('in the middle') in Native Hawaiian and Tahitian cultures are third gender people with traditional spiritual and social roles within the culture, similar to Tongan and Samoan . Historically māhū were assigned male at birth (AMAB), but in modern usage māhū can refer to a variety of genders and sexual orientations. According to present-day māhū kumu hula Kaua'i Iki: In modern popular culture, māhū is commonly used pejoratively of LGBTQ people. History According to some, in the pre-colonial history of Hawai'i, māhū were notable priests and healers, although much of this history was elided through the intervention of missionaries. Others describe the māhū as not having access to political power, being unable to aspire to leadership roles, and "Perceived as always available for sexual conquest by men." The first published description of māhū occurs in Captain William Bligh's logbook of the Bounty, which stopped in Tahiti in 1789, where he was introduced to a member of a "class of people very common in Otaheitie called Mahoo... who although I was certain was a man, had great marks of effeminacy about him." A surviving monument to this history are the "Wizard Stones" of Kapaemāhū on Waikiki Beach, which commemorate four important māhū who first brought the healing arts from Tahiti to Hawaiʻi. These are referred to by Hawaiian historian Mary Kawena Pukui as pae māhū, or literally a row of māhū. The term māhū is misleadingly defined in Pukui and Ebert's Hawaiian dictionary as "n. Homosexual, of either sex; hermaphrodite." The assumption of same-sex behavior reflects the conflation of gender and sexuality that was common at that time. The idea that māhū are biological mosaics appears to be a misunderstanding of the term hermaphrodite, which in early publications by sexologists and anthropologists was used generally to mean "an individual which has the attributes of both male and female," including social and behavioral attributes, not necessarily a biological hybrid or intersex individual. This led to homosexual, bisexual, and gender nonconforming individuals being mislabeled as "hermaphrodites" in the medical literature. Kaomi Moe, aikāne to King Kamehameha III and a māhū, is another historical example. In 1891, when painter Paul Gauguin first came to Tahiti, he was thought to be a māhū by the indigenous people, due to his flamboyant manner of dress during that time. His 1893 painting Papa Moe (Mysterious Water) depicts a māhū drinking from a small waterfall. Missionaries to Hawai'i