Though the subject was no laughing manner, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau still found a way to make himself laughable in addressing it.
I refer to a message Trudeau shared on Twitter about missing or murdered Indigenous women and girls: as I said, no cause for anything but prayer and deep empathy. The part that is laughable is Trudeau’s managing to take this very serious subject into the realm of the absurd by trying to appeal to the LGBT movement through including them in his message, and in a very unusual way. Apart from the women and girls, he decided to mention “2SLGBTQQIA+ people” as well…
Who are “2SLGBTQQIA+ people,” you ask? Well, you aren’t alone in your puzzlement. It’s an even more unusual version of an already unusual (not so mention silly and patronizing) acronym. As one celebrity commented on Twitter, it seemed as if “Headbutting the keyboard is now a sexuality.” Media were quick to pick up on the round of mockery Trudeau faced for his sycophancy.
Really, all Trudeau has done to the more “traditional” (if we can use that word for such a thing) acronym of “LGBTQQIA+” is slap “2S” on the front of it. According to lgbtqhealth.ca, this refers to “two-spirit” individuals, which are defined as “person(s) who identify as having both a masculine and a feminine spirit.” The term originated in 1990, supposedly to describe a unique gender/sexuality perspective that exists in certain Indigenous or Native American populations. Trudeau was attempting his own sort of two-spirited message, trying to appeal simultaneously both to Indigenous people and to the “alphabet soup” crowd.
Of course, the term “two-spirit” as appropriated by sexual revolutionaries is a subject of some debate. Some see it as a form of offensive “cultural appropriation;” whereas others have pointed out that there is a anthropological error in viewing tribal ceremonial and linguistic concepts through the lens of post-’60s sexual liberalism.
For our part, we can add one more criticism to the mix. Especially as so much of the vanguard of the LGBT movement nowadays (particularly the “T”) represents an erasure of women and girls, there is something uniquely perverse in calling attention to violence against women and girls while simultaneously pandering to a movement that in so many ways undermines women’s and girls’ safety.
In any event, Trudeau continues to be the object of scorn and mockery online, and it seems to be his just deserts. He’s eating his words; pity for him that it was such a mouthful.