Third gender cultures around the world: hijra, fa'afafine, muxe

Third gender is a catch-all English phrase for gender systems with more than two categories. Three of the best known are the hijra communities of South Asia, fa'afafine in Samoa and muxes among the Zapotec people of Juchitán, in southern Mexico. Each has its own words, history and arguments, and people inside them do not all accept the English label. Below, each one is described through sources from or close to its own community, with the points where those sources disagree, and with what the law says where it says anything.

Why third gender is a label to handle with care

The phrase gets attached to dozens of traditions. A 2023 overview by the human rights organisation Outright International lists, among others, the fakaleitī of Tonga, the māhū of Hawaiʻi and Tahiti and the bissu of the Bugis people in Indonesia, whom it calls the fifth gender of Bugis society. That last detail is telling: the number three does not always fit.

Scholars have made the point more sharply. Two of them, writing in the journal GLQ in 2002, argued that the term does not disrupt the binary at all; it adds one more, separate category to the existing two. They also warned against treating non-Western examples as raw material for Western ideas about gender. Some of the people these lists describe reject the phrase for themselves, as the sections below show.

Two other words need keeping apart. Non-binary is a recent English umbrella for genders that are not simply man or woman, not a third box beside them. Two-Spirit is a term chosen by Indigenous people in North America, it belongs to them, and it has its own page here rather than a paragraph in this one. What all of these sit outside, in very different ways, is the gender binary.

If you arrived looking for evidence that gender diversity is old, who was the first transgender person covers that question, and why historians are careful about putting modern words on people who never used them.

Hijra: households, gurus and blessings

Hijra is a word used across South Asia, with regional words beside it: kinnar in parts of India, aravani in Tamil Nadu, khawaja sira in Pakistan. These are rough equivalents, and they are often better understood as related but separate identities. Communities are organised through the guru-chela system. A guru, a senior hijra, heads a household of chelas, or disciples, and households belong to lineages called gharanas. Over generations, many members have been people living in poverty or people rejected by the family they were born into.

Joining is marked by a ritual that the Supreme Court of India, in its 2014 judgment on transgender rights, calls reet. Hijras are known for badhai: singing, dancing and giving blessings at births and weddings, a role that one telling traces to a boon from Rama in the Ramayana. Religion is mixed too. In the Hyderabad community studied by the anthropologist Gayatri Reddy, hijras were practising Muslims or Hindus and performed the rites of both faiths.

How do hijras describe themselves? Not in one way. The same judgment records hijras identifying as women, as "not-men", as "in-between man and woman" or as "neither man nor woman", and notes that the hijras in that case described themselves as third gender. Reddy's ethnography, With Respect to Sex (2005), found that gender and sexuality were only part of the picture. The people she worked with defined themselves through religion, kinship, class and izzat, which means respect.

Reddy also describes a certain weariness with outside attention. According to one review of her book, the hijras she knew expressed irritation at having their "minds eaten by firangi (foreign) people". The label is contested from within as well. Many transfeminine activists in India reject third gender as a term assigned to trans women who do not see themselves that way, In Tamil Nadu, community words such as thirunangai, meaning respected woman, have largely replaced older terms now considered insulting, and they place people within a broader trans identity rather than the hijra one.

What Indian law says, and what changed in 2026

On 15 April 2014, in National Legal Services Authority v Union of India, the Supreme Court declared that hijras and eunuchs, "apart from binary gender", be treated as third gender for the purpose of their constitutional rights. In the same judgment it upheld the right of transgender people to decide their self-identified gender, whether male, female or third gender.

Parliament's Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, passed in November 2019, took a different route. Its definition of a transgender person covered trans men, trans women and genderqueer people, and named kinnar and hijra as socio-cultural identities within it. People could apply to a District Magistrate for a certificate recording their gender as transgender; a certificate as male or female required surgery.

In March 2026 an amendment narrowed that definition. Passed by both houses on 24 and 25 March and signed into law on 30 March, it replaces the definition with a list: people with a socio-cultural identity such as kinner, hijra, aravani or jogta, and people born with variations in sex characteristics, in other words intersex people. It states that people with self-perceived identities are not included, and certificates now depend on the recommendation of a medical board. Human Rights Watch called the bill a huge setback, because it removes legal recognition from trans men, trans women and non-binary people who self-identify.

As of September 2026: petitions challenging the amendment were before the Supreme Court, which issued notice to the government in May 2026 but refused to stay the law. Check for later rulings before relying on this summary.

The result, on Human Rights Watch's reading, is a law in which belonging to a recognised socio-cultural group such as hijra or kinner is a route to legal recognition that simply being a trans woman no longer is.

Fa'afafine: in the manner of a woman

Fa'afafine is a Samoan word: fa'a means in the manner of, and fafine means woman. The Samoa Fa'afafine Association, the community's own organisation, is plain about the frame. In a submission to a United Nations human rights review (undated, but written after 2015), it says Samoa has four cultural genders: female, male, fa'afafine and fa'afatama. It describes fa'afafine as male at birth and explicitly embodying feminine gender traits, and adds that some identify as gay males and some as transgender.

The sociologist Johanna Schmidt, who interviewed half a dozen fa'afafine in Apia in 2000, described a gender defined less by appearance than by work and family. In village life, Schmidt wrote, a sense of gender is largely defined by what a person contributes to the aiga, the extended family, and fa'afafine are identified early by their liking for feminine tasks. One respondent remembered doing the cooking, washing and ironing as a child while a sister played.

Sexuality is where outside readings go most wrong. In Schmidt's account, sex between fa'afafine and men is not read as homosexual by either party, because that would make fa'afafine men "in a way that they simply don't see themselves". Many fa'afafine, Schmidt wrote, are adamant about keeping a distinct, Samoan-based identity, grounded in their place in family and culture rather than in their sexual practices.

That research dates from 2001, and it already described change. Migration, city life and Western media were pushing some younger fa'afafine towards identities built on clothing and make-up, and some Samoans who might once have called themselves fa'afafine were calling themselves gay. The association's own wording, with some identifying as gay and some as transgender, shows the vocabulary still moving.

Neighbouring cultures have related words, such as fakaleitī in Tonga and akava'ine in the Cook Islands. They are cognates, not synonyms, and each has its own history.

Muxe: Zapotec, from Juchitán

Muxes (pronounced roughly mu-shay) belong to the Zapotec people of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, above all the town of Juchitán de Zaragoza. Nobody is certain where the word comes from. One theory traces it to mujer, Spanish for woman, from a time when the x was pronounced like sh.

Muxes are generally assigned male at birth and tend to present in typically feminine ways, in clothing, behaviour and work; many are skilled at embroidery. According to muxes and researchers CNN spoke to in 2023, muxes generally do not identify as women and do not all experience gender dysphoria, while a younger generation is more open to hormone therapy. The sociologist Alfredo Mirandé writes that although most muxes are attracted to men, many would not call themselves gay either, and describes muxe as more of a social and gender category than a sexual one.

Felina Santiago, a muxe activist who presides over the muxe group Las Auténticas Intrépidas Buscadoras del Peligro, put it this way in a television documentary: "We are the duality, neither man nor woman." Kristhal Aquino, another activist, has said: "I am a muxe at heart."

Inside the community the definition is argued over: whether being muxe is inborn or shaped by society, whether you have to be Zapotec, and whether medical transition changes anything. Some families speak of a muxe child as a blessing, partly because muxes have traditionally been expected to stay at home and care for their parents as they age.

Recognised is not the same as safe

It is tempting to hold these traditions up as places where gender diversity is simply accepted. The people in them tend to be more careful. In Juchitán, the group's vela, a festival held each November, was founded by muxes in the mid-1970s (CNN gives 1976, other accounts 1975) in response to the persecution they faced. It now draws thousands of visitors. Óscar Cazorla, one of its founders, was stabbed to death in 2019, and when Al Jazeera covered the festival in November 2023, nobody had been arrested.

A researcher quoted by CNN describes a persistent culture of machismo on the Isthmus, and some muxes face rejection and exclusion at home. Across Mexico, the Trans Murder Monitoring project counted 52 killings of trans and gender-diverse people between October 2022 and September 2023, second only to Brazil in Latin America.

Samoa and South Asia tell similar stories. Schmidt found fa'afafine an unremarked part of everyday life in Apia, yet met reactions to the research ranging from mild concern to overt disgust. In its UN submission, the Samoa Fa'afafine Association pointed out that only female and male appear in Samoan legislation, asked that fa'afafine and fa'afatama who identify as transgender be able to change the gender marker on their documents, and called for the repeal of sections of the Crimes Act 2013 that still criminalise consensual same-sex relations. Under British rule, hijras were placed under the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, which subjected them to registration and monitoring. A place in a tradition has never guaranteed a place in the law.

How to talk about these traditions with respect

None of this needs a rulebook, but a few habits help, and they are our suggestions rather than anyone's official line:

• Use the word the person uses, and let them tell you what it means. A muxe, a fa'afafine or a hijra may also call themselves trans, gay or a woman, or may not; every one of those answers appears in the sources above.
• Do not borrow the word. Whether you have to be Zapotec to be muxe is debated inside the community, and that debate is theirs to settle, not an opening for everyone else.
• Do not use these traditions as evidence in someone else's argument, for or against. They are ways of living, not exhibits.
• Put a date on anything legal. Indian law on this changed in 2014, 2019 and 2026, and the latest change is being challenged in court.

If you are reading for LGBTQ+ History Month, these histories belong in it, told in their communities' own terms. And if you meet someone from one of these communities, online or off, the same rule applies as with anyone: ask what their words mean to them, and listen to the answer.