A Love Letter to FNTM

By Ellie Cole (written in collaboration with Cambridge Girl Talk).

Content Notes: self-deprecation, discussion of the gender paradigm, discussion around the grouping of non-binary people with women

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I’m not a writer. (Other than the essays that I- note to self- should be writing for my degree.) And though I’m not what people may consider to be the epitome of ‘shy and retiring’, I’m not usually one to share my thoughts publicly via ye olde written word. In short, I apologise for my lack of eloquence and flair.

FNTM is, very simply, a festival created by people who may experience disadvantage because of their gender identity or presentation.

Now would probably be the point at which I should shower you with statistics or case studies to demonstrate the existence of a gender paradigm, but I think that a short trip down google lane will do that just fine. Gender is an incredibly personal and delicate matter, and we have aimed to be as inclusive as possible in regard to this. If you’d like to know more about how why our creators all identify as female, non-binary or trans, we’ll have a few more blog posts on this that I hope you take the time to check out and engage with. But, for now, know that we are just a group of people who want to facilitate great art in a space that is comfortable and supportive.

I’m not sure that I can do justice to the love, dedication and creativity of everyone involved in bringing this festival to life. In all honesty, I thought that it was going to be nothing more than a pipe dream. But that quickly changed as more and more people came onboard and poured nothing but energy, excitement and enthusiasm into their roles.  (Look at that alliteration- Maybe I am a writer after all…)

So here we are – 10 days away from our launch night and our first event, and we’ve got so much to offer. This is a festival built from scratch by a load of talented, driven and creative people saying ‘Yes, we need this and I want to help create this’. And as such, it is basically one big celebration, and we invite anyone and everyone to come and celebrate with us.

So why have we only opened up our roles to people who identify in this way? Gender is a very very delicate subject, there is no way of getting around it. It affords certain people certain privileges, which I will assume for the sake of ease is common knowledge. I’m not going to cite articles or reference cases, google is a wonderful thing and can give you far more examples than I can in this short little hello. The reason for this collaboration with these self- identifying groups is that these are the people who genuinely feel disenfranchised within creative spaces that they love – be it theatre, dance, art, poetry etc. A question that I’ve seen arise is ‘Why are non-binary people often ‘grouped’ with women? Why not male and non-binary?’ I’m not going to pretend that I have detailed and excessive knowledge why, but from speaking to people about it and reading what I can, the simple answer is that these are both groups that experience disadvantage owing to the simple fact that they identify in these ways. An interesting and very important follow up point is also often raised – ‘By consistently pairing self- identifying women and non-binary groups, are we equating their identities?’ Again, I’m going to give a short answer: no. And nor should we. But often this is the impression that is given and is something that we have tried to dispel.

FNTM Arts Fest began 6 months ago when a group of friends were sitting in a flat and discussed how frustrating it is too feel as though you’re on the back foot and not really understanding why. Or rather, completely understanding that it was to do with our gender, but not really knowing what to do about it. We were a bit tired of complaining about the huge amount of talented actors around competing for the comparatively few roles that were accessible to women, let alone non-binary and trans people.

FNTM is our way of attempting a solution. FNTM is an expression of ourselves. FNTM is not the entire sum of our collective creativity, but we hope it goes some way in showing it.