Even if you don’t understand,
You can always support and accompany.
Our identity stays legitimate and it exists
My name is Cami, I’m 22, I’m nonbinary
And I’m here to talk about nonbinarity.
“Nonbinary” is an umbrella term
That groups together all gender identities
That are neither exclusively masculine
Or exclusively feminine.
It can be agender so “a”, the subtraction,
Without gender, that is neutral,
Or it can be all of the fluid identities
Like if we imagined gender as a spectrum with two poles
The masculine and the feminine.
We can have a moving cursor.
All the people who are genderfluid, demigender, pangender, etc
I never really identified with femininity.
At 18 I was already starting
To ask myself questions on my gender identity
And I met a trans man
With whom I was with for a little while
And together we were able to place a label on my identity
Which was nonbinary.
And I think it’s because
He had a lot more information than I did
That he knew how to help me find the words concerning my identity
Gender identity is what we are,
The gender we feel,
That we live and experiment with,
And gender expression
Is what others see,
It’s the way we express this identity.
We can have a gender identity
For example, masculine: A man,
With a gender expression
That is feminine, with a lot of traits
Considered feminine in society.
For example Jeffree Star, who is a man
With a feminine gender expression.
I told my parents I was nonbinary
And that I wanted to change my name
At the same time.
I was 20, so that was 2 years ago,
And my mom took it well.
She was already very up to date with gender questioning topics
She was pretty deconstructed and safe to talk to.
I felt safe.
It was slightly more delicate with my dad.
It took me a little longer to tell him.
And I didn’t do it
Face to face,
I sent him a message
Because it was easier for me
And he reacted pretty well.
He said he didn’t understand everything
But that he’ll be there for me
And that it won’t change anything for him,
That he still loves me.
For my grandmother, it was a little harder.
Because it was something less familiar to her
She grew up in the country, then moved to Paris
She lived with my grandfather for 50 years
She was in very cis heteronormative contexts
Where different gender identities had never crossed her mind
Same goes for others’ identities
So when I told her, it’s safe to say she was confused
But she always made sure
To behave
In the best way possible with me
She made a lot of efforts
Now, she rarely makes mistakes
With my chosen name
I applied for a name change
In 2019
I applied
At the city hall in my town
I filled out a form
With witness statements from my close ones
To say they used “Cami”
When talking to and about me
I asked my school for a letter as well
Then I gave them the form
And waited a few months
It depends on the cities
Then I got a confirmation for my name change.
Misgendering someone
Is when you talk to them
Using the wrong pronouns.
So gendering a nonbinary person
Who would’ve explicitly said
To use neutral pronouns, like “they”,
And gendering them with feminine or masculine pronouns.
Personally I use the pronouns
Considered feminine when speaking, and the neutral ones on paper
And it’s true that in general,
I tend to say it right away
That I prefer getting addressed
With feminine pronouns out loud
Then if the person doesn’t do it themselves
And you want to make sure,
You can ask them their pronouns
Or wait for them to gender themselves in front of you
To respect their identity .
In previous videos I’ve made,
There were a lot of comments
Invalidating our identities,
Denying our gender expression and identity.
I don’t really read those ones
Just cause I know that for the most part,
They don’t mean well, or are very, very insensitive
And will just hurt me.
One time I participated in a report where they said
It was a trend.
That it had only appeared a few years ago,
In the States, 10 years ago,
That it was related to fashion,
Unisex fashion, etc.
That’s completely false. I think it’s also
A really white and eurocentric point of view
Because in a lot of cultures,
You can find many gender identities
That were fully erased
During colonisation.
We often hear it’s problematic,
It’s embarrassing to recreate cases and cases
To identify and re-identify with
But I think it’s really important
To be able to identify with something
To de-identify from an identity
That was arbitrarily assigned.
I think it’s necessary
To find yourself in a community
To make links, know you are not alone,
That there’s support,
That there’s others that are like us
That listen and understand.
If there was one thing I’d wanna say,
I think that even if you don’t understand,
You can always support and accompany
You can learn, deconstruct
Old-fashion mindsets.
You can seek information, help your loved ones,
Even if you don’t understand
Whatever comes with their gender identity.
A second thing is that all nonbinary people
Express themselves differently,
That there are people that will go through
Medical transitions, that will take hormones,
That will get surgery, and some others won’t.
And whatever way
One will transition, or not,
Socially, medically, etc,
Our identity stays legitimate and it exists,
And there are many of us.