Digital Transgender Archive

Interview with Agaiotupu Viena

An interview with Agaiotupu Viena, a fa'afafine and trans woman from Amerika Samoa, educator, advocate, and community organizer based in the Seattle area. At the time of these interviews, she was Program Director for TRANSform Culture, an education and advocacy program of the Pride Foundation, a Seattle-area philanthropic organization prioritizing movements led by queer and trans people of color. In addition to her work with Pride Foundation, Viena was a Co-Chair both of United Territories of Pacific Islanders Alliance (UTOPIA,) an advocacy and mutual support organization led by and serving members of the Pacific Islander LGBTQI community, and of the first-ever Washington State LGBTQ Commission. In the first part of this oral history interview, Viena discusses her upbringing in Samoa surrounded by fa'afafine family members, mentors, and peers, her experiences of family life, school, religion, and fa'afafine identity as a child, and the beginnings of her trans activism after her move to Hawai'i at the age of 17 and subsequent estrangement from her family. Additionally, she discusses her thoughts on the value of experiential and cultural knowledge and research justice as part of her work, the insufficiency of mainstream, assimilationist narratives of transness, and the widespread exclusion of Indigenous understandings of gender and gender expression. In the second part of the interview, Viena discusses her move to Seattle and the relationship between her experiences in community with other sex workers and her political activism, her thoughts on fa'afafine and trans sisterhood and chosen family, transformative justice, and the problems of respectability in the nonprofit world, and her work with the Trans Justice Funding Project. Additionally, she discusses the lack of engagement around sex work among mainstream trans organizations, her thoughts on groups and activists doing vital work, and her visions for the future.