My name is Camille, I'm 22 years old.
I'm non-binary and I'm here to talk to you about nonbinarity.
Nonbinarity is an umbrella term that includes all the gender identities
that are neither completely male nor completely female.
It could be agender, where "a" means without, which is neutral,
or it could be all the gender fluid identities, including those
who are gender fluid, demigendered, pangendered , and so on.
If you imagine gender as a spectrum with two poles - male and female -
and a cursor that could move anywhere between them,
it would include all of those gender identities.
I never really identified with femininity and when I was 18,
I'd aleady started to question my own gender identity.
I met a trans man I was with for awhile and together, we found the words
for my identity, which was non-binary. Because he knew more about it than I did,
he helped me find the words for my gender identity.
Gender identity, it's who you are, the gender that you feel, that you try out.
And gender expression is what you show to others.
It's the way you express your identity.
So you can have, for example, a male gender identity, so you're a man.
But your gender expression could be feminine
with lots of markers that our society considers to be feminine.
For example Bilal Hissani, who is a man with a feminine gender expression.
I told my parents I was non-binary and at the same time,
that I also wanted to change my first name.
I was 20 years old so it was 2 years ago and my mom took it very well.
She was already totally up to speed about questions of gender.
She had thought through the issues and I felt very safe, very secure with her.
My dad, it was a little more delicate. I took more time to talk to him about it.
And in fact I didn't actually do that -
I sent him a message as it was easier for me to handle. And he reacted well.
He said he didn't understand everything but he'd always be there to support me,
and it that it didn't change anything for him, he loved me just as much.
For my grandma, it was more complicated since the concept was so foreign to her.
She grew up in the country, then went to Paris.
She was with my grandfather for 50 years and was very much cis-heteronormative,
where she never questioned her identity or that of others.
So when I talked to her about it, she was kind of thrown for a loop
but she always did the best she could with me.
She tried really hard and almost always got my first name right.
I made a request to change my name in 2019.
I made the request through my town's city hall.
I filled out an application form with statements from my family and friends
saying that they called me Cami when they talked to me.
I asked my school to write a letter of support, and so on.
Next, I submitted the application, and waited a few months.
The time varies from city to city,
but my request to change my name was accepted.
To misgender someone is to refer to them using the wrong pronouns,
and this assigns a gender to a non-binary person,
who would have explicitly said to use neutral pronouns like "iel".
And instead people use pronouns that identify that person as female or male.
Personally, I use female pronouns in speaking and neutral pronouns in writing.
l usually tell people up front that I prefer they use female pronouns
when they speak to me. If they don't do that on their own
and you want to be sure that you identify their gender correctly,
you can ask them their pronouns or wait until they identify their gender
themselves so you can follow their lead.
In the videos I made earlier, there were a lot of comments
that invalidated our identities, that denied our gender expressions
and our gender identities. After, I read very few comments because I know
they're usually malicious or very insensitive. And they really hurt me.
I've already taken part in a report where you could hear that it's just a fad,
that it appeared a few years ago. In the United States, about 10 years ago.
It was related to fashion, like unisex fashion and so on.
That's completely false and I also think
it's a point of view that's totally white and absolutely Eurocentric.
Because in so many cultures, there are
several gender identities that were completely erased during colonisation.
We hear it's problematic or awkward to create more and more categories
for people to self identify and re-self identify. But I think it's so important,
in the first place, to be able to self identify with something in order to
de-self identify with an identity that was arbitrarily assigned.
And I think it's also necessary to find a community, to create a link,
to know we're not alone, that there's support, that there are other people
who are like us, who understand us, who listen to us.
If I have only one thing to say, it would be that even if you don't understand,
you can always support us and be with us. You can learn.
You can deconstruct your patterns of thought. You can inform yourself.
You can help your friends and family, even if you don't entirely understand
the impact of what their gender means to them.
A second thing is that all non-binary people have different ways
of expressing their identity.
Some will have medical transitions, some will take hormones,
have operations, other things. And no matter how they transition or not,
socially, medically and so on, our identity is legitimate and it exists.
And there are many of us.