{"id":101896,"date":"2026-04-15T03:00:52","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T07:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=101896"},"modified":"2026-04-14T19:29:34","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T23:29:34","slug":"mmiwg2slgbtqqia-is-a-case-study-in-progressive-linguistic-self-sabotage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/04\/15\/mmiwg2slgbtqqia-is-a-case-study-in-progressive-linguistic-self-sabotage\/","title":{"rendered":"MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ is “a case study in progressive linguistic self-sabotage”"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Quillette<\/em>, Jonathan Kay<\/a> highlights how NDP politician Leah Gazan’s freshly coined replacement for our already over-long initialism for other-than-cis-gendered individuals has been a boon to online commentators and comedians across the internet:<\/p>\n

While the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls was announced in 2015, its final report wasn’t published until mid-2019. The three-and-a-half year period in between overlapped with Justin Trudeau’s manic campaign to replace the idea of biological “women” in public discourse with faddish gender-inclusive terms that describe female-identified men. The initialism he eventually came up with is “2SLGBTQI+<\/a>” (whose “2S” component signifies a special \u2014 albeit ill-defined \u2014 “two-spirited<\/a>” LGBT category that Indigenous people can opt into).<\/p>\n

And so, channelling the state-of-the-art in Canadian gender jargon, the Inquiry’s commissioners duly expanded references to Indigenous “women” by addition of the words “… and 2SLGBTQQIA people” \u2014 i.e. Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer\/Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual.<\/p>\n

The term “2SLGBTQQIA” appears in the final report 1,197 times. Agglomerating that with the original “MMIWG” mandate yields “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA”.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Detail from page 229 of The Final Report Of The National Inquiry Into Missing And Murdered Indigenous Women And Girls<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

If this unbreakable wi-fi code sounds familiar, it’s because a Canadian MP named Leah Gazan just became an international laughingstock for using it<\/a> at a televised 8 April news conference. (Indeed, she lengthened it even further by adding a plus sign to the end \u2014 suggesting that yet more letters, numbers, and\/or symbols are on their way.) This unintentional comedy routine was made all the more meme-worthy by the casual, deadpan, en passant<\/em> way the sixteen-character term rolled off Gazan’s tongue, as if it were a set of ASCII characters that ordinary Canadians ran together all the time in normal day-to-day discussions.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As some Canadians (including me) tried to explain<\/a> on social media, “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+” is not a commonly used term outside of activist circles. I also let people know that Gazan is not a Canadian government representative (as was being claimed), but rather a member of a small and increasingly radicalised<\/a> hard-left federal party known as the New Democrats.<\/p>\n

But by then, no one was in the mood for such nuances. Elon Musk<\/a>‘s three-word tweet on the subject \u2014 “Canada is cooked” \u2014 has, as of this writing, garnered more than half a million likes and 77 million views. Thanks to Gazan, millions of people around the world now believe that ordinary Canadians talk in this ridiculous fashion. We don’t.<\/p>\n

Gazan told CBC News<\/em><\/a> that the whole episode only goes to show that “bigots are offended by my positions around equality”. A more useful lesson she might take away from this experience is that the use of cultish ideological jargon can turn discussion of even the most serious issue into a farce. This is especially true when terms such as “MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+” (or “menstruators”, or “uterus-havers”, or “people with a vagina”<\/a>) are used to soothe the sensitivities of men who demand the right to be called women.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Quillette, Jonathan Kay highlights how NDP politician Leah Gazan’s freshly coined replacement for our already over-long initialism for other-than-cis-gendered individuals has been a boon to online commentators and comedians across the internet: While the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls was announced in 2015, its final report wasn’t published until […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,28,53],"tags":[438,254,196,798,1020],"class_list":["post-101896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-media","category-politics","tag-firstnations","tag-gender","tag-lgbt","tag-ndp","tag-progressives"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-qvu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101896"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101896\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101901,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101896\/revisions\/101901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}