Even if you don't understand, you can always support us and be with us.
Our identity is real and it exists.
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 masculine nor completely feminine.
So that can be "ungendered" or without gender which is neutral,
or it can be all the gender fluid identities, including those
who are gender fluid, demigendered, pangendered , etcetera.
If you imagine gender as a spectrum with two poles - masculine and feminine -
and a cursor that could be anywhere between them, it would include everyone
who is gender fluid, demigender, pangender and so on.
I never really identified with femininity and when I was 18,
I'd aleady started to ask myself questions about my 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. And because he knew more about it than I did,
he could help 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 explain your identity.
So you can have a gender identity, for example masculine, so you're a man.
But your gender identity could be feminine
with lots of markers that our society considers to be feminine.
For example Bilal Hissani, who is a man with female gender expression.
I told my parents I was non-binary and at the same time,
that I wanted to change my first name.
I was 20 years old so it was 2 years ago and my my mom took it very well.
She was already totally up to speed about questions of gender.
She was sufficiently deconstructed and I felt very safe, very secure with her.
My dad, that was a little more delicate. I took more time to talk to him about it.
And in fact I didn't really do that -
I sent him a message because 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, that he loved me just as much.
For my grandmother, it was loss obvious because it was a foreign concept for her.
She grew up in the country, then went toParis.
She was with my grandfather for 50 years and was very much cis-heteronormative,
where she neve questioned her identity or that of others.
So when I talked to her about it, she was a bit surprised,
but she always tried to behave in the best way she could with me.
She tried really hard. She almost never made mistakes in my first name.
I'd made a request to change my fist name in 2019, through my town's city hall.
I got an application form that I filled with testimonies from my family and
friends to say that they used the first name Cami to talk to me.
I asked my school to write a letter of support, and so on.
Next, I submitted the application. I waited a few months.
In fact, that varies from city to city,
but my request to change my name was accepted.
To misgender someone is to speak to them using the wrong pronouns,
which thus genders a non-binary person who would have explicitly said
to use neutral pronouns like iel.
And instead people use pronouns that identify them as feminine or masculine.
Personally, I use feminine pronouns in speaking and neutral pronouns to writing.
It's true that in general I tend to say up front that I prefer people to use
feminine pronouns when they speak to me. If they don't do that on their own
and you want to be sure that you indentify their gender correctly,
you can ask them their pronouns or wait until they identify their gender
so you can follow their gendering.
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 of those comments because I know
that for the most part they're malicious or very insensitive.
And they just bring me pain.
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 year ago
it was related to fashion, like unisex fashion and so on.
That 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.
Often enough, 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 that 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 it you don't understand,
you can always support us and be with us. You can learn.
You can deconstruct the patterns of thought.
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.
There are those who will have medical transitions, who have take hormones,
who will have operations, other things.
And no matter how they are going to transition or not,
socially, medically and so on, our identity is legitimate and it exists.
And there are many of us.