The acronym that became the problem: MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+

At what point did wokeness become its own caricature. Recently, in the Canadian Parliament, Leah Gazan, New Democratic Party MP for Winnipeg Centre, decided to go down as a poster child for ridicule by denouncing the budget cuts by the Canadian government, claiming it had not allocated a single dollar to address the genocide of MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ people.

The clip went viral within hours, not because of the genocide but because of the acronym.

What the heck does MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ stand for? The question has an official answer. MMIWGG2SLGBTQQIA+ stands for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit-a term used by some First Nations to describe people who embody both male and female spirits, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual.

Sixteen characters, nine categories and one plus sign for everything that hasn't been invented yet. On social media, many compared it to a "woke" Wi-Fi password. Gazan's response to the taunts was, of course, to accuse everyone of bigotry. That was not a very smart move if one wants to draw attention to the problem one is denouncing. It is the perfect vicious circle. Incomprehensible language alienates the public. The public's reaction is interpreted as reactionary hostility. That hostility justifies tightening up their language, adding another letter, another qualifier, another plus sign. Government versions range from MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+ to variants such as 2SLGBTQQIA+ or FFADA+, depending on who drafts the document. The very instability betrays its uselessness.

The bitter irony is that the proliferation of identity categories can function in practice as a mechanism for diffusing responsibility. When everyone is included in the acronym, no one is particularly at the center of the problem. Murdered Indigenous women, at the core of the debate the deputy denounced, become diluted in a litany of categories that signal the inclusive sensitivity of those who utter them rather than the suffering of those who endure it.

The principle that allows any society to treat violence as a solvable collective problem is simple, ancient. All individuals are equal before the law. A murdered Indigenous woman deserves exactly the same investigation, the same judicial rigor and the same presumption that her life matters, as any other citizen. No more, no less. The same.

That principle is universalist. It does not recognize ethnic, gender or sexual orientation categories as determinants of the value of a life or of the state's obligation to protect it. It is by definition incompatible with the identity-based logic that produces acronyms such as MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+.

Because that logic operates exactly backward: It does not start with the individual citizen with equal rights, but from the creation of victimized groups to be tutored. This is the foundational basis of wokeness. It does not seek to apply the law uniformly, but to build hierarchies of oppression that determine who deserves more attention, more resources, more visibility. The result is not universal justice but a taxonomy of castes, always with a plus sign at the end.

If Canadian institutions had, without exception and without discrimination, applied the law equally to all Canadian citizens over the past several decades, perhaps there would be no groups more exposed to violence. But bureaucracy always shifts blame elsewhere. So the answer is not to keep adding identity categories in the official vocabulary but to apply the law.

Curiously, the language of Western public institutions is becoming increasingly cryptic to ordinary citizens. There is a certain perversion in this pretentious and unpronounceable terminology. Almost all attempts to impose the famous "inclusive language" stumbled over the same stone. Not only were they impossible to pronounce, but their logic was as ridiculous as it was cryptic. There is much "virtue signaling" in the left's crusade to add letters to the acronym, a certain whiff of moral superiority seen in changes such as "woman" to "womb-bearer," among many other examples.

Fortunately, the authoritarianism of woke advocates leaves them exposed to the greatest ridicule. But what does not work on the street or in everyday life continues to pulse within institutions. All woke language functions as a perfect rhetorical trap: its complexity serves as an entry barrier separating the initiated from those who are not yet "woke."

The Canadian MP appealed to another of the quintessential woke dogmas, intersectionality, that overlapping of oppressed categories which grants status in the pyramid of oppression. The acronym merges gender theory and decolonial vocabulary to produce a spawn such as MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+. The central idea is that European colonialism not only dispossessed Indigenous peoples of land and resources but imposed upon them binary gender categories alien to their cosmologies. Therefore, decolonization also requires decolonizing gender. Hence the "2S" Two-Spirit embedded at the beginning of the acronym, merging the Indigenous cause with the LGBTQ+ agenda under the same umbrella of intersectional oppression.

The reasoning that so seduces the left, when applied to actual public policy, produces government documents that look like the glossary of a role-playing game. But worse, it starts from a premise that is philosophically opposed to emancipation and individual freedom, holding that Indigenous people, gay people, transgender people, bisexual people, intersex people, asexual people and everyone who fits after the "+" sign are first and last members of victimized categories that require differentiated protection.

This is quite the opposite of human dignity, which rests on the premise that each individual is an autonomous agent capable of exercising their rights, defending their interests and living their lives without needing the state to classify, label and administer them according to their group identity. The identity-based project, with all its rhetoric of inclusion and recognition, does exactly the opposite: It turns people who already enjoy equal rights before the law into permanent victims who need to be named by their oppressors, guided by their allies and represented by a class of victimhood experts who speak on their behalf, whom no one elected.

The paternalism of progressive compassion is perhaps the most difficult to combat because it arrives disguised as sensitivity. That is why the congresswoman can call those who laugh at her unpronounceable sophistry "bigots" or "phobics."

There is a fundamental difference between saying "This woman was murdered, and the state failed in its obligation to protect her as an equal citizen before the law" and saying "This woman was murdered because she belongs to a category of structural victims whose intersectional oppression requires a national action plan with a decolonial and gender perspective." The first formulation demands accountability. The second demands bureaucracy. The first treats the victim as an individual with violated rights. The second makes her a symbol of a collective narrative administered by others.

The first is compatible with equality before the law. The second replaces that principle with a hierarchy of vulnerabilities that is never quite complete, hence the plus sign, that honest little symbol that acknowledges that there will always be another category to include, another letter to add and another victim to fold into the acronym, none of which changes anything in that victim's real life. If progressivism valued the people it claims to defend, it would treat them as citizens with equal and enforceable rights, not as victims with manageable identities.

The acronym will continue to grow, at least in Canada, a country that seems hellbent on being a sanctuary for an ideology that has already demonstrated its danger and decay. Year after year, letters will be added to ensure that state resources continue to flow, that the judicial system continues to degrade and that identity-based bureaucracy trumps public policy rationality.