In recent years, the Trudeau government has adopted the term “2SLGBTQI+” to refer to gender and sexual minorities. This is unfortunate, because not only is the acronym a sin against the English language, it is also terribly unpopular within the very communities it purportedly represents. We should trash it and immediately return to a less convoluted alternative.
Many queer activists have pushed for ever-longer acronyms since the 1990s, under the belief that such terminology is necessary for genuine inclusion and coalition-building. At first, this meant supplanting “lesbian” and “gay” with “LGBT,” in recognition of the growing visibility of bisexuals and transsexuals. Then, starting in the mid-2010s, the slightly longer “LGBTQ” came into fashion, setting a precedent for a slew of extravagant derivatives, such as “2SLGBTQQIPAA+.”
Faced with a plethora of options, the Trudeau government announced in 2022 that it would adopt “2SLGBTQI+” as the country’s official acronym going forward. The Liberals claimed, via their “Federal 2SLGBTQI+ Action Plan,” that queer communities throughout Canada had requested updated terminology, and that “2S” should be placed at the front because “two-spirit people” (an Indigenous identity) were “the first” of Canada’s queer communities.
Contrary to the government’s claims, though, the term “two spirit” was actually invented at a Winnipeg conference in 1990, and, it seems that except for a handful of activists, almost no one, of any sexual orientation or gender identity, uses the term “2SLGBTQI+.”
According to Google Trends, which analyzes web searches over periods of time, search volumes for “2SLGBTQI+” on Google and YouTube have been so low over the past five years that, on most days, they do not meet the minimum threshold to be counted at all. On its most popular days, the acronym is still less than 1 per cent as prevalent as either “LGBT” or “LGBTQ” in Canada. While web search data does not directly measure societal uptake of a term, it nonetheless provides a good, albeit flawed, proxy for linguistic trends.
This data is also consistent with my experience as a gay Torontonian. Despite knowing an obscene number of homosexuals, I have never come across “2SLGBTQI+” in organic conversation.
When the Trudeau government launched its Federal 2SLGBTQI+ Action Plan, it boasted that it had surveyed 25,636 queer Canadians, hosted several roundtables, and repeatedly met with, or received written submissions from, queer civil society organizations.
However, their survey did not query respondents about acronym preferences. How exactly they came up with and why they chose to adopt the acronym was, unfortunately, not disclosed in the Action Plan.
Parallels can be drawn to “latinx,” a gender-neutral label that progressive activists and governments tried to impose upon the public, even though polling data showed that an overwhelming majority of the Latino community widely rejected the term, with 40 per cent finding it offensive.
Following the feds’ lead, bureaucrats at all levels of government rapidly adopted “2SLGBTQI+” into their parlance, as did many unions and non-profits. Perhaps they thought that they were being supportive. The acronym remains a cumbersome embarrassment which has been disparaged as an “alphabet soup.”
Acronyms rarely melt into the natural rhythms of spoken language, except when they are very short. People yearn for brevity when speaking, and instinctively shave off syllables where possible. This impulse is so strong that, when spelling permits, many acronyms are simply pronounced phonetically (i.e. AWOL, NAFTA, NATO), rather than as a string of letters — some even eventually transform into regular words (i.e. “scuba” and “radar”).
But “LGBT” cannot be pronounced phonetically, at least not in a way that sounds remotely pleasant, because it lacks vowels. Speakers thus must list out every letter, which can feel cumbersome (this is technically known as an “initialism”).
According to Wiktionary (the Wikimedia Foundation’s open-source dictionary), 77.3 per cent of English words have three or fewer syllables, but four and five-syllable words, like “LGBT” and “LGBTQ,” still account for 14.5 per cent and 5.2 per cent of the English language, respectively. So both of these acronyms exist within the bounds of common speech.
But what about “2SLGBTQI+” (9 syllables) or “2SLGBTQQIPAA+” (13 syllables)? It doesn’t take a genius to see that they are impractically long and borderline unpronounceable — but some cursory data can illustrate this intuition more objectively.
According to Wiktionary’s word bank, both of these acronyms have more syllables than 99.9 per cent of the English language. Of the 87,501 English words on file, only 65 have more syllables than “2SLGBTQI+.” To put things another way: the government-approved label for the queer community has so many syllables that English words of comparable spoken length include gems like “methylenetetrahydrofolate” and “psychoneuroimmunology.”
The fact that so few words — fewer than 0.01 per cent — have evolved to such comically inefficient lengths suggests that these labels will never be used in natural conversation.
“2SLGBTQI+” also has twice as many characters than the current average English word (estimated at about 5 letters). Many longer words uncontroversially exist (i.e. “unbreakable”), of course, but they are easier to spell because they can be broken down into familiar constituent parts and follow normal linguistic patterns. As an acronym, “2SLGBTQI+” lacks this structure, which makes it visually unnatural and difficult to spell or remember the order of — like a high-strength wifi password.
It’s clear that “2SLGBTQI+” and similarly convoluted variants are overly cumbersome, and as a result cringeworthy. It seems unwise to insist upon terminology that makes acknowledgement, let alone discussion, of a minority group cumbersome and fatiguing — linguistic barriers should be lowered, not raised.
But the federal government, despite habitually overanalyzing language, steadfastly dismiss commonsense truths about practical communication. Even discounting pragmatism, it’s questionable whether listing out specific communities with acronyms makes sense at all.
In a 2019 Atlantic essay, It’s Time to Drop the ‘LGBT’ From ‘LGBTQ’, veteran gay activist Jonathan Rauch argued that this framing promotes factionalism and presents rights advocacy as a succession of carve-outs for specific minority groups, rather than a universal call for equality. To illustrate his point, he noted that the religious liberty movement would’ve been far less effective had it branded itself “CJMHBSBA+” (Catholic-Jewish-Muslim-Hindu-Buddhist-Sikh-Baha’i-Animist-plus).
Rauch also observed that groups that are not specifically included in these acronyms might feel specifically excluded. Given the intersectional left’s focus on representation, this means that ever-bloating acronyms are an inevitability, not a bug. He advocated for using “queer” as a simpler, uncomplicated alternative — which I broadly agree with, even if the word has historical and political baggage.
Even queer writers who defend these labels sometimes admit their faults. Granting that Rauch had a point about the “unwieldiness and verbosity” of these acronyms, Amanda Kerri, in a 2018 The Advocate article, confessed that labels like LGBTQIAA+ are “a mouthful when speaking” and “quite fatiguing and obnoxious” to type out, but unpersuasively argued that they should be accepted anyways, partially because the U.S. military already uses “excessive” acronyms like COMNAVAIRSYSCOM.
More recently, some queer activists have pivoted to using “SOGI” (sexual orientation and gender identity), which has the benefit of being short, easy-to-pronounce and all-encompassing. Had this label been proposed a decade or two ago, it would’ve been a clear winner — but, at this point, public appetite for another acronym may be slim.
Queer? Sogi? LGBT? The options are there, and, despite some drawbacks, all of them are better than the government’s current, unwieldly jargon.
National Post