running alongside it.
