Overview
What two-spirit means.
Two-Spirit is an English word, and a young one. It was chosen in 1990, at an Indigenous gay and lesbian gathering in Winnipeg, to replace "berdache" — a term outsiders had been printing about Native people for a century, and a slur. Albert McLeod is usually credited with proposing it. It comes from the Anishinaabemowin niizh manidoowag, two spirits, offered as a placeholder until each nation's own word could come home.
The roles it points at are old. The word is not. Both of those are true at the same time, and anyone who tells you otherwise is usually selling something.
It is an umbrella, not one identity. Underneath it sit hundreds of nations with hundreds of different arrangements: nádleehí in Diné, winkte in Lakota, lhamana in Zuni, ikwekaazo and ininiikaazo in Anishinaabemowin, asegi in Cherokee. Some nations recognised several genders. Some had nothing resembling this at all. There was never one Native way to be.
It is also not only about gender. In many nations the role came with work — who names the babies, who sits with the dying, who carries messages between two families who are not speaking, who keeps the kids nobody else can keep. Gender and role and ceremony arrive tangled together. The tangle is the point.
Two-Spirit belongs to Indigenous peoples of North America: First Nations, Métis, Inuit, Native American, Alaska Native. It is not open to non-Native people. That is not a vibe or a technicality — Two-Spirit organisations have said it plainly for over thirty years. If you are not Indigenous to this land, this is not your word, and nothing further down the page will change that. Read it as a guest.
Inside the community there is real disagreement and you will run into it. Some elders will not use the term. Some people think a pan-Indian word flattens the nation-specific ones and should be retired now that those are coming back. Some hold that it has to be given to you in community, not picked up alone. Others use it as shorthand and get on with their day. Nobody speaks for everybody here.
You do not have to be enrolled, fluent, out, on reserve, or connected to anybody to read yourself in this. A lot of the people who use this word are looking for their way back.
A pan-Indian term adopted by some Indigenous North Americans to describe gender-variant individuals with both masculine and feminine spirits.
Two-Spirit in one line
Origin
Where the word comes from
Two-Spirit was proposed in 1990 at the third annual Intertribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian American Conference, held in Beausejour, Manitoba (near Winnipeg). Elder Myra Laramee brought forward the concept in a dream, and activist Albert McLeod helped develop the English term as a translation of the Anishinaabemowin niizh manidoowag ("two spirits"), intended as a replacement for the anthropological term "berdache", which Indigenous people considered a slur.
It was adopted as a pan-Indigenous umbrella term for use in English, meant as a placeholder of solidarity across many nations until each nation's own words for its own gender and role traditions could be reclaimed and used again — not as a replacement for those specific, older words.
- Coined by
- Albert McLeod, building on a concept from Elder Myra Laramee
- First recorded
- 1990
- Where
- Third annual Intertribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian American Conference, Beausejour, Manitoba, Canada
Signs people describe
Common experiences
None of these is a test. Most people recognise a few and shrug at the rest.
Someone in community used the word about you before you ever typed it into a search bar. An auntie, a cousin, someone at a powwow who watched you for ten minutes and then said it like a fact about the weather.
"Gay" and "trans" describe the shape of your life accurately and still miss the reason for it.
The gender part of you is bound up with what you are for — who you cook for, who you drive places, who rings you at 3am — more than with clothes, hormones or a name change.
You know your nation has its own word.
You may not know what it is. There may be nobody left who could teach it to you, and that gap sits somewhere under your ribs.
You get read as the safe one.
People tell you things they are not telling their partners.
At ceremony the question is never who you are.
It is which side of the lodge you sit on, and someone has to decide, and the deciding is the whole thing.
You have had to prove you were Native enough in one room and queer enough in another, in the same week.
In queer spaces you are the Native one.
In Native spaces you are the queer one. You stopped expecting either room to feel like home.
You are urban, or adopted out, or scooped, or three generations off — reaching for this word without a nation behind it yet. It feels like reaching. It may still be yours.
None of this feels like a discovery.
It feels like a return to something that got interrupted.
Day to day
What it looks like on a normal Tuesday
Most days have no ceremony in them. Most days have a bus, a shift, and a fridge that needs sorting out.
Your cousin messages asking if you can take her kid Thursday. You get asked because you are the one who says yes, and because at some point, with no conversation about it, you became the one people hand things to. You reshuffle Thursday.
At work somebody asks you to do the land acknowledgement again. You do it again. Somebody else asks whether Two-Spirit is "the same as non-binary" and you decide, in about half a second, whether today is a teaching day or a "sort of, it's complicated" day. Most days it is the second one.
Evening: beadwork, or the group chat, or nothing at all. A relative sends a photo of a cousin's new regalia. You notice which side of the arbour you would be dancing on, and you park the thought, again.
It is not a costume you put on in the morning. It is more like weight distribution. You only notice it when the room tilts.
Across the parts of a life
Open the area you came here for.
Straight answers
What people get wrong
Every Native nation held Two-Spirit people as sacred.
Some nations had recognised roles with real authority. Some had roles with none. Some had nothing like it, and some would have given you trouble. "Sacred" gets used as a single flat story and it is not one. Meanwhile plenty of Two-Spirit people are shut out of their own communities today by relatives quoting a church, not a tradition. Romanticising the past does living people no favours.
It means a man and a woman in one body.
That is a literal reading of an English placeholder. Niizh manidoowag was offered as rough shorthand in 1990, not a description of anatomy or of two souls sharing a rib cage. Nation-specific words often mean something else entirely — nádleehí is usually glossed as one who changes, or one who is transformed. Different idea altogether.
Two-Spirit is just the Native word for gay or trans.
No. Many Two-Spirit people are also gay, lesbian, bi or trans and use those words daily. Some are not, and hold the role while living what a form would call a straight life. The word carries community and ceremony with it. "Gay" does not.
Anyone who feels a spiritual pull to it can be Two-Spirit.
No. It is for Indigenous people of North America. Non-Native people using it — including kind ones, including people with a great-grandmother story — is exactly what the community has been asking people to stop doing for three decades. There is no workshop, teacher or ceremony that makes an outsider eligible.
It is an ancient traditional word.
The English term dates from 1990. The roles are far older. People collapse those two facts constantly, usually online, and it hands ammunition to anyone looking to attack the term. Knowing the 1990 origin is not a weakness in your claim to it. It is the actual history.
If you are Two-Spirit you are automatically a healer or a ceremonial leader.
Most Two-Spirit people are not. Roles get given by communities over years, usually to somebody who has been doing unglamorous work the entire time. Anyone charging non-Native strangers online for a Two-Spirit ceremony is running a business, not a tradition.
Take care
On the hard days
The hard days are rarely about gender.
They are about the funeral you cannot afford to get to. The cousin nobody has heard from. The fact that Two-Spirit people are named in the national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, because we go missing too, and the search for us is thinner.
They are about a door. An elder who will not have you in the lodge. A relative quoting scripture at Christmas. A community you would give anything to be inside that has quietly decided you are a problem.
They are about the gap where the language should be. Knowing your nation had a word. Knowing the person who could have taught it to you is gone. Knowing that residential and boarding schools did that on purpose, and the silence is a result rather than an accident.
And they are about the ordinary grind of being explained to. Somebody telling you confidently what your own word means, at a party, at work, in a comment section, while you decide whether it is worth the breath.
On those days the word is not what holds you up. Your relatives are. Including the ones you have not met yet. Including the ones you are still going to have to go and find.
Pronouns
Pronouns
Every pronoun, and no pattern to it. Some Two-Spirit people use he, some she, some they, some two sets depending on which room they are standing in — ceremony, work, home, the group chat.
Worth knowing: many Indigenous languages do not gender pronouns at all. In Cree, wiya. In Anishinaabemowin, wiin. One word for anybody. If you speak your language, the whole pronoun argument can feel like an English problem someone handed you.
The word tells you nothing about the pronoun. Ask.
Consider another path
This might not be your word if…
- 1You are not Indigenous to North America. There is no route around this and no amount of feeling drawn to it changes it. A distant ancestor does not open the door; neither does being adopted into a friend's family or having done the work.
- 2You are Native and queer and "Native and gay" is already the whole sentence. Nothing missing. Reaching for a heavier word will not make what you have more real.
- 3Your nation's own word is alive and reachable. A lot of people would tell you to use that one and leave the English placeholder alone.
- 4You are Indigenous somewhere else in the world. Some do use 2S in solidarity, but plenty of Two-Spirit people consider it specific to this land. Go looking in your own languages first.
- 5You want it because it sounds spiritual. That is the clearest sign it is not yours.
- 6What you are actually after is a gender word with no community attached to it. Non-binary, genderfluid and agender are all easier to carry on your own. Two-Spirit is not a solo word.
- 7You are hoping a word will settle a question about whether you belong to your nation. It will not. That is a different fight and it deserves its own attention.
Close by
Related identities
Your nation's own word (nádleehí, winkte, lhamana, ikwekaazo, asegi, and many others)
Not nearby — underneath. Two-Spirit is English shorthand covering many different systems. If your nation's word exists and is being spoken again, it is the more precise one, and plenty of people would say it comes first.
Indigiqueer
Coined by Cree filmmaker TJ Cuthand and carried further by Oji-Cree writer Joshua Whitehead. Native and queer, without the ceremonial and role weight Two-Spirit carries. Some people choose it precisely because they do not want to claim a ceremonial term.
ReadTransgender
Overlaps constantly. Trans is about gender and where you are moving. Two-Spirit is gender inside a community, with obligations attached. Many people are both. Being a trans Native person does not by itself make you Two-Spirit, and being Two-Spirit does not mean transition.
Non-binary
Non-binary is defined against a two-box system that did not originate with us. Two-Spirit comes out of systems arranged differently in the first place, so it is not a position on somebody else's binary. Many people use both words, in different rooms.
Gay, lesbian, bisexual
Those are about attraction. Two-Spirit can include attraction and is not limited to it. Plenty of Native people are gay and not Two-Spirit, and there is no competition between the words.
Māhū, Fa'afafine, Muxe and other closed cultural identities
Other peoples, other systems, closed the same way this one is. Articles love to bundle them together as "third genders around the world", which flattens every one of them. Muxe are Indigenous to the Americas too and still not the same thing.
Indigenous people elsewhere in the world (Sámi, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, Māori, and others)
Genuinely contested. Some use 2S in solidarity. Many Two-Spirit organisers say it is specific to Turtle Island and its history. Your own peoples may have their own word, or the loss of one, and that is worth going after first.
Two-Spirit, side by side
Questions people ask
Frequently asked questions
Can I be Two-Spirit if I am not Native?+
No. The word was made in 1990 by Indigenous people, for Indigenous people, specifically to replace a slur that non-Native academics had stuck on them. Taking it as an outsider takes the one word the community built for itself. If what pulled you here was the idea of a gender that comes with a role and a place among your people, that pull is real and worth following — follow it in your own languages and histories, or in words like non-binary and genderqueer, which are open to anyone.
Is Two-Spirit the same as being gay or trans?+
No, though the overlap is heavy. Gay is about who you want. Trans is about gender and movement. Two-Spirit braids gender together with community role, ceremony and being Indigenous. Plenty of Two-Spirit people also use gay, lesbian, bi or trans, in different rooms, on the same day. A Native person can be trans and not Two-Spirit. A Two-Spirit person can be married to someone of another gender and living what a form would record as a straight life.
I am Native but I was adopted out, or I am urban, or I do not know my nation. Can I use it?+
Most Two-Spirit people would say yes, and a lot of them are in exactly your position. The Sixties Scoop, boarding schools, adoption, moving for work, enrolment rules that cut families off — the disconnection was engineered. It is not a personal failure of yours. Use the word if it fits, and keep looking for your people while you do. If your nation's own word turns up later, you are allowed to change what you call yourself.
Does somebody have to give it to me? Do I need ceremony first?+
Communities genuinely disagree here, and you will meet both positions. Some hold that the name is conferred — recognised by elders, given in ceremony — and that declaring it alone is not enough. Others treat it as a word any Indigenous person can pick up. In practice most people start using it themselves and grow into recognition later, if recognition comes. What nearly everyone agrees on is that stacking a healer or ceremonial-leader claim on top of it, with no community standing behind you, is not on.
The flag
Not a stripe flag and several designs — two feathers over the rainbow flag (provenance unknown, 2011 or earlier), 2Sanon's, Miigwan's 2019 and Patrick Hunter's 2025 designs.
Sources
- Two-spirit — Wikipedia Confirms 1990 coinage, McLeod's and Laramee's roles, and the niizh manidoowag etymology; fetched 2026-09-06.
- Two-Spirit — The Canadian Encyclopedia Corroborates Laramee's introduction of the concept and McLeod's development of the term in 1990; fetched 2026-09-06.
- New stamp remembers pivotal moment when “Two-Spirit” term was first introduced — Canada Post Confirms the 1990 Beausejour, Manitoba gathering location and date; fetched 2026-09-06.
Still figuring things out?
Twenty questions, four minutes, and a few words worth trying on.