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Two-spirit (also known as two spirit or occasionally twospirited)[a] is a contemporary pan-Indian umbrella term used by some Indigenous North Americans to describe Native people who fulfill a traditional third-gender (or other gender-variant) social role in their communities.[1][2][3][4]
Coined in 1990 as a primarily ceremonial term promoting community recognition, in recent years more individuals have taken to self-identifying as two-spirit. Two-spirit, as a term and concept, is neither used nor accepted universally in Native American cultures. Indigenous cultures that have traditional roles for gender-nonconforming people have names in their own Indigenous languages for these people and the roles they fill in their communities.
The initial intent in coining the term was to differentiate Indigenous concepts of gender and sexuality from those of non-Native lesbians and gays[5] and to replace the pejorative anthropological terms that were still in wide use.[6] While two-spirit has been controversial since its adoption,[7] the term has experienced more academic and social acceptance than the term berdache, which it was coined to replace.[6][8][9] The government of Canada officially uses 2SLGBTQI+[b] as an alternative to the established acronym of LGBTQI+,[10] sometimes shortened to 2SLGBT or a similar variant.
Early adopters stated that a two-spirit identity does not make sense outside of a Native American or First Nations cultural framework[3][2][11] and its use by non-Natives is seen as a form of cultural appropriation.[12]
The gender nonconforming or third-gender, ceremonial roles traditionally embodied by some Native American and Indigenous peoples in Canada that may be encompassed by modern two-spirit people vary widely, even among the Native individuals or cultures that use the term. Not all of these cultures have historically had roles for gender-variant people, and among those that do, no one Indigenous culture's gender or sexuality categories apply to all Native people.[13][14]
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was invoked but never defined (see the help page).At the Wenner Gren conference on gender held in Chicago, May, 1994... the gay American Indian and Alaska Native males agreed to use the term "Two Spirit" to replace the controversial "berdache" term. The stated objective was to purge the older term from anthropological literature as it was seen as demeaning and not reflective of Native categories. Unfortunately, the term "berdache" has also been incorporated in the psychology and women studies domains, so the task for the affected group to purge the term looms large and may be formidable.