So I have a coworker who is half Hawaiian and half Native American and we were talking about things they'll call white people over there and he just says "we'll sometimes call them "MΔhΕ«", don't look it up cause it's a slur."
And of course I looked it up and I'm just like ??? It's just the Hawaiian third gender? Everything about the term seems cool to me. Like, there's alot of cultural significance behind the word, in the past MΔhΕ« were held in very high esteem and had an important role in their culture and it only started getting used in a derogatory way because of western influence. He said it's like calling someone the F slur in Hawaii. So I challenged why he thinks of it as a slur and he got pretty uncomfortable with the conversation. I asked him if it's a slur than what's the "socially acceptable" Hawaiian term for trans folk there and he had no idea. Probably because bad actors have done their best to make the very existence of trans people socially unacceptable.
It's just a case of transphobia mixed with colonization. Westerners have made them uncomfortable with the idea of a nonbinary gender system, and tried to erase the existence of other genders in every culture they come across. It's just the equivalent of being called gay: something only straight cis people or internalized homo/transphobic people would take issue with. I think a step towards decolonizing their culture would be reclaiming the term and refusing to see it as a slur, and after doing some digging it does look like there's efforts to reclaim it as part of their cultural identity.
If there's any Native Hawaiians here who can provide more input and context here it would be appreciated.
Edit: Gonna repost this gender map I included in a Mega post I made ages ago:
