Translator: María Guadalupe Niklison
Reviewer: Peter van de Ven I wonder what you first think
when you see me. Perhaps it's something about my curls -
people often mention them. Or "What a dapper little man." In my experience,
one of the first things people do is assume I'm a boy or aren't sure
whether I'm a girl or a boy. We do this to everyone. We assume what gender someone is,
based on how they look, and if we can't tell, we get confused. I say "we" because I do it too.
It's ingrained. Our first decision and mostly unconscious. But why? Well, I'm Audrey, and if we are talking biology, I'm female. But I feel it's more complex than that. For an entry point,
let's look at my style. As you can probably see,
I have a unique style, but I wasn't born wearing suits,
bow ties, and flamingo socks. My style had to evolve,
and it will keep evolving, and I think it gives some insight
into my changing experience of gender. Here's a photo of me
before I started school, wearing a Star Wars top,
a skirt, and sneakers, demonstrating to the world
that I'm a girl! It's the skirt, right? We all know that sign. So at this age, I was just a girl
who didn't care much about what I wore. It was functional and varied. This all took a different turn when I hit the age of five
and started school. I remember one of my first days at school,
and I was in the girls' toilet when two girls I knew came near me
and said, "Look, there's a boy in here." I looked over my shoulder,
but there was no one there. So I asked them, "Where?" I realized they meant me. I was really shocked, as I'd only been around people
who knew and understood me. I felt upset and alienated. Eventually, this misrecognition started happening
in public bathrooms as well, with adults assuming my gender. Often, I would get things like
"Why are you in here?" or "Wrong bathroom." This eventually lead
to me being hesitant and tentative about even going
to the bathroom in public. Mostly, people didn't actually
say anything at all. They just stared at me. This felt, and feels, worse. At school, this happened
increasingly often, but while many people in that situation might have started dressing
more typically female, in dresses, with long hair, or bows, I became more and more
masculine presenting, wearing what we consider
to be boys' clothes because in them I felt
most authentically myself. I was pretty adamant
about just wearing male things. What that meant to me
was no pink, or even purple, or any form of dress, skirt,
or even glitter and frills. I didn't think of myself as a boy, but anything that was identified as female
felt uncomfortable to me. I adopted the label of "tomboy," which meant a girl who wore boy clothes
and played with boys' toys. To me, this avoided conflict. Tomboys are common, right? They're even considered a stage -
as though we'll grow out of it. My parents never fought my insistence
on avoiding dresses. They allowed me to choose what I wore because they believed
it had no bearing on who I was. I started wearing shirts and bow ties
to any slightly formal event. Here's a photo of me at six
wearing a bow tie I made out of paper because Dad was wearing his fabric one. As for my experience in bathrooms,
I tried to avoid the problem by waiting until people left
before I went in because otherwise, I'd feel trapped. Until about the age of nine, when someone mistook me for a boy,
I would reply comfortably that I'm a girl. But eventually, it stopped feeling right; instead of gaining confidence
the more it happened, I lost it. "Girl" didn't feel right,
but "boy" didn't feel correct either. So, what did I want?
I'm not sure I really knew at the time. My friends started getting
more and more into sports, but I was never sporty, I was a bookworm. If I were a boy, people would probably have said
I was a sensitive one. They don't tend to use
that term as much for girls, because it's what's expected. So I started hanging out
with a group of girls. This didn't really alter my style,
more my attitude to the word "tomboy," which I grew to dislike. I started to realize
I could still be a girl and wear typically male things. In my mind, I was still a girl
because I didn't feel like a boy. At the age of eight, I traveled with my parents
and the cast of our film, "52 Tuesdays," to the Berlin International Film Festival. "52 Tuesdays" was partly about a mom
transitioning from female to male. I image some of you are thinking, "Oh, no! Audrey just got this gender confusion
from her parents film making." But this gender questioning happened
before they started considering it, and they say I've taught them
as much about this as they've taught me. Anyway, in Berlin, I met Bart. Bart wore drapy black materials, high heeled boots,
nail polish, and eyeliner, but he wasn't dressed as a woman. This demonstrated to me that I could be flamboyant
and androgynous with my style, that my love of bow ties didn't need
to exclude anything traditionally female. That year, when the film won
the Crystal Bear Youth Jury Award, I took to the read carpet
in eyeliner and nail polish. Here's a photo of me that night.
Note the bow tie. I started to think of gender
as something more dynamic. Gender was not your genitals
or even what you wore or acted like, and maybe it wasn't fixed. I'm going to take a second
to pose a question to you. Why does it matter to you
whether I am a boy or a girl? And if you think it doesn't, I'm going to really ask you
to stop and think. Have you ever come across someone
whose gender you just can't place? Have you wanted to know,
even if you don't care either way, have you wanted to know what they are? For those of you who say,
"No, I'm totally comfortable not knowing, I don't use 'he' or 'she'
when talking about them, I just treat them as a human
without any gender identifiers." Well, that's impressive. It's hard to do. Just try and talk about someone
for a minute without using gender terms. It's really difficult. This is Audrey. Audrey is a ... ... young person who doesn't
identify as any gender. Audrey writes stories
and they love writing. Audrey loves writing -
not the stories love writing. Oops. It's hard for all of us. We want to know because of our language and, also, in my experience, it's because we treat men and boys
differently to women and girls. And we want to know how to treat them. Sometimes I'm glad
that people mistake me for a boy because I get to have
real conversations with people. They ask me about my future,
and we talk about about what I want to do. Often, when they find out I'm not a boy,
they don't know how to treat me. My friends, who show
more outward signs of being girls, often get called things like
"sweetheart," or "darling," or "love." People comment on how pretty they are. Recently, when I traveled overseas, I noticed a trend of gender neutral
or all-gender public bathrooms, which makes me feel so relieved. Having that choice makes me
love going to the bathroom in public, and I love I don't have to tell anyone
what genitalia I own. Here's a photo of me
in my sparkle pants, as I call them. They really added flare to my style, and they also really confuse some people
about whether I am a boy, or even, possibly,
make them uncomfortable because I seem like a very
flamboyant, or even girly, boy. Though I don't think this is always easy, I'm so happy with the choices I made
when I was younger to wear what made me feel good
and that I felt expressed me because I think I would be
a much unhappier kid otherwise. I still get called a boy
in public situations, but, in terms of bathrooms, I try to go to the all-gender
or unisex ones, or, if I can't,
I go to the disabled toilets. Although I do still use the girls' loos
in school and sometimes in public. Using the girls' toilets,
I never feel good, and I still have a tendency
to go with someone else. Though I'm not labeled
as a particular gender when I go to the disabled toilets,
I don't feel great still, because it just reminds me that there are mostly no toilets
for people like me, who don't identify
within the gender binary, and that toilets are just another way
we categorize people. My style has evolved drastically since the Star Wars t-shirts and skirts
of my early childhood, and I think it has a lot to say about how I now appreciate
and consider gender. I've realized that, for me,
gender is a spectrum. What my gender expression
and identity is, is entirely about me and not about how
other people perceive me. I don't know how we deal with that in a world so desperate
to define by gender. I'm going to leave you
with that same question. Why does it matter to you
whether I am a boy or a girl? Or that I am in the wrong bathroom? Does it really matter to you
which bathroom I use? Because it does matter to me. Would it hurt you
not to know someone's gender? Because despite how uncomfortable
it might make you feel, you assuming my gender
makes me feel uncomfortable every day. All I'm asking is for you to just sit
with that little bit of uncomfortable to make someone else feel better. Because it does matter to me. It matters to me when I walk
with my friends and you say, "Hey, girls!" But I don't want you to make amends, I don't hold my grudges,
but everytime you say that it smudges my happy thoughts
into undefinable words. It matters to me
when you say I'm a handsome lad because while you may be complimenting, it makes me question
my inner vision of myself. So, strangers, sit uncomfortably while I tell you how my gender
ranges from day to day, sometimes neutral, sometimes fluid,
sometimes gentle, sometimes fierce. It doesn't make me a boy,
but it doesn't mean that I'm realigning, and I don't want to be redefining
what it means to be a girl. Because I'm not a girl. So it does matter to me. (Applause)
