A local takes me to her table, past a handful of male waiters wearing white blouses and heavy make-up – their lips red, eyebrows plucked and chests waxed. "Some of them are more graceful than girls," my guide says. "They are reliable workers. A lot of people depend on them."

We spot Mataele sitting at a table reserved for dignitaries, dressed in a snug fuchsia twinset with two strings of white pearls and her dark hair in a bun. She greets me with a light kiss.

She's the very picture of a glamorous, well-connected woman in a country with a keen sense of knowing your place. The fact that she was born a man hasn't dented her standing in high society.

Mataele holds a curious position in the Polynesian archipelago. She's not considered a cross-dresser, despite the dresses she wears. She's not gay, despite being attracted to other men.

She's a "fakaleiti", a term that translates roughly into "like a lady". She's among a prominent category of transgendered men in the South Pacific – from Fiji to Samoa and Tuvalu – who don't fit neatly into Western definitions of sexuality.

Whether leitis (lay-tees) are born female or nurtured is another curiosity. Some effeminate young boys are encouraged to act as girls by parents wanting help with household chores. Others feel they've always been female, despite their anatomy.

"I am a woman trapped in a man's body," Mataele says. "I might have been born with male genitals but 99 per cent of my hormones are female. A leiti is a person who acts like a lady, lives like a lady, talks like a lady, sleeps like a lady and dresses like a lady. People say we choose to be what we are but I didn't choose to be a leiti – I was born like this."

She takes me for a walk among the noble families in the Tongan capital Nuku'alofa, who are gathered ahead of the coronation of King Tupou VI, in July. What's striking is how visible leitis are in this conservative Christian country, where their supporters include members of the royal family. Today, some, like Mataele, are happily feasting in the sun. Many more are busy preparing and serving food.

In Australia, transgenders are typically on the fringes of mainstream society. In Tonga, they sit close to the king – or wait on his table, at least.

But leitis still struggle against discrimination and prejudice, Mataele says. "I have been forced to act like a male and talk like a male by a brother of mine, but it never worked. I felt like I was lying to myself," she says.

"The leiti or transgender women community here is very visible but at the same time they are still respectful of the culture in our little kingdom," she adds. "Leitis are seen as helpers. They're chefs, they're decorators, they're hairdressers – that's what we're known for, as a helping hand.

"But when it comes to decision-making, we're nowhere to be seen. It's like we're in the system but out of sight."

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A closet of bright-coloured dresses awaited the arrival of Sonia Inesmorgan Kivalu, the fifth child of poor parents on the outlying Tongan islands of Vava'u. Her mother felt she would be a girl, right through the pregnancy. She readied the house, rearranging the bedroom her new daughter would share with her older sister.

Kivalu, 40, has a photograph of herself wearing a dress, taken not long after she was born a boy. That she wasn't what her mother had expected mattered little. "She wished I was a girl and she prepared everything for me to be a girl," she says, smiling. "And when I am born, I am not."

She stands by a window inside a small hair salon in Nuku'alofa, holding a hairdryer in one hand and in the other a cigarette, which she puts to her bright-red lips. The mud-brown salon is on a busy road by a dirt yard busy with puppies, ducklings and children.

Kivalu is lean with a bob of thick black hair and wearing a yellow blouse, tight black pants and matching heels. "When I was a kid, I always wanted to play with the girls," she says. "I liked to wear my sister's lipstick. It felt natural."

While her six brothers planted crops with their father, she helped with the domestic chores that are typically reserved for females in Tonga. At age 16, she left school to work in a hair salon. "All my life I feel like a woman. Inside of me, my heart, my brain, everything, I'm a woman," she says.

I ask whether that was her choice or her mother's. She tells me that's the wrong question. "It is not my choice. It is not her choice. I am born like this."

Cultural anthropologist Niko Besnier, who has done extensive fieldwork in Tonga, says parents sometimes encourage a young boy to assume a more feminine role at home. But he debunks the myth that some boys, particularly those in families with few or no daughters, are forced to become female.

"When a child looks a bit effeminate, mothers will encourage him. Mothers are just tickled by having a boy who becomes a leiti and will put on him frilly clothes and make him dance," he says. "So if a five-year-old boy is the only one around and there is laundry that needs to be done, a mother may say 'Do it'. And if the boy is a good worker, not only will he be asked to do it over again but that may well forge into his identity if he wants to be a fakaleiti.

"Does that mean a parent will purposely bring up a boy as girl? Absolutely not. But there may be some subtle encouragements that mothers and sisters can give."

Professor Besnier, from the University of Amsterdam, estimates there may be some 250 leitis in Tonga. The acceptance of leitis within Tongan society is based on the strength of the kinship system, he says. "There is a normalcy to people's relationships with them which is very striking to people from the outside," he says.

"Leitis are somebody's daughter or son, somebody's brother or sister. People are not going to reject them in the same way parents might reject gay or lesbian or transgender children elsewhere."

But it's a strange kind of acceptance. Outside the home, leitis work primarily in traditional female roles, such as cleaners, cooks or hairdressers. Professor Besnier says this reflects, in part, the low socioeconomic background of many leitis.

One leiti I meet, who works as a caterer, says she would like an office job organising building projects but fears she wouldn't be accepted by her colleagues. "They would give me funny looks and giggle," she says.

"When you are a man you have to do a man's work. When you're a woman you have to do women's work."

Leitis find themselves somewhere in between. They still face discrimination from some quarters in the predominantly Christian country. In May, members of one church protested outside a fakaleiti conference with banners describing them as "immoral" and "evil people".

At the hair salon where Kivalu works, Bible passages are stuck around a mirror warning against fornication. Salon owner Iloa Tuineau, 40, says he stopped being a leiti after joining a local Pentecostal church, in 2012. He burned some of his dresses and cut his hair into short, dark curls. "When we have God in our lives we cannot call ourselves leitis because it is a sin," he says.

"I don't hate them but I pray for them. God doesn't want to punish his people. But they must repent or they go to hell."

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The morning after the nobles feast, Joey Joleen Mataele is dressing for mass in her rambling white house between two churches. Her adopted daughter Tamara, 12, leaves early for the service. In the living room a bookshelf is filled with religious icons and a commendation signed by King Tupou V.

The sound of church bells and gospel choirs drifts in through an open window. Mataele says she first wore a dress in public at the age of 14, while walking into church with her grandmother. "I felt good. I felt that I had proved what I am," she says.

Today, she's singing in the church choir, where she stands a head taller in her heels than the other women in her pew. The homily is about the importance of love and the role that each person has to play in life.

Mataele says that her Catholic priest cares more about her contribution to church than her fashion choices. After the service, she rushes off to another royal feast – one of many in the week-long coronation celebrations.

Over in west Nuku'alofa, Venus Fonua dresses casually in black jeans, a grey fitted T-shirt and red thongs, with her long black hair in a ponytail and an orange flower behind her right ear. Fonua, 26, is a former winner of the Miss Galaxy Pageant, an annual beauty and talent show for fakaleitis. Categories include "condom creation", where Fonua won by wearing a multi-coloured cocktail dress made from condoms to promote HIV and AIDS awareness.

We meet later at a bar in the main street of Nuku'alofa, where the balcony overlooks a stream of people returning from a military parade for the new king. Fonua says her boyfriend is in the Tongan military. He's straight, she adds. "When it comes to the sexual part, I am trying very hard to play a women's role," she says. "Tongan men are very horny. They are not gay but I think they really enjoy the way we work it. They are doing to me what they do to the girls."

"I believe I am a woman so I am not liking a man who is liking a man. I find it very weird when I see gay people."

Homosexuality remains outlawed in Tonga. But Professor Besnier says sex between a leiti and a heterosexual man is common. "It is someone with a penis having sex with another person with a penis but that doesn't make it homosexuality in the sense we understand it," he says. "When a straight man has sex with a fakaleiti, he is not attracted to her body as a gender male. He is attracted to the fact he can do certain things women won't do, such as suck dick."

He reckons the number of leitis is growing as Tonga becomes more complex and nuanced, along the lines of more liberal Western cities in Australia and New Zealand.

But Fonua says she faces less discrimination in Nuku'alofa than when visiting Sydney recently, on holidays. "I find life here for leitis is very normal. I don't get much discrimination, people respect me so much. "They say it is very open in Australia but I find it hard when I go over there because they don't respect you, they look you up and down with a bad look.

"When people give me that look I don't back down or bow down," she says, clicking and waving her fingers like a diva. "You've got to be strong to be a woman."