Could you tell us a little bit about the pre-colonisation context? So what was life like for Takatāpui at that point in time?

It's so easy to romanticise what life might have been like for us prior to colonisation, but there were things that we know about.

We had our own language.

We had control over all of our land in our own country and we were able to live our culture.

And so the evidence we have for what life was like in pre-colonial times for people that we now call takatāpui and using takatāpui in the broader sense of how we've reclaimed it to embrace all Māori with diverse gender identities, gender expressions, sexualities and innate variations of sex characteristics.

Back in the day, we had no need for such terms because the evidence that we've been able to find, particularly in the research of Ngahuia te Awekotuku, who studied Moteatea and other Māori narratives, and my own work on Whakatauki.

So many other scholars have done work about the place of sexuality generally.

So, Elizabeth, I mean, what do you think is the big kind of, what's the big characteristics of this? What happened there and what difference did it make?