I originally thought it was an excessive amount of letters to describe those of us under the rainbow but no, it makes more sense in the context of the article I do not really agree with combining the two but to each their own I guess.
MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ stands for missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex and asexual+. It’s derived in part from the more commonly used initialisms MMIWG (missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls) and 2SLGBTQ+.
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?
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.
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.
Remember when the neo-pronoun thing landed on:
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? It’s two acronyms. Like ROFLMAO.
I mean, no one is forcing you to memorize it.
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.