This Silly Movie Could Solve the Debate about Trans Women in Sports

What we can learn from Samoa

I was on a plane recently, watching a movie out of the corner of my eye that the passenger across from me had playing. It took place in a beautiful, tropical setting and seemed to star a pallid Michael Fassbender yelling at a feminine male soccer player. Hm, I thought to myself, that person getting yelled at really looks like a fa’afafine.

Indeed, the movie was Next Goal Wins, the true-ish story of the consistently-losing Samoan soccer team, and the angry white guy who arrives to save the game. I decided to watch it, mostly with the sound off and subtitles (I was “working”), to see how they handled the character based on the real life fa’afafine and soccer player Jaiyah Saelua.

In the film, Fassbender, portraying Dutch-American football coach Thomas Rongen, doesn’t understand why Saleua is on the men's team when she’s visibly female. (To him, anyway! To me, the actor playing Saleua looks identifiably male.) At any rate, Rongen is confused and angry at being confronted with this gender nonconforming and difficult [for him] to characterize human, until people explain to him that walking around in the world like this—male, feminine, wearing women’s clothes and make-up—is No Big Deal in Samoa. And since everyone knows and accepts that Saelua is technically male, Saelua plays on the men’s team, and even wears the uniform. Saelua’s on estrogen (at least in the film), and still not competing against women.

Let’s do that! Problem solved.

Except that, here, we have no such category and no such acceptability. It’s so hard for Americans to understand the fa’afafine that a writer for Forbes, in a piece about the film, describes them as “a third gender in the Samoan culture often referred to as transgender or non-binary.” While I do believe that today, the fa’afafine may be increasingly referring to themselves that way, due to the influence of Western gender beliefs, that’s certainly not the way they’ve understood themselves historically. That, in fact, is the imposition of a western idea of gender identity onto them, as Paul Vasey, the sex and psychology researcher who has spent decades studying the fa’fafafine, has written. That’s colonialism of non-western, indigenous understandings of gender—the greatest sin, according to wokeness…and the woke are the ones sinning!

Fa’afafine are same-sex attracted, feminine males. The name roughly translates to “in the manner of a woman.” Sodomy is technically illegal in Samoa, but in 2013, the government decriminalized “female impersonation,” essentially bestowing rights upon the fa’afafine because everybody knows they’re not female. As I understand it, “straight” men can have sex with them without being considered gay because gay is not okay, but these guys aren’t masculine so they’re not real men so it’s cool to have sex with them and it doesn’t make me gay because we shepherded them into a new category outside of manhood but I know they’re not women but, like, no, really I’m not gay because I act like a real man!

I’m not suggesting that we create room for male gender nonconformity by criminalizing homosexuality and creating some category that we scoot these “not like a real man” fellas into. But I am suggesting that, rather than impose our western idea of gender identity onto others, we allow for different culture-bound understandings, and try to make room for gender nonconforming people without denying reality and without infringing on women’s rights.

One solution is that trans women, or males who identify as women, or transgenderists (as Virginia Prince called heterosexual cross-dressing men who might take hormones but didn’t get surgery), or cross-dressers, or those who medically alter themselves to appear more feminine—that all of these people look how they want and do what they want to themselves without asking the general public to accommodate them in any way other than to tip our hats and say, “top o’ the morning to ya.” And then they would play on the sports team and use the bathroom and the locker room and take the scholarship or the grant according to their sex.

To do this means allowing our culture to shift and not be hostile to “non-passing” men, who engage in their personal version of “female impersonation.” It means inching closer to my ultimate goal, which is to make gender nonconformity No Big Deal here, too. And I know that there’s tremendous resistance to this—both from the hard right and the rad fem left, despite the fact that many rad fem lesbians lean masculine in appearance. Many of them object to ignoring or normalizing autogynephilia, which I understand. As I’ve learned, some AGPs conceive of women as numbskulled sex objects, and that’s the look, the existence, they’re trying to conceive, as this video demonstrates. Normalizing fetishes is a Pandora’s box. But the box is already open so, now what?

Perhaps one reason for the relative tolerance of fa’afafine is that they’re not autogynephilic—straight dudes attracted to the fantasy of themselves as women, per Ray Blanchard’s typology of transsexualism. (The other category is what he called “homosexual transsexual:” very gender nonconforming, same-sex attracted transsexuals, closer to fa’afafine than AGP.) There’s not a direct line between how sports are handled in Samoa and any solution here. But maybe there’s a crooked line?

A new study says that a majority of women athletes polled, especially elite ones, would prefer that sports are divided by sex, not sense of self—depending on the sport. Yet: “81% of female athletes believe sporting bodies should improve inclusivity for transgender athletes.” That is, for many of those polled, exclusions by sex and inclusion for all weren’t contradictory.

I’m curious what others think. Please leave your thoughts in the comments, which are open to all.