Two-Spirit
An Indigenous North American word for gender that arrives bundled with community, ceremony and a job to do — and it belongs to Native people only.
- One of twenty-two Cultural identities
- No settled flag
- 15 min read
What it is
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.
Keep reading
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.
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.
Does this sound like you?
Take the test
Twenty questions, about four minutes, nothing leaves your phone. It suggests. You decide.
An ordinary day
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.
What people get wrong
How it actually plays out
Love
The word tells you nothing about who you end up with. Two-Spirit people are with men, with women, with other Two-Spirit people, with nobody, with the same person for thirty years.
What does show up: a partner has to make room for the fact that you come with obligations. Your cousin's kid. Your auntie's appointments. The funeral eight hours away that you are going to whether or not it is convenient. If someone treats your relatives as a scheduling problem, that relationship has a ceiling and you will find it.
Dating non-Native people has its own weather. Some are steady about it. Some want the identity as a feature — an interesting partner, a story for their friends — and you learn to spot that early, usually by how they behave when nothing interesting is happening.
Dating in community is small. Everybody is somebody's cousin. Breakups happen in front of an audience that will still be at the same feast in twenty years. Discretion is a survival skill here, not repression.
Desire
Desire is not the load-bearing part of this word, and treating it as the main event is how the whole thing gets misread.
Some Two-Spirit people are drawn only to men, some only to women, some to both, some to almost nobody. Asexual Two-Spirit people exist and get erased twice — once by each community.
What comes up often: the usual roles in bed are up for grabs rather than assigned by what your body is. Not always a big revelation. Sometimes just the plain absence of the script everyone else seems to have been handed.
There is also a particular tiredness around being fetishised. The people who want a Native partner the way they want a souvenir, the ones who bring up your ancestry in bed. It is common enough that plenty of people screen for it before a first date and make no apology for doing so.
The body
Bodies vary and so does what people do with them. Some Two-Spirit people take hormones, have surgery, change their documents. Plenty do none of that and never wanted to. Neither version is the more traditional one.
The medical side carries an extra layer. Care through Indian Health Service, a band clinic or a rural provider can be thin, far away, or run by somebody who has never written a hormone prescription. The paperwork pulls in different directions too — a status card, a tribal roll and a gender marker that disagree with each other, held by systems that do not talk.
Ceremony is where it gets sharpest. Sweats, dancing, regalia, moon-time protocols: much of it is gendered, and the gendering is enforced by whoever is running it that day. Some places will seat you where you belong with no discussion at all. Some will make you ask. Some will say no.
Then you decide whether to go back. That is not a small decision. Being turned away from ceremony is not like being turned away from a bar.
Work
Ordinary jobs, mostly. Care work, trades, kitchens, admin, driving, teaching, art.
If you work anywhere Native-facing — friendship centre, band office, health programme, university — expect to be handed the queer file. And the culture file. Both usually unpaid, both on top of the job you were hired for.
If you work anywhere else, expect the other version: you become the diversity anecdote. Somebody will ask you to speak at the Pride event in June, then again for whatever truth-and-reconciliation or heritage day your country runs, and be surprised when you say no.
If you sell art or beadwork, there is a shadow side to how well it moves. The market wants a particular kind of story attached to it, and the closer you fit that story the better it sells. People will pay for the version of you that is easy to explain in a caption.
Family
There is no single family reaction, because there is no single family.
The missionary line runs through a lot of households. A devout grandmother, an uncle who quotes scripture, a parent caught in the middle who loves you and also flinches. That is not tradition talking. That is a church that arrived on boats and stayed.
And then, often in the same house, an auntie who does not blink. Uses your name from the second you say it. Feeds you, puts you to work, never once brings it up, because as far as she is concerned there is nothing to bring up.
Kinship keeps operating either way. You are still somebody's grandchild, somebody's cousin, somebody who owes a ride on Thursday. That web does not much care what you call yourself, and on the bad days it is the thing that holds.
Coming out
A lot of Two-Spirit people do not use the phrase coming out. The Cree scholar Alex Wilson wrote about coming in instead — not leaving your people to go and be yourself somewhere else, but arriving back into your family, your community and your place in it, whole.
That framing is not universal. It lands for a lot of people because the Western script assumes a closet with a bright open world outside it. Some of us are walking the other way, back towards the people we were separated from.
In practice there are two rooms and they take different words. In queer spaces you might say gay or trans or non-binary, because Two-Spirit gets misheard as an aesthetic. In Native spaces you might say nothing at all, because everyone clocked it years ago and no announcement is required.
Safety is uneven and you know your own situation better than any page does. Small communities can be tight-knit and merciless at once. Being out at the urban centre says nothing about being out at home. Running two versions is not dishonesty. It is arithmetic.
Nearby identities
The distinction is the useful part. Names without a link don’t have a page yet.
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.
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.
Compare Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer →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.
All Transgender identities →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.
Compare Two-Spirit and Non-Binary →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.
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.
Māhū → · Fa’afafine → · Muxe →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.
It might not be you if…
- You 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.
- You 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.
- Your 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.
- You 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.
- You want it because it sounds spiritual. That is the clearest sign it is not yours.
- What 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.
- You 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.
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.
Questions people ask
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.
Read next
Two-Spirit is a word most people have seen and very few can explain. This guide is for two readers at once: Indigenous people circling the…
Guide · 14 min readAgender Identity: What It Means to Live Without GenderAsk most people what gender they feel like and something comes back. Ask an agender person and the line stays open.
This is not a clinical instrument, not a diagnosis, and not evidence of anything about anyone. It describes experiences so you can recognise your own — or rule them out.