Two-Spirit

The coinage was primarily a ceremonial term promoting community recognition, and it is neither used nor accepted universally. Indigenous cultures that have roles for gender-nonconforming people have names for them in their own languages, and those roles differ widely from one nation to another. Not every culture has such a role, and no one culture's categories apply to all Native people. The umbrella now appears beside Third gender in general writing, and it was built for a narrower job.

Why the word was coined in Winnipeg

The phrase was worked out across a series of five conferences and settled at the third of them, the Inter-tribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian American Conference held in Winnipeg in 1990. Primary attribution goes to Albert McLeod, of Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation, who has consistently credited the wider group of participants. In 2021 Myra Laramee, of Fisher River Cree Nation, reported that she proposed the phrase at that gathering after it came to her in a dream. The English term came first. The Ojibwe niizh manidoowag, from niizh for two and manidoo for spirit with the animate plural suffix -wag, was constructed afterwards, to honour the language of the peoples in whose territory the conference sat.

The purpose was separation: early adopters wanted a word that marked Indigenous understandings of gender and sexuality off from those of non-Native lesbians and gay men, and off from the vocabulary that had arrived with them: gay, lesbian, transgender. Michelle Cameron, of the Carrier First Nations, describes it as an Aboriginal-specific term of resistance to colonisation, and one that does not transfer to other cultures. The German anthropologist Sabine Lang makes a related observation from outside, that at the core of two-spirit identity is ethnicity, an awareness of being Native American rather than anything else.

One oddity in the record is that the hyphenated form already existed in English in an unrelated sense. Two-spirit was a theological adjective for the dualism of the Treatise on the Two Spirits in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Harvard Divinity School Bulletin used it that way in 1957. The noun this entry describes has no connection to it, and Wiktionary dates that noun from 1990 with no earlier use recorded.

Why berdache had to be replaced

The word displaced is berdache, which non-Native anthropologists had used for Indigenous people who did not conform to European-American gender roles. It means the passive partner in sodomy, or a boy prostitute, and it has been offensive to Indigenous peoples for as long as it has been in print. The journalist Mary Annette Pember, of the Red Cliff Ojibwe, has written that conference participants named replacing it as their motive.

The new word has had more academic and social acceptance than the one it replaced, though it has been controversial since its adoption. The Government of Canada writes 2SLGBTQI+, with the coinage at the front of the acronym. Wiktionary lists berdache among the entry's dated and offensive synonyms.

How colonial law drove the roles underground

Albert McLeod describes the imposition of Christian gender roles as central to the colonisation of Canada. As Canada extended its borders and territorial claims after 1867, new law enforced Christian forms of marriage and cohabitation, criminalised polygamy and same-sex relationships, and removed children into residential and day schools. Staff there divided children strictly by binary gender: separate dormitories and classrooms, often a prohibition on speaking to one another, sewing and domestic chores for the girls, woodworking and other trades for the boys. Children who showed non-binary gender expression or queer desire were punished severely.

Ma-Nee Chacaby, an Oji-Cree elder born in 1950 in Ombabika, a remote community in northwestern Ontario, disliked wearing girls' clothes, fished and hunted, and helped elders collect plant medicines. Neighbours mocked her and called her a devil child. Her grandmother, then over ninety and born before Canada existed, pushed back: she remembered a time when people like her granddaughter were respected, and said the child should be given room to develop her own preferences, talents and gifts. In the account the Canadian Museum for Human Rights published in 2024, Chacaby gives the words as "There's two great spirits living inside of you. One is a female, one is a male."

By the middle of the twentieth century the Indian Act, the reserve system and the power of the church had between them driven these roles out of sight, including inside the communities that had held them. Organised resistance to colonialism and to homophobia within Indigenous communities began to emerge in the late 1960s and 1970s.

What Indigenous languages call these roles

None of the older vocabulary translates as two spirits, and there is a great deal of it. Cree carries at least six expressions and Anishinaabemowin at least four, and Wiktionary's translation table runs to dozens of languages. The Ojibwe phrase coined in Winnipeg is a translation out of English, not one of these.

Walter Williams and Toby Johnson, writing in 2006, record wapetokeca alongside winkte in Lakota and gloss it as people with special powers. That gloss is the reason the criticism that follows has force: where gender-variant people appear in the historical record, they appear very often in a spiritual or ceremonial office, and a phrase with no ceremonial content can detach the role from the beliefs it belonged to. With 574 federally recognised tribes in the United States alone, critics inside Native communities hold that one umbrella risks erasing the words those communities already have.

Who is allowed to use the term

Early adopters stated that a two-spirit identity does not make sense outside a Native American or First Nations cultural framework, and that its use by non-Natives is seen as cultural appropriation. That position has held, and this catalogue follows it.

"The elders will tell you the difference between a gay Indian and a Two-Spirit," Joey Criddle told John Leland of the New York Times in October 2006, making the point that being gay and Indian does not by itself make a person two-spirit. Harlan Pruden and Se-ah-dom Edmo come at the same distinction from the other end, writing that most people now associate the term with LGBT Natives, while the work of two-spirit organisations sits closer to the traditional understanding.

What the surveys have actually counted

Very little, and what exists is not a prevalence figure. The Trevor Project's research brief on the diversity of nonbinary youth records 28 per cent of Indigenous LGBTQ young people in the United States using two-spirit about themselves. That is a share of a recruited sample of LGBTQ young people, and no general-population estimate exists. A 2020 nursing article introducing the term to that profession makes the same caution: the umbrella is convenient, and community-specific definitions and roles are more extensive and varied than it is.

What is disputed about the coinage

Attribution is unsettled. The non-Native anthropologist Will Roscoe receives much of the public credit, which Pember records while noting that Native people contributed too: Kristopher Kohl Miner of the Ho-Chunk Nation names the anthropologist Wesley Thomas, of the Diné, among them. Roscoe's involvement with the Radical Faeries, a non-Native group that emulated Native spirituality, is part of why that credit is contested.

The objection to the concept itself is separate. Criticism centres on the term's Western origins and influence, on the lack of emphasis on the traditions elders maintain, and on the risk of rendering those traditions indistinct. Two spirits, one female and one male, is a picture that assumes the male-female binary the word was meant to sit outside, and it locates the matter inside a person instead of in a role a community recognises. At the conferences themselves, some attendees said reservation communities would scorn the idea and never adopt the word. Writing in the Encyclopedia of Gender and Society in 2009, Kylan Mattias de Vries set the coinage against urbanisation and assimilation, which had moved Native people toward gay, lesbian, transgender and intersex and separated cultural identity from gender and sexuality; others have since called the word a capitulation to that process.

Set against those readings is the one Wiktionary records beside them, that the umbrella references several genders, sexes and sexualities at once and works as a self-identity label for reconnecting gender and sexual variance with Native culture and religion, rather than with Transgender or Genderqueer as those words are used elsewhere. Both readings sit in the same usage note, in that order, with nothing chosen between them.