I originally thought it was an excessive amount of letters to describe those of us under the rainbow but no, it makes more sense in the context of the article I do not really agree with combining the two but to each their own I guess.
MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ stands for missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex and asexual+. It’s derived in part from the more commonly used initialisms MMIWG (missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls) and 2SLGBTQ+.
Colour me crazy, but I’ve always thought the temptation to explicitly add more and more letters to these kinds of acronyms was a little counterproductive (referring to 2SLGBTQIA+). Like… I remember when it was LGBTQ+. The plus was meant to represent all sexualities. Listing 5 items felt like more than enough to clearly convey the nature of the list.
But then when you go and explicitly pull some group out of the plus to better represent them, I always wondered what that implicitly said about those not explicitly pulled out. Like suddenly groups in the plus feel less important, because we’ve taken out the special highlighter for some. So I’m not surprised that more sexualities got loud and demanded to be added as well, further watering down the nature of that “plus”. I feel a little bad for those in the plus when it’s considered in poor taste to say anything shorter than 2SLGBTQIA+.
But I guess that’s just how naming by committee works, it’s hard to convince a group of people who want to be explicitly included about the implicit downsides for others. I suspect the initialism will only get longer rather than ever becoming any shorter.
Yeah, I’m also in that group and the acronym is just unwieldy to the point of being ridiculous. I’m also not clear on the rationale behind packing together missing and murdered indigenous women with the entire queer community. I mean, obviously all marginalized people need to stand together - none of us are free until all of us are free - but in that case why aren’t they also including every other form of marginalized person in their super-acronym? It seems utterly arbitrary.
Personally, I love the label “queer” because it identifies me as part of a group that includes anyone who doesn’t fit the norms of gender and sexuality, without trying to divide us all up into largely needless subcategories. Alphabet soups are well intentioned, but don’t really seem all that helpful.
Classic case of champagne socialism smh. As someone from the “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+” community, I would be much more excited to see housing, groceries, utilities, etc. go down while healthcare, education labor laws etc get strengthened.
I want to see strong, clear policies being presented by NDP politicians that I can talk about with friends and family and get them to vote orange, so that the above happens.
Holy fuck, no offense but there’s no way I’m going to remember that long of an acronym. It’s just going to keep extending, isn’t it? Why not just pick or make up a word for it and just include all the groups under there?
Remember when the neo-pronoun thing landed on:
co/cos e/em/eir e/em/es hu/hum ne/nem ne/nir per/per s/he/hir thon/thons ve/ver vi/vir vi/vim zhe/zherI’m all for being inclusive and a completionist. But the community had to learn the difference between what belongs in academic and reference litterature, and what belongs in casual conversation. A well intentioned idea was badly introduced to the public causing blowback and faned the flames of the culture wars and energized the maga chuds. It’s weakness was not its specificity. It was trying to start at the end and forcing the language everybody’s been learning since birth to be rewritten. It’s unweildy.
To your exact point. Naming each group IS important. Specificity and identity has a power of its own. Let the acronym grow! But know where it belongs. This is already past the point of needing a shorter simpler umbrella term for conversation and is going into reference material.
When even your allies are getting tripped up, it’s time to rethink and pivot.
Did you read the text? It’s two acronyms. Like ROFLMAO.
I mean, no one is forcing you to memorize it.
Gazan calls the pushback a distraction from the continued violence facing Indigenous women and girls, two-spirit and gender diverse people, along with federal funding cuts to programming aimed at prevention.
And I think the fact that we’re focusing on an acronym and not the funding cuts that are at the center of the discussion proves that she’s correct.
So this whole story exists because the bigots came out of the woodwork to squee at the acronym? Good then, let them show themselves and burn in the sunlight. The acronym did its job.
Good point. It has utility as a shibboleth. Careful though, a weapon like this can burn friend and foe alike.
While I understand the motivation of wanting to support the rights of marginalized groups in society, a term that encompasses all of those groups would be far too unwieldy to be practical or readily recognized.
Solidarity between marginalized groups can be achieved with a term more marketable than an alphabet soup.
I’m not going to get upset at anyone using however many letters to describe an inclusive, group, all of them in the alphabet if they wish. Though if I were in her place I personally would just say MMIWG+, where + is other humans.
Like I think it’s bigotry when insisting on removing letters as a policy clearly motivated on exclusion, but in normal conversation, using GBLT+, 2S+, LGBTQ+ etc. for brevity when you are referring to all forms of gender expression, I also won’t get upset.
*Upon some more thought, why not just focus on the plus as the banner? Gender expression is a spectrum and unique to each of us. Gender+ (which would be inclusive of agender ppl btw) and Sexuality+ or Romance+ sound pretty cool to my ears, so we can talk about it like an upgrade to people’s life and freedom, not needing to conform to cis, binary and heterosexualism, and then we don’t have to fit people into one of a myriad of categories we force ourselves to create?
If they wanna sing the whole alphabet song remix every time this comes up, that’s on them but shitting on people who criticize the lack of a stable core idea that can be carried across conversations for years in a concise matter as bigots seems counterproductive not only for the people on the fence but also for those on either side of that argument.
The fact this comes from a representative of the only party that has some hope to unfuck things around here makes it so much worse imo.
Some may see the alphabet soup and snidely think the gays are expanding along a slippery slope yet again. But the acronym is specifically referencing people who are missing or murdered AND are (indigenous) women or gender or sexual minorities. It’s 2 acronyms put together in order to include the queer community in a specific cause. If you have a strong reaction to it, you’re probably experiencing internalized bigotry planted by the right.
For those of us who live in reality, yeah they really are this nuts:
What Actually Happened At the NDP Convention 2026
https://youtu.be/aUVrrlArqjM?t=114
MY EQUITY CARD!?! 😡
It’s not nuts. It is uncalibrated and counterproductive. It’s also what I’ve called the “curse of the intellectual”, and why they rarely become polliticians, let alone successful ones. It’s what happens when ideas are carried further than their utility justifies.
