Outrage is a cheap commodity. It is the easiest thing in the world to find a long string of letters, point at it, and laugh. When a Canadian Member of Parliament gets "trolled" for using the acronym MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+, the internet reacts with its usual predictable split. On one side, you have the "woke" brigade performing a frantic dance of linguistic purity. On the other, the reactionary crowd scoffs at what they see as a keyboard smash of social justice.
Both sides are missing the point. They are fighting over the font while the building is on fire.
The obsession with the length of the acronym—Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual plus—is a deliberate distraction. If you are focused on whether the letters are hard to say, you aren't focused on why they exist in the first place. This isn't a "word." It is a diagnostic list of systemic failures.
The Administrative Trap of Inclusion
The common critique is that "inclusivity has gone too far." That’s a lazy take. In reality, inclusivity hasn’t gone anywhere; it has just been outsourced to the marketing department.
When a government or a corporation adopts an acronym this dense, they aren't actually helping the people represented by those letters. They are creating a linguistic shield. I have seen policy advisors spend six hours debating where the "2S" (Two-Spirit) should sit in a sequence, while the actual funding for Indigenous women's shelters sits untouched on the same desk.
This is the Bureaucratic Camouflage. By making the language as complex as possible, the institution signals "virtue" while simultaneously making the topic inaccessible to the average citizen. It creates a barrier to entry. If you can’t say the word, you aren't allowed to have an opinion on the policy. That is a power play, not a progress report.
Accuracy vs. Accessibility
The "trolling" of MP Laurel Collins or any other official using the full string of characters stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of communication.
Communication exists to transfer an idea from one brain to another with the least amount of friction possible. When you add friction, you lose the audience. The "Lazy Consensus" among activists is that adding more letters equals more respect. It doesn't. It equals more noise.
In data science, we talk about the Signal-to-Noise Ratio.
- The Signal: Indigenous women and gender-diverse people are being murdered at rates that should be considered a national emergency.
- The Noise: Whether the "Q" for Queer comes before or after the "I" for Intersex.
When the noise exceeds the signal, the message dies. The irony is that the most vulnerable people—the ones these acronyms are supposed to protect—are the ones who lose their voice when the conversation becomes a semantic battlefield.
The Two-Spirit Erasure Under the Guise of Addition
Let's talk about the "2S" specifically. Two-Spirit is a term that predates the Western colonial gender binary. It is not just "another identity" to be tacked onto a list. It is a distinct cultural and spiritual role within many Indigenous communities.
By shoving "2S" into a Westernized, alphabet-soup acronym, we are actually performing a second act of colonization. We are forcing a complex, non-Western worldview to fit into a neat little box next to "L" and "G."
The contrarian truth? If we actually respected the Two-Spirit identity, we wouldn't try to "include" it in a list of Western sexual orientations. We would treat it as its own sovereign concept. Inclusion, in this context, looks a lot like assimilation.
Stop Asking if the Acronym is Woke
"People Also Ask" if the term is "too woke." That is the wrong question. "Woke" is a meaningless term used by people who are too tired to engage with nuance.
The real question is: Is the acronym effective?
If the goal is to raise awareness for the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, then the 15-character string is an objective failure. It is a linguistic wall.
Imagine a scenario where a search and rescue team is looking for a lost hiker. Instead of saying "We need to find the hiker," they insist on saying "We need to find the potentially dehydrated, possibly injured, likely exhausted, probably disoriented individual of various demographic backgrounds." By the time they finish the sentence, the hiker is dead.
That is what is happening here. We are editing the labels while the bodies are piling up.
The Policy of Performance
The reason this MP is being trolled isn't because the public is "bigoted"—though some certainly are. It’s because the public can smell a lack of authenticity.
When you see a politician struggle through a 15-letter acronym, you aren't seeing empathy. You are seeing someone who is terrified of their own HR department. You are seeing a person who is more afraid of using the "wrong" word than they are of the fact that Indigenous women are 12 times more likely to go missing or be murdered than any other demographic in Canada.
This is Performative Pedantry. It is the act of being technically correct to avoid being practically useful.
The Data of Disappearance
Let’s look at the actual mechanics of the crisis. The National Inquiry's final report, Reclaiming Power and Place, identified 231 individual "Calls for Justice."
How many of those calls have been fully implemented?
How many of those calls involve changing an acronym?
The answer to the second question is "none." The calls for justice are about policing, healthcare, housing, and the legal system. They are about the Indian Act and the structural violence of the state.
When the media focuses on the "trolling" of an MP over an acronym, they are complicit in the erasure of the 231 calls. They are choosing the easy story (internet drama) over the hard story (systemic failure).
The Counter-Intuitive Solution
If you want to actually support MMIWG2S+ people, stop defending the acronym.
Defending the acronym is a trap. It forces you to play on a field where the only goal is "representation." Representation is a consolation prize. It is what institutions give you when they have no intention of giving you power or safety.
We need to move toward Radical Simplification.
- Acknowledge the Crisis: Use language that hits like a hammer, not a textbook.
- Focus on Outcomes: If a policy doesn't lower the murder rate, the terminology used to describe it is irrelevant.
- Reject the Alphabet Arms Race: New identities will always emerge. Language will always evolve. Trying to capture every single nuance in a single acronym is a fool's errand that leads to the very mockery we see today.
The Cost of the "Plus"
The "+" at the end of these acronyms is the most honest part of the whole string. It is an admission that the list is incomplete and always will be.
But the "+" also acts as a "etcetera." It is a linguistic shrug. It says, "and everyone else we forgot or don't have space for."
If we are going to use a symbol for "everyone else," why are we bothering with the first 12 letters? Because the letters aren't for the people. The letters are for the institutions to show they did the "work" of listing them.
The Reality of the "Troll"
The people mocking the acronym are often dismissed as trolls. And yes, many are just looking for a reason to be hateful. But ignore the "why" of the mockery at your own peril.
The mockery happens because the language has become decoupled from reality. When an MP says "MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+," it sounds like a glitch in the matrix. It sounds like someone reading code instead of speaking to humans.
If you want to stop the trolling, stop giving the trolls such easy targets. Use language that is human, urgent, and focused on the tragedy, not the taxonomy.
Burn the Style Guide
The industry of "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" (DEI) has a vested interest in making these acronyms longer. The longer the acronym, the more "training" is required. The more training required, the more consultants get paid.
I have watched organizations dump $50,000 into "inclusive language audits" while their Indigenous employees are still making 70 cents on the dollar compared to their white counterparts.
The acronym is a product. It is something to be sold, managed, and updated like a software patch. But the people it represents are not products. They are victims of a system that is perfectly happy to call them by their preferred, 15-letter collective noun as long as it doesn't have to stop killing them.
Stop arguing about the letters. Start arguing about the lives.
If you can’t say it in a way that a grieving mother in a remote community can understand without a glossary, you aren't helping her. You’re just talking to yourself in a mirror of your own making.
The acronym is a distraction. The "woke" MP is a distraction. The "trolls" are a distraction.
The only thing that isn't a distraction is the silence where thousands of women should be.
