What’s John Swinney got against two-spirit Scots?

You may have thought that the Scottish government had abandoned gender metaphysics after the collapse of the ‘Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill’ last year. Think again. The SNP government appears to be heading back down the non-binary rabbit hole. This week it issued official guidance to public bodies suggesting that they should record public identities under no fewer than 24 gender categories. These include, in no particular order, genderqueer, genderfluid, bigender, androgynous, non-conforming, pangender, and neutral.

The LGBTQIA+ community will no doubt be worried about the absence of several gender that have featured prominently in the literature on non-binary identity, such as ‘two-spirit’. The cancellation of the two-spirit people will surely be of concern to the Bipoc (Black, Indigenous People of Colour) community. It refers, of course, to non-binary people who identify as members of the First Nation and other indigenous cultures of Native America. This is surely denying the very existence of two-spirit people.