Two-Spirit

Two-Spirit is an English umbrella term used by some Indigenous people in North America for gender, sexual and spiritual identity understood together. Two things distinguish it from every other term in this vertical. It was adopted at a specific meeting on a specific date; and it is not open to everyone — it belongs to Indigenous people, and non-Indigenous use of it is not a neutral synonym for non-binary.

Definition & scope

Two-Spirit does not name one gender. It is a pan-Indigenous English cover term standing in for a great many distinct roles across hundreds of nations, each with its own name, its own social function and its own relationship to ceremony. The Canadian Encyclopedia's account is explicit that the term describes gender, sexual and spiritual identity as one thing, which is where it parts company with the Western vocabulary that keeps those three on separate axes.

That integration is the substance of the difference. Non-binary describes a gender and says nothing about spirituality or community role; Two-Spirit, in the accounts of people who use it, is not separable from either. Treating the two as equivalent flattens exactly what the term was coined to preserve.

Not all Indigenous LGBTQ people use it. Some prefer a term in their own language; some consider a pan-Indigenous label a poor fit for nation-specific roles.

History & origins

The term is precisely dated, which is rare for an identity word.

• Before contact: many Indigenous nations recognised third and fourth gender roles, with their own names and their own places in ceremonial and social life.
• From the 18th century: European colonists applied berdache — a loanword ultimately from a Persian term for a kept boy — to those roles. It was pejorative, imposed from outside, and became the standard term in anthropology for roughly two centuries.
• 1990: at the third annual Intertribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian American Conference held near Winnipeg, Elder Myra Laramee brought forward the term, which had come to her in a vision before the gathering; the activist Albert McLeod proposed its adoption, and those present accepted it ceremonially. It renders the Anishinaabemowin niizh manidoowag, "two spirits".
• 1990s onward: the term spreads across Indigenous communities in Canada and the United States, and berdache is retired from serious use.
• 2010s: the initialism 2S enters organisational acronyms, most visibly in the Canadian 2SLGBTQ+.

In practice

The deliberate act of naming is what the 1990 gathering was for: replacing an outsiders' word with one chosen from inside, and doing so ceremonially rather than by publication. That origin explains the boundary around the term's use, which is enforced socially rather than legally and is taken seriously by the communities concerned.

In contemporary organisational language it appears most often in the Canadian acronym 2SLGBTQ+, where the placement is intentional: 2S comes first because these identities predate the others in the list on that land.

Psychology

There is no clinical literature on Two-Spirit identity as such, and there should not be — it is a cultural and spiritual category, not a diagnostic one. Nothing in the DSM-5 or the ICD-11 applies to it, and the ICD-11's 2019 removal of gender incongruence from its mental-disorders chapter settled the wider question for the whole vertical.

The research that does exist is public-health research, and it consistently reports that Two-Spirit people face compounded disadvantage — the effects of colonisation and the loss of the roles themselves, alongside the stressors documented for LGBTQ populations generally. The relevant literature is about historical trauma, not about gender.

Prevalence & culture

How common is Two-Spirit identity?

No survey measures it directly at national scale, and the figure here is a bounded derivation rather than a count.

The ceiling is demographic: Indigenous people are roughly 1–2% of the United States population and about 5% of Canada's, and the term is available only within that group. Applying LGBTQ identification rates in the range Gallup's 2025 survey reports for the general population (9% of adults) to that base gives an upper bound around 0.1–0.2% of the North American population, before accounting for the fact that not all Indigenous LGBTQ people use the term. The estimate below sits at the lower end of that range and carries low confidence.

Culturally the term travels much further than the population using it, which creates the recurring problem of non-Indigenous people adopting it as a synonym for non-binary. Every serious source on the term addresses that directly, and this entry follows them.