Postgres, varchar, and silent white space trimming

Given this table:

# create table initials (monogram varchar(2) primary key);

Insert a three character monogram.

# insert into initials(monogram) values ('BPD');
ERROR:  value too long for type character varying(2)

Ok, cool. Thanks Postgres. But what if my string ends in a space?

# insert into initials(monogram) values ('BP ');
INSERT 0 1

What? This caused me great pain when trying to do an insert. Here in my example I've used a CTE for brevity, but imagine you can't see the input table, and it contains thousands of records. My insert went something like this:

with input as (
        select 'BD '::text as data
)
insert into initials(monogram)
select data from input where not exists (select 1 from initials where monogram = input.data)
;
ERROR:  duplicate key value violates unique constraint "initials_pkey"
DETAIL:  Key (monogram)=(BD) already exists.

A spot check based on the error message turns up no results:

select count(*) from input where data = 'BD';
count
-------
     0
(1 row)

But of course 'BD ' = 'BD', if you keep in mind that Postgres will silently truncate trailing whitespace when casting to a varchar.