The Fa’afafine

I've just been doing a bit of reading, and I came across a term that I'd read once before, a long while back; fa'afafine. This term describes a subsection of male Samoan society that takes on traditionally female roles. There is no stigma associated with being a fa’afafine, unlike identifying as gay, even though the fa'afafine have sex with other fa'afafine; gay men in Samoan society are generally looked down upon as being different or repugnant.

One of the things that interested me most about what I read is that the fa'afafine usually come from large families, which could lend credence to the theories regarding birth order and certain female fertility studies which have been done. Another thing that interested me, which is related to the above sentence, was the fact that the fa'afafine lavish most of their affection on their nieces and nephews in lieu of having their own children. The correlation here is that these men, while they resist the categorization of "gay", are homosexual in the scientific definition of the word and thus must succumb to their genetics. The female fertility study I linked to above found that "female maternal relatives of homosexuals have higher fecundity (fertility rates) than female maternal relatives of heterosexuals". This fertility boost was not found in paternal or male relatives of homosexual men. This is also interesting because it could open up a line of discussion about gay men being born to take care of their large extended families.

The reason this interests me is that it points very strongly towards the theory that homosexuality is definitely not a choice. Now, of course, you could ask any gay person walking down the street if they chose to be attracted to the same sex, and they would obviously answer in the negative; what I'm getting at is more the idea of persuading people who are sitting on the fence about whether or not sexual orientation is a choice in the direction that no, it's not.

Of course, in thirty or forty years the fact that being gay is not a choice will be widely accepted amongst the more socially developed nations, and perhaps even starting to be considered in the less-developed ones; studies like these intensely interest me because they're baby steps on the road to that destination. If humans don't end up destroying the environment and making our planet uninhabitable for current life (which is a subject for another post), then the future is going to be a wonderful place... Not just for gay people, but for all minorities. We're starting to take the first motions towards universal acceptance, and it's looking good. It's just a matter of time.