My name is Cllare Chevry, I am working at the ELP as a summer intern, and before Pride Month ends, I would like to share a story, my story, about conflicting yet complementary identities.
I am a queer person and a speaker of a marginalised language. I am a Romand Lothringian and a woman, and these are two elements that are at the core of who I am and go hand in hand together, yet these two truths weren’t always as obvious as they are now. When I was a child, schools and family tried to raise me as a boy and as a French person, and that was what I believed I was, for years, even though I was never quite happy about it. I was taught you were either a boy or a girl, and that’s it. I was taught “you’re in France, you’re French, you speak French, that’s it”. At school, I was taught nationalist myths, about the greatness and unity of France. Both queerness (especially transness) and marginalised languages were erased in all public spaces, no one taught me about it all. Everyone constantly expected me to be a boy (even though I was already socially perceived as a “failed boy” and treated like a freak by everyone), and everyone expected me to be French and nothing else. I remember these nights where I would cry myself to sleep as a kid because I could never just be myself around anyone, although I didn’t really know that was the reason at the time, because I didn’t have the opportunity to even know who I really was.
However, that changed when I was a teenager, when I slowly discovered what had been kept hidden from me. I first learned about the Lothringian languages, and all the other marginalised languages spoken in neighbouring areas. I learned about how France conquered my country and annexed it, about the burnt cities, about how the attempts at regaining independence were repressed. And I learned about how our language was repressed, about how it was banned in public spaces, about the humiliations our elders went through. I learned how the repression policies meticulously targeted children, by taking advantage of their vulnerable age to traumatise them and make them ashamed of their own language to the point that they would never dare speak it again nor teach it to future generations. I learned about how its number of speakers went from the majority of the Lothringian population to only a few thousand people at most.
I decided to learn Romance Lothringian, and the more I learnt, the more I felt connected to the language. I was rediscovering a part of me that was never allowed to exist, yet had somehow always been there somewhere, asleep in a corner of my heart. After all, the shadow of the language had always been there, in my family name (a badly phonetically translated version of a Lothringian traditional name), in my accent, in all the Lothringian words I already used while speaking French. It was just waiting for me to catch up, which I eventually did. I gave the language a larger home within my heart, where it could keep on living, and that is one of the things that brings me the most happiness in my life.
Not long after that, I slowly came into contact with the queer community and became friends with a few trans people, and discovered what it meant to be transgender. That made me slowly realise that I could be a girl too, and that transness was actually the right word to accurately describe my experience, this thing I could never quite put into words until that moment. The realisation took quite a long time, at least a few months, maybe a year, but I got there. And I was in another journey of discovering a part of me that I had been repressing for years, that had always been there, hidden in that same corner of my heart. I found myself a new name, a name in one of the languages of my ancestors, an obvious choice. It was scary at first, such discoveries are always scary, but it finally enabled me to be myself. It was never easy, it took quite a bit of time for my family to finally accept me, it took me a long time to be able to start transitioning, first because my family didn’t allow me to, and then because of the French medical institution keeping me running in circles, but I kept my determination. I also learned about the history of trans struggles and queer struggles in general, and slowly became a queer activist, the same way I slowly became a marginalised language activist.
In French-controlled territories, being both queer and a marginalised language speaker is often seen as impossible, because these two identities are seen as contradictory. Marginalised language speakers are seen as a bunch of close-minded backwards peasants, who cling to a rudimentary language and refuse the enlightenment of French republican universalism, while queerness is seen as a recent corruption of the youth, that exists only in decadent cities, etc. It’s funny, when you speak a marginalised language, you cling too much to antiquated tradition, but when you’re queer, you’re too modern, too disconnected from tradition. So what am I then ? An impossible thing, it would appear !
Being this apparently impossible thing isn’t always easy. It can entail some pretty specific problems : changing your legal name as a trans person is hard, but changing your legal name to a traditional name of an unrecognised language as a trans person is even harder. I’m at the intersection of two struggles that appear unrelated, yet share quite a lot of similarities. I am scared of speaking my language in public the same way I am scared of being visibly trans in public. Both can be dangerous sometimes. And it’s quite isolating: rejection can come from everywhere. I can face rejection both from fellow queer people and from fellow speakers of marginalised languages. The isolation has always been the hardest thing about it for me.
Yet, I still cherish these two identities. It took years for me to find where I could belong, I spent years not understanding what I should do with these two conflicting identities, but not anymore. Nowadays, the idea of these two identities being contradictory seems absurd to me, as they are closely linked. My two journeys of self-discovery share so many similarities, there are so many parallels you can draw between them, to the point that they form only one journey. There is a special link that can’t be quite put into words between my gender identity and my Lothringian identity, they’re complementary, and one can’t fully exist without the other. I have been openly advocating for both causes for a while now, and while I have faced a lot of rejection and backlash, I have also found community. I have found friends who are like me, who speak marginalised languages and are queer, and are proud of both, and the friendships I have built with them are some of the most meaningful I have ever built, they are among the people I trust the most in my life.
It’s not easy to be a speaker of a language that is dying all around you, it’s not easy to be a trans person in a world where the pushback against trans rights is getting stronger and stronger, but I am still happy to be both, and I will never renounce these two identities. I’m proud to be a patoisante trans woman, and always will be !
Bien-aize darìer jorn dil Mois deis Gllóres !