“We just want to survive.”
This single line from a Two-Spirit poem carries the weight of centuries—centuries of erasure, violence, and the deliberate dismantling of Indigenous ways of understanding gender and identity. But survival, in this context, means something more profound than merely existing. It means reclaiming space in a world that tried to make you disappear. It means remembering what colonizers worked so hard to make people forget.
The Western world likes to think of gender diversity as modern, progressive, even revolutionary. But for Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island and beyond, gender has never been binary. Two-Spirit identity isn’t new—it’s a reclamation of something ancient, something that existed long before European ships arrived on these shores.
Gender Diversity Isn’t Modern—It’s Ancient
Walk back through history, and you’ll find gender expansiveness everywhere. The cult of Inanna in ancient Mesopotamia, dating to the 25th century B.C., represents one of the earliest recorded instances of gender transition and non-binary identity. Hijras—a recognized third gender in South Asia—have legal status in India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Bangladesh today. The Bugis people of Indonesia recognize five distinct genders. Eunuchs existed throughout the world’s largest empires.
The evidence is overwhelming: rigid gender binaries are not universal, natural, or inevitable. They’re culturally specific.
For Indigenous nations across North America, gender diversity has flourished for millennia. Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous peoples have always been here, holding vital roles in their communities as healers, warriors, spiritual leaders, and multi-dialect speakers. They were admired, respected, and believed to possess supernatural gifts and wisdom.
So why does the Western world act like gender diversity is a modern invention? The answer lies in what happened when European colonizers encountered something their worldview couldn’t comprehend.
The Violence of Misunderstanding
Early European explorers, translators, and traders documented Two-Spirit people—but their records reveal more about their own prejudices than about Indigenous realities. Unable or unwilling to understand gender beyond their binary framework, settlers interpreted Indigenous acceptance of diverse genders as evidence of “moral inferiority.” This wasn’t just ignorance—it became justification for genocide.
Colonial anthropologists labeled Indigenous people who lived other genders as “berdache,” a term derived from Arabic referring to a prisoner used for sex. The word itself is a violence, stripping away the cultural and spiritual significance of third and fourth gender roles within Indigenous nations and reducing complex identities to something deviant and shameful.
It wasn’t until the 1990s that the umbrella term “Two-Spirit” emerged as an Indigenous-led alternative, an attempt to protect Indigenous interpretations of gender from Western assimilation. While the term can’t fully capture the complexity, diversity, and unique expressions across hundreds of nations and communities—and isn’t universally accepted—it represents something crucial: Indigenous peoples naming themselves on their own terms.
Colonialism’s Gender Project
Here’s what many people don’t understand: the erasure of Two-Spirit identities wasn’t a side effect of colonization. It was central to the colonial project.
The Canadian state, like other settler-colonial governments, had a vested interest in controlling Indigenous bodies. Through laws, policies, and medical systems, the state enforced standards of “proper” citizenship based on what it deemed “hygienic” or “normal.” Bodies that didn’t fit—intersex genitalia, gender fluidity, any expression outside the rigid male-female binary—were pathologized, criminalized, or erased entirely.
Colonial powers deliberately targeted Indigenous language capacity, and Two-Spirit individuals who often served as multi-dialect speakers would have been particularly affected. The removal of Two-Spirit bodies from communities wasn’t random—it was strategic. Control the people, control the land, control the resources.
The state worked to assimilate Indigenous bodies into European gender roles and infuse Indigenous families with heteropatriarchal hierarchy. Indigenous forms of gender construction and fluidity had to be replaced with rigid binary thinking. Strict gender roles were imposed. The sexuality and autonomy of Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people—normalized within Indigenous societies—were forcibly removed from public life and placed under colonial control.
This is what genocide looks like: not just the destruction of bodies, but the erasure of entire ways of being, knowing, and relating to the world.
Land, Language, and Identity
There’s a profound connection between Two-Spirit erasure and ongoing colonization that often gets overlooked. Indigenous understandings of gender are inseparable from relationship to land. Land shapes language, which shapes what can be said about anything—including gender.
When we talk about Two-Spirit identity, we’re not just talking about individual gender expression. We’re talking about kinship systems, spiritual practices, governance structures, cultural traditions, and relationships to the land itself. These are all interconnected, and colonialism understood this. To control the land, you had to control the people. To control the people, you had to control how they understood themselves and each other.
The continued absence and lack of acknowledgment of Two-Spirit bodies and identities in mainstream Canadian discourse coincides with the state’s ongoing failure of reconciliation and its continued efforts to control Indigenous land, resources, and governance. These aren’t separate issues—they’re the same issue wearing different faces.
The Difference Between Two-Spirit and Trans
This is where things get nuanced, and it’s important to get it right.
“Transgender” is a culture-specific term born from Western sociopolitical contexts. It’s not a universal category. While the experiences transgender describes—transitioning, existing beyond binaries, spiritual dimensions of gender identity—exist across cultures, not all cultures use “transgender” to describe them.
Two-Spirit is distinctly Indigenous. It represents not just gender diversity, but a reclamation of traditional roles within Indigenous nations and a way to build solidarity across different Indigenous communities. It’s tied to specific cultural contexts, spiritual understandings, and community relationships that can’t be separated from Indigeneity.
Here’s the crucial point: each Indigenous nation has its own distinct, complex, and sacred roles for gender-diverse individuals. The term “Two-Spirit” is an umbrella that acknowledges this diversity while resisting Western assimilation, but it’s not meant to flatten or erase the specific terms and understandings that individual nations hold.
Understanding these distinctions matters because settler-dominated frameworks—even progressive, queer-friendly ones—can inadvertently perpetuate colonial erasure by imposing universal categories where cultural specificity is essential.
Existence as Resistance
So what does resistance look like?
Sometimes, it’s as simple as existing. Taking up space. Refusing to disappear.
Two-Spirit activists and advocates increasingly turn to forms of media less policed by state authorities—social media, poetry, art, storytelling. They’re reclaiming narratives that were stolen and creating new ones that honor their full complexity.
The immense variety of gender and sexual fluidity represented by Two-Spirit identities highlights something colonizers feared: the evolutionary advantage of diversity and acceptance. Homogeneity—the colonial project’s goal—is actually a hindrance to growth and resilience. Diversity strengthens.
Two-Spirit visibility enables Indigenous people to negotiate boundaries between LGBTQ+ communities and their own nations while connecting with traditional gender understandings. It’s a bridge between worlds, but one that centers Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination.
Reclaiming Two-Spirit identity means reestablishing fundamental relationships to community, to land, and to traditional ways of being. These aren’t abstract concepts—they’re the foundation of Indigenous identity and survival.
Pleasure and Power
There’s another dimension to this worth considering: pleasure. Social authorities benefit from limiting how pleasure is permitted to exist and whose pleasure matters. The erasure of marginalized racial, gendered, classed, and sexual identities serves power.
Pleasure can disrupt power structures or reinforce them. Sexuality is a domain where there’s immense pressure to enact prescribed social roles, particularly around gender. When people control these fundamental aspects of their own lives—how they experience pleasure, how they relate to their bodies, how they express desire—it represents a challenge to social and political control.
For Two-Spirit people, reclaiming pleasure and bodily autonomy is inherently political. It’s a rejection of colonial attempts to regulate and pathologize Indigenous sexuality and gender.
The Work of Understanding
If you’re reading this and feeling uncomfortable, sit with that. If you’re realizing how much you don’t know, that’s good—it means you’re paying attention.
Many of us carry assumptions about gender that are so deeply ingrained we don’t even recognize them as assumptions. We might support trans rights, advocate for LGBTQ+ equality, and still inadvertently perpetuate colonial frameworks by assuming Western concepts of gender and sexuality are universal.
The work of challenging these representations shouldn’t fall only on the communities already victimized by erasure. Those of us benefiting from settler colonialism—whether we realize it or not—have a responsibility to educate ourselves, examine our assumptions, and make space for Indigenous voices and sovereignty.
Understanding the difference between trans identity, third gender frameworks, and Two-Spirit identity matters. These terms aren’t interchangeable, and treating them as such perpetuates harm.
Why This Matters Now
Queer Indigenous bodies carry knowledge, relationships, and responsibilities. They represent a threat to settler sovereignty—which is exactly why queer Indigeneity has been and continues to be violently targeted by colonial powers.
The development of “Two-Spirit” as a term represents Indigenous peoples shedding layers of imposed ignorance and reclaiming their own histories. It’s about recognizing the immense documented historical presence of gender diversity in Indigenous communities and confronting the deliberate ways Western heteronormative views sought to abolish and replace it with homogeneity.
Gender identity has evolved to accommodate a spectrum that transcends the male-female binary imposed by missionaries and explorers. Two-Spirit identities challenge the pathologizing perspectives that once dominated Western literature and research about Indigenous peoples.
Most fundamentally, Two-Spirit existence is resistance to the ongoing project of making Indigenous peoples disappear—from the land, from history, and from themselves.
Moving Forward
True reconciliation—not just lip service, but actual structural change—requires acknowledging what was taken and what continues to be denied. It requires recognizing that Two-Spirit erasure is inseparable from land theft, resource extraction, and the suppression of Indigenous governance.
It requires understanding that when someone says “we just want to survive,” they’re not asking for permission to exist. They’re declaring that they will exist, regardless of the violence directed at making them disappear.
The beneficial and enduring qualities of diversity and acceptance aren’t just nice ideals—they’re necessary for collective survival and flourishing. The colonial project of homogeneity has always been a path toward stagnation and death.
Two-Spirit people reclaiming their identities aren’t asking the settler state for recognition. They’re reconnecting with traditions that predate colonization, rebuilding relationships severed by violence, and ensuring that future generations inherit something colonizers tried to destroy: the knowledge that there have always been more than two ways to be human.
That’s not just survival. That’s thriving.
Understanding Two-Spirit identity requires ongoing learning, listening to Indigenous voices, and recognizing the specific contexts of different nations and communities. This is just the beginning of a much larger conversation—one that Indigenous peoples have been having among themselves long before settlers arrived, and will continue long after.
The Journal 