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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.
at this point i think proposed changes like this are ragebait to weaken support with people on the fence. every little stupid thing that is mildly irritating adds up. don't lose the bigger picture
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.
As someone from the βMMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+β community
Since you're alive enough to post here, I don't think you're from that community. Note the first three letters are for "missing and murdered Indigenous", and the rest are modifiers from that. As I understand, Leah Gazan is using this initialism as an expansion of "MMIWG", not as an expansion of "LGBTQ+". She is highlighting that the "ongoing genocide" she refers to is not solely of Indigenous women and girls, but also of gender-diverse Indigenous people.
This. It doesn't matter what niche you fall into. We are all citizens and deserve the same consideration when it comes to the basics like food, shelter and warmth. Everybody everywhere should thrive and have hope for the future. Everything else is a rose is a rose is a rose.
Oh you're going to love the new NDP leadership then: https://lewisisleader.ca/ideas
And by the way, Leah Gazan has supported Lewis and his program from the start.
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.
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/zher
I'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? Itβs two acronyms. Like ROFLMAO.
No one else uses that many letters. She bleneded 2 initialisms together, and added some extra letters.
MMIWG2S, most people just use MMIWG
LGBTQQIA+, which most people just use LGBT+ or "The queer community".
But it is distracting from the real issue, the federal government cutting funding towards programs designed to prevent violence.
I mean, no one is forcing you to memorize it.
There already is a word that encompasses it, "Queer".
The only people that generally want to keep adding more letters to the acronym are so-called "Allies" and not members of those groups themselves. Most members of those groups (in my experience) are more than happy to call themselves Queer and then give you a funny look when you start talking gibberish.
Or use that acronym. Do you want people to use slang (or slurs) while you try to push a increasingly unwieldy label that, by definition, can and, in theory, must go on indefinitely? There must be hundreds, if not thousands of minority marginalized groups that are underrepresented. And we're going to add upwards of 4 letters for each?
This is what the right complains about when they have to do something simple like use preferred pronouns. But this is political correctness gone made because it is an insane number of letters required to describe a very wide range and yet wildly incomplete number of people, and it is a slippery slope because there is no limit to how many marginalized groups there are that could be added for inclusion.
And don't get me wrong, Murdered and Missing Indigenous Woman is a very important subject and people to bring attention to and actually address and do something about. But adding that subject to LGBTQ+ detracts from all of it more than it helps.
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.
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.
The mega acronyms strike me as a lifeless, corporate legalese kind of tolerance. Kind of like land acknowledgements. They satisfy the requirements of tolerance so we can move on to the real business.
Yeah, that's it exactly. It doesn't really feel genuine or meaningful, even though I'm sure a lot of people do mean it earnestly. It just sort of feels like a checklist.
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.
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, thatβs 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.
the reactionary weirdos in the replies to this who are getting their knickers in a twist about an acronym need to sit down, listen, and focus on the actual issues being raised here, instead of whining like small children
I've been part of the community since it was just LGB. Those are sexual orientations. I'm absolutely all for representation of marginalized communities, but I'm not clear on the relationship between all of these groups. I fucking love the trans community but that isn't a sexual orientation, and MMIWG is a completely separate issue. One that needs more attention, in my opinion, but they are wholly unrelated.
Can't we go with LGB+QA or something that I will be able to remember? I want to be supportive but it's getting out of hand.
Hey it was Trans women who started the pride movement. It was Trans people who fought for queer acceptance, prior to stonewall. The gays get credited for it in Canada, but it was the Trans who pushed the boundaries.
I'm not at all debating whether these groups deserve attention, sympathy, or respect. It enrages me that it's a question at all. But my point still stands - one of these things is not like the others. I'm not being an asshole. It's just a fact.
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!?! π‘
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.
Having people being able to skip to the front of the queue based on the colour of their skin or disability, as though it was some kind of hierarchy of the oppressed is nuts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPLQNUVmq3o
this is a cult, it's like a weird reverse powergrab, the one that's the most hardest done by gets to bark orders at everyone about how they should behave
It's not fundamentaly different than the Heritage Foundation trying to find ways to bring back lynchings. People pick a position that suits their narrative and groups eventually evolve extremists. It exists everywhere. This only appears absurd because you're getting a rare glimpse of LGBTQ+ and neurodivergents trying to self govern.
It's not absurd. It's inevitable. These groups have never had a voice before, let alone the freedom to try and self-assemble power.
You judge a nascent phenomena in human civilization with a lense that was forged, refined and normalized watching the dominant power groups who have had fewer of the particularities of these minorities and a lot longer to work out the kinks of governance.
The real kicker here - tell me this well intentioned but unproductive spectacle here is "nuts" while I look at the dominant form of conventional politics in the news daily. It makes me want to pull out a lawnchair, sit naked on the frontlawn, crack a cold one and wait for the nuclear blastwave to free me.
Heritage Foundation trying to find ways to bring back lynchings
?????
This only appears absurd because youβre getting a rare glimpse of LGBTQ+ and neurodivergents trying to self govern.
???
You're like yes it's nuts but it's not regular nuts, it's rainbow coloured nuts πΆ
Beyond the right wing fake outrage machine, for anyone wanting to understand the cards system: https://youtu.be/imCT5OA8HIo?t=1754
they/them explaining how their insane card system works doesn't make it better? explaining how your oppression olympics works is still insanity
Omg, that thing you refuse to understand is terrifying!