In the Middle, Neither Fully Male nor Fully Female

Mahu is a traditional social and spiritual category in Hawaiian and Tahitian culture describing a person understood to embody qualities of both genders at once, a status Besnier's comparative study of Polynesian gender liminality places among a wider family of related third gender or gender liminal roles found across the Pacific, each shaped by its own local history and none reducible simply to a Western transgender category despite the loose comparisons sometimes drawn. Traditionally, mahu were closely associated with the transmission of cultural knowledge, particularly hula, chant and genealogical memory, and with healing practice, occupying a position considered spiritually significant precisely because it stood outside the ordinary gendered division of social and ceremonial labour rather than being marginal to it.

The literal sense of the word, in the middle, captures how the role was understood locally, as a distinct and recognised position rather than as either an incomplete man or an incomplete woman. Besnier's comparative work situates mahu alongside related figures found elsewhere in Polynesia, such as fa'afafine in Samoa, cautioning that despite surface similarities each role carries its own distinct local history and should not be treated as interchangeable examples of one single pan Polynesian category.