Today, 20th of March, is Two-Spirit and Indigenous LGBTQIA+ Awareness & Celebration Day. Two-Spirit is a word that tries to embody an ancient Native American identity that describes people whose personal sense of gender is outside the binary male/female and who want to live differently from the gender roles, behaviours and interests that their tribal society may have assumed they would undertake, for instance, they take on a different job role and marry a different sex than they otherwise might have been expected to want. So, in Native American culture, the concept of having a 2 Spirit identity spanned three aspects of a person: where they felt they identify on 1) the gender spectrum and 2) sexuality spectrum, together with 3) their spiritual self which reflected their sense of having more than one spirit or energy that is outside the gender binary.
The words, concepts, traditions and social conventions for 2 Spirit people varied between Native American tribes and nations, so I have represented this by including the variety of words and concepts within different Native American groups under my heading: 2 Spirit Terms.
Under my heading: Celebrating 2 Spirit People, I have raised awareness of famous indigenous LGBTQ+ people and their contributions who, nevertheless, often do not receive the same visibility worldwide as other social groups.
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