When you are yourself, it cannot be wrong
Camilla Vivian – My son in pink
Camilla Vivian was a mother like many others when her second-born, whom she was told was a boy, starts to let her know that they were wrong to assign him that gender, because she is a girl.
“You start to wonder what you are doing wrong” says Camilla. To start with, one questions what is happening and then one gets lost in a thousand questions, thinking it might be just a phase.
Society and conventions expect classifications, create clear barriers that an individual does not have – what is on the outside is only part of what is happening on the inside of a person.
Pink or pale blue, but also green, yellow, blue, red, orange. Feeling different must become the right to feel different.
Camilla chose to listen to her daughter and to start accepting her as she really is – an opportunity.
She became alert, she looked for support in society and discovered she was alone in a world that tries to hide, shyly accepts but will in any event exclude.
Looking beyond Italy’s borders, Camilla discovered she was part of a wider world where she is not alone to live this experience. For years she researched the topic, collected information and in the end, she decided to make her knowledge available to all. She started a blog to offer support and to be a contact point for other families who are in the same situation. Within a short space of time, Camilla and her family discover that many people have lived in silence, in a lonely exterior that does not represent them.
Camilla continues to write to enable people to feel acknowledged and no longer feel alone. She helps then find the correct information whereby gender diversity, i.e., not belonging to the male-female binary based on anatomy, is nothing but one of many facets of a human being.
Slowly families become stronger and more numerous. Information enables them to understand there is no need to be afraid, and they can clamour for rights.
Today Camilla lives in Spain. She continues with her fight in Italy where gender diversity is still a hospital door one needs to go through to find advice, but in a whisper.
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An individual/group of individuals/project that, through their tenacity and determination, their work, and commitment, have succeeded in making diversity a value for a community, a recognized social asset.