On Tuesday, The Daily Beast talked with Jaiyah Saelua, a transgender men’s World Cup soccer player for American Samoa who has styled himself the ‘Samoan Caitlyn.” What the Daily Beast terms Saelua’s “triumph” turns out to be two unrelated events he personally did nothing to bring about: Sepp Blatter, the corrupt head of FIFA, stepped down, and Bruce Jenner now calls himself Caitlyn.
Saelua was born male, but identifies as a female, something he claims is accepted as part of the fa’afafine subset of Samoa. It refers to men that participate in roles normally performed by female Samoans. Somewhere between a quarter of a percent and one percent of Samoans identify as fa’afafine [1], a fact the Beast didn’t bother to note.
The article recounted an open letter Saelua wrote to a Samoan magazine about Bruce Jenner’s Vanity Fair coming-out cover. Jenner, Saelua announced, is no more. “She has evolved into a human who is living her truth, as should all human beings, transgender or not.”
Her truth. This is something we keep hearing from the LGBT world – we’re all entitled to our own truth, which we can shape and color and carry around like a fashion accessory. Capital T Truth is, like, so 20th century.
The article decried in particular the ‘sexual bigotry’ that Saelua encountered at the University of Hawaii, where the men’s soccer coach turned her down. She claims that “he didn’t want to put the team in an uncomfortable position” because of her transgenderism.
“It did open my eyes to how cruel the world could be outside the Samoan culture.” Saelua said. Really. That’s cruelty. In Iraq, ISIS is throwing gays off buildings [2]. But it’s cruel to be uncomfortable around a guy who pretends he’s a woman.
Well, that’s his truth.