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.