Whatever happened to Icelandic urban critic and cultural anthropologist Guðmundur Logi Ólafsdóttir?
Ólafsdóttir, a goateed parliamentarian and 76-year old father of 9, is a prolific writer, inventor and public intellectual. An expert fisherman, the Yale-educated Ólafsdóttir speaks five languages and is a long-time activist and former candidate the world’s first Green Party while living in Germany in the 70’s. He holds a patent on several green technologies, including a russet potato battery powered by biodegradable electrolytes.
And he’s nowhere to be found.
Reporters from Democracy Now traveled to his Reykjavík home earlier in August, and found only a few herring hanging on a smokehouse line, with a sign on the door reading, “Farin í veiði” (Gone Fishing).
Is he on the run? And is it over something serious or satirical? Former Reykjavík mayor and comedian Jón Gnarrr said on Zoom that he wouldn’t put it past his friend to bend his principles for the sake of a joke. “He’s like that; sometimes he can’t resist making a prank even when its against his own interests. I’ve told Guðmundur he’s the one person I know who should think more INSIDE the box.”
I asked Gnarrr if he had seen Ólafsdóttir recently.
“No. Last I heard he was somewhere on the coast of Ireland, hiding out in a friend’s coracle.”
If you’ve been taking a digital detox this winter, you may have missed the controversy surrounding Ólafsdóttir‘s recent comments on gender identity. And how strange things have become on that front.
LGBT…and more
Back in 2008, Ólafsdóttir argued that the term LGBT didn’t accommodate all the “marginalized groups who want a piece of the alphabetical action.” It was discriminatory in its present form, he argued. Following American activists, the Icelandic scholar endorsed appending a Q to LGBT, with Queer defined “not as specific to sexual orientation or even gender identity, but rather a banner term encompassing those who do not endorse the culturally dominant narrative, on any matter of concern.”
Ólafsdóttir was also among the first to endorse and publicize the fuller term, LGBT2QIA. In an monograph published in 2014 by the University of Reykjavík, he argued that “expansion of the acronym has no prescribed limit. As many oppressed and aggrieved groups as can be imagined should be added into the indefinite future, with or without their consent.”
It’s unknown if Ólafsdóttir‘s endorsement of LGBT2QIA and its variants lead to their wider acceptance as banner terms. However, he’s known to be influential voice in policy-making circles on both sides of the Atlantic. The man is the ultimate insider. Numerous world leaders have named him as a personal friend, including Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, German chancellor Angele Merkel, and US vice president Kamala Harris.
Intriguingly, back in 2016 Ólafsdóttir expressed his support for the addition of “2” beyond its aboriginal sense of “Two-spirited.” The addition of the number “also raises awareness about the hegemony of letters in our acronyms and computer passwords. Arabic numerals have been culturally appropriated by an oppressive AngloSaxon alphabet for centuries,” he wrote on his website.
That remark raised a few eyebrows in the academic world, and the attention of alt-right trolls monitoring Ólafsdóttir’s social media accounts. But he recently went much further and endorsed the following mouthful in the summer issue of the influential Columbia Journal for Subcultural Studies. Here is his proposal, “LGBT2QIASPAOTRC@TH2+2=5 ,” in it’s entirety:
L = Lesbian.
G = Gay.
B = Bisexual.
T = Transgender.
Q = Queer.
2 = Two-spirited.
I = Intersexual.
A = Asexual/Ally
S = Skoliosexual: attraction to transgender, genderqueer, or non-binary people.
P = Polysexual: attraction to multiple genders, but not all.
A = Androgynsexual: attraction to androgynous people.
O = Objectsexual : attraction to landmarks and other inanimate objects.
TR = Transraced: identifying as a person visually contrary to the socially-constructed definitions of race.
C = Clocksexual: shifting identity(s) ranging across a temporal range by hour, day, month, or year.
@ = Atsexual: experiencing sexual desires and activity exclusively online, through pornographic sites, fantasy role-playing, teledildonics, and so on.
TH: Transhuman: those who have augmented (or wish to augment) themselves with microchips and digital implants. Or who otherwise identify as robots.
2+2=5: to both highlight and reject the long-standing hegemony of phallologocentric western reason over the panglobal expression of feelings. And also to acknowledge the 5-spirited community.
Public backlash
After this daunting but descriptive mouthful began to circulate online, Ólafsdóttir experienced a predictable backlash. University of Toronto psychology professor and author Jordan Peterson responded to LGBT2QIASPAOTRC@TH2+2=5 with a widely-viewed YouTube video.
“This is the madness that George Orwell warned us about, the superheating of verbiage into tools of totalitarian control. Ólafsdóttir is more than a loose cannon - he’s a ballistic missile hacked by teenage cultural Marxists,” Peterson squealed.
“An ageing Icelandic crybaby has thrown a 23-letter log onto the bonfire of the insanities, and social justice warriors are warming their hands on the blaze,” wrote right-wing author and stick insect Anne Coulter on Breitbart. On Twitter, #Ólafsdóttirterror is a tempest-tossed teacup of praise and invective, showcasing dozens of entertaining memes. More seriously, protests erupted mid-November of 2023 at Antioch College in Ohio when alt-right mobs clashed with Ólafsdóttir supporters, injuring 12.
Tempers are building on all sides, particularly since many progressive observers have expressed appreciation of LGBT2QIASPAOTRC@TH2+2=5, particularly with the addition of two divisive terms: O and TR.
“Objectsexual” describes sexual attraction to landmarks such as bridges and public buildings, or fetish objects like teddy bears and automobiles. (“Objectsexual is not a clinical condition, but a healthy alternative lifestyle,” grunted free climber and TikTok influencer Meru Ridgely, while grinding against Ayer’s Rock in Australia in a recent video.)
“Transracial” describes self-identification as Asian, African, or any chosen ethnicity as long as you feel solidarity with the group’s history of oppression. This winter in Berlin, a summer study group of white male students examining American race relations announced they are “innerlich schwarz”, meaning “black inside.” Not in a metaphorical sense, but “existentiell,” according to one transracial member.
In the middle of the debate are those who would like to endorse Ólafsdóttir‘s aims, but are tentatively critical of his construction. “It’s quite lengthy,” observed Eudora Overton from The Berkeley Centre for Sapphic Studies in an personal communication.
“The burden is on the speaker to remember and recite the acronym correctly. That could trip up some speakers who are not fully committed to social justice. Then again, it would also make them easier to identify.”
Darker speculations have emerged among conspiracy theorists, who note the man‘s consulting work with midAtlantic policy circles and his rumoured intelligence agency connections. They insist he’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and peg LGBT2QIASPAOTRC@TH2+2=5 as part of a wider covert plan for fracturing the progressive left into smaller and smaller fiefdoms of victimization. And to tie them up in Lilliputian debates about who must call who what.
Stranger yet are the speculations that the Icelandic lightning rod doesn’t exist at all, and that all the mutually supporting documents, audio clips and videos have been cadged together by some Zelig-like character for some perverse, long-form performance art. In the most giddily paranoid variant of this, Ólafsdóttir, his friends and supposed family members aren’t just fake, they’re part of a Scandinavian arts collective conducting a decades-long augmented reality game.
Then there are those who believe the aging academic is very much real but that that his proposal is unreal. In essence, he authored a bad joke that ran out of control.
The academic is certainly no stranger to mischief-making. In a string of rather hilarious tweets, he publicly shamed his editor at Oxford University press into agreeing to the title for Ólafsdóttir‘s 2013 blockbuster, Where Do We Stick Our Shit: An Unnatural History of Civilization, Waste, and Entropy (now a standard text for postgraduate urban planning studies).
The man is undeniably a joker. He allegedly once ducked under his seat in the Icelandic parliament and crawled over to a representative from Deutsche Bank to tie his shoelaces together.
But what does it mean to tell a joke if no one can tell if it’s humour or not? Or whether its proper to laugh if it is? And who gets to decide what’s funny? Regardless, LGBT2QIASPAOTRC@TH2+2=5 is being studied seriously in some quarters. The Provincial Government of Ontario’s Department of Social Services is reportedly considering adopting the term for its public communications and sensitivity training sessions. And of course, it’s already a fixture on the flags of Antifa activists.
Is it him?
Complicating matters, a communiqué showed up this week on the 4Chan network by someone claiming to be Ólafsdóttir. “This is the only place I can safely make my voice heard without my presence being seen,” the statement begins. “I am using the Tor network out of concern for my personal safety.”
I have spent a considerable amount of time in self-imposed isolation at an undisclosed location. I am now faced with what I recognize to be a failure on my part. LGBT2QIASPAOTRC@TH2+2=5 is a failure ––we may as well be frank, a catastrophic failure–– as a designation. It is difficult to recite and impossible to remember. Therefore it will not serve as a useful addition to the vocabulary of the progressive left.
Having fasted and meditated and taken cold showers to clarify the mind, I have been granted what I believe to be a modest revelation. I know why I failed in spite of my best efforts, though it is disturbingly obvious in retrospect. I believed expansion of the term with no prescribed limit to be a virtue when it was actually a fatal flaw. It is precisely the addition of most of rest of the alphabet to LGBT, with repetitions and in random order, that have rendered it unusable!
My fundamental error was to approach the problem from the wrong direction. In striving for total inclusivity I set myself an impossible goal, as events clearly proved. No matter how many letters are added, there will always a group or a sub-subgroup somewhere who will feel felt left out and aggrieved. This is unjust on the face of it.
I should have worked with exclusivity rather than inclusivity. I can no longer endorse LGBT2QIASPAOTRC@TH2+2=5. The elegant solution which I offer in its place is: is Everyone Except White Heterosexuals (EEWH).
EEWH is as concise as LGBT was before my accretions dragged it down into ruin. EEWH is a genuine acronym, which can be pronounced as a word, rather than an initialism like LGBT. EEWH is not subject to accretion and so can enjoy a long future with its concision intact. (Groups may demand to join the Included, but none will demand a place among the Excluded.)
I anticipate the objection that my proposal is discriminatory in the extreme, focusing on a single identifiable out-group. But consider who constitutes that group. Surely, there is general agreement among serious scholars that the out-group are smug, arrogant, bigoted, misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, homophobic cultural imperialists and hereditary colonialists. I count myself among them. In order to have a society of open-hearted, loving, generous people living in an atmosphere of mutual acceptance and respect, I believe it’s necessary that this small pot of lexical gold be placed at the base of the multicultural rainbow.
Serious Ólafsdóttir-watchers don’t give the message full credence, as 4chan is a dark web portal favoured by hackers and trolls. That said, the confusion around the man is now total. Yesterday, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau claimed never to have met him even though a photo from 2015 Liberal campaign literature shows Trudeau holidaying on the Ólafsdóttir family yacht.
Meanwhile, the world awaits a 76-year old Icelandic fisherman and cultural anthropologist to come clean and appear in public. Did he intend this expanded abbreviation as serious semantic engineering or as smart-ass social commentary? Did he really retract it? Is Ólafsdóttir a tricky scholar... or a scary Trickster?
@edwardhopley
I finally realized my coffee wasn't strong enough when I tried to 🤪 google "Eudora Overton". omg, scary.. But love the discovery of Kurt Schwitters, thank you.
Bravo - there has to be some kind of very high paying award for this somewhere..