Even if you don’t understand, you can still support and stand by us.
Our identity remains valid, and it exists.
[Non-binary Testimonials]
My name is Cami, I’m 22,
And I’m here to talk about my non-binary identity.
Non-binarity is an umbrella term that includes all gender identities
that are neither exclusively masculine nor exclusively feminine.
It can mean being agender,
“a” as in absence, without gender,
which is neutral,
or it can refer to all fluid identities,
as if we imagined gender as a spectrum
with two poles: masculine and feminine.
A cursor can move between the two.
These are people who are gender fluid,
demigender, pangender, etc.
I never really identified with femininity.
At 18, I was already questioning my gender,
and I met a trans man I was with for some time,
and we were able to put words on my identity, which is non binary.
I think that since he had a lot more information than me,
he helped me find the words to describe my identity.
Gender identity is who we are.
It’s the gender we feel, live, and experience.
Gender expression is what we show to others.
It’s the way we express this identity.
For example, you could have a masculine gender identity:
a man,
with a feminine gender expression,
with a lot of traits society considers feminine.
For example, Bilal Hassani is a man with a feminine gender expression.
When I told my parents that I am non-binary,
I also told them that I wanted to change my name.
I was 20, so it was 2 years ago.
My mom took it very well.
She was already well-informed about gender identity.
She was very open minded and
made me feel safe.
Telling my dad was a bit trickier.
I took longer talking to him, and I didn’t do it in person.
I sent him a message, since it felt easier to handle.
He reacted quite well.
He said he didn’t understand everything, but that he’d be there to support me,
it wouldn’t change anything, and he loved me the same.
It was a bit harder for my grandmother, with it being a very foreign concept.
She grew up in the countryside and later moved to Paris.
She lived with my grandfather for 50 years.
She lived within very cis-heteronormative frameworks,
where she never questioned her gender identity, or anyone else's.
When I told her, she was quite shocked.
But she has always tried to act
as well as possible with me.
She makes a lot of effort,
and rarely gets my name wrong anymore.
I filed for a legal name change request in 2019,
at a city hall close to where I lived.
I sent in a file I filled with statements from people close to me
confirming that they used the name Cami to refer to me.
I asked my school for a letter of support.
Then, I submitted my application
and waited for a few months.
Wait times depends on the city hall.
And, I got approval for the name change.
Misgendering someone
means referring to them using the wrong pronouns.
So, misgendering a non-binary person
who explicitly requested you to use neutral, "they/them", pronouns,
would be to gender them, to the masculine or feminine.
Personally, I use so-called feminine pronouns when speaking
and neutral pronouns when writing.
I usually say right away that
I prefer to be referred to with feminine pronouns when speaking.
If someone doesn’t say it unprompted,
and you’d rather make sure you’re using the right pronouns,
you can ask them directly
or wait for them to gender themselves in front of you,
and follow their lead.
In previous videos I’ve made,
there were lots of comments that invalidated our identities,
that denied our gender expressions and identities.
However, I don’t read many of those comments
because I know they’re often hateful or very tactless,
and they’ll only hurt me.
I have participated in a previous report
where people were portraying it as a trend,
that it only appeared in the US, barely 10 years ago,
that it was just a passing unisex trend, ect.
That is completely false.
I think that it's also a very white and eurocentric perspective,
because we can find several gender identities in many cultures,
that were completely erased during colonization.
We often hear that creating more and more labels to identify
and re-identify ourselves is problematic.
But I think it's crucial to first have something to identify with,
in order to separate ourselves
from an arbitrarily imposed identity.
I think it’s necessary to find ourselves within a community,
to build connections, to know we’re not alone,
that there’s support
and that others like us exist, who understand and hear us.
If I had just one thing to say, it
would be that even if you don’t really understand,
you can still offer support and stand by us.
You can learn,
and unlearn thought patterns,
educate yourself, help your loved ones,
even if you don’t fully understand what their gender identity means.
Secondly, every non-binary person expresses their identity differently.
Some go through medical transitions, take hormones, have surgeries,
while others won't.
And regardless of how someone chooses to transition,
whether socially, medically, or not at all,
our identity remains valid. It exists. And there are many of us.