A professor at Laurier University, Ontario, called for the addition of “two-spirit” individuals to be added to the LGBT+ acronym.
Dr. Percy Lezard works in the university’s Indigenous Studies program.
“If you still exclude the 2SLGBTQ component,” Lezard said, “you are literally telling me that the violence that I experience on the daily, or the members of my community experience on the daily, is not important, is not valid and is not worth talking about. So until we move from that space, to including the actual longer acronym, I think the quality of life is not gonna change.”
“I always center everything as an Indigenous person,” the professor explained.
“I am a faculty member, I am a researcher, I’m a clinician, as a social worker for 35 plus years, but yet those are systems that if we critically engage and unpack, they continue to cause harm to First Nations, Métis, Inuit, Afro-Indigenous, black-Indigenous, 2SLGBTQQAI communities, and so I named the ways in which I am complicit, and so, in doing so, I acknowledge that we need to have a different framework.”
Meet @Laurier professor Dr. Percy Lezard. She wants to modify the LGBT+ acronym to MMIWG2SLGBT+ and claims to experience violence every day because of her identity. She identifies as trans, disabled, & 2 spirit.
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 9, 2024
Imagine going into debt for this. Stop hiring college graduates! pic.twitter.com/NsERspNj7l
