Iel, il, or elle? Gender non-binarity in French

In languages with grammatical gender, people who identify out of the gender binary are given two choices: to use the grammatical male/female form or create a third gender-neutral option. With more people identifying as non-binary, there is a need for appropriate forms. My research examines the creation and use of gender-neutral language in French, focusing on social media. I began by gathering data from 5-10 French Instagram accounts that discuss LGBTQIA+ activism to see what changes are being proposed. The most frequent modifications were the use of iel/ael pronouns, alongside canonical il/elle. After pronoun usage, the most common information presented was about making nouns and adjectives gender-neutral. This mostly dealt with the written form, with next to none of these posts mentioning a way to convert this method to spoken French. After observing the writing forms used by most of these accounts, using a period to condense words with both masculine and feminine forms into one is the most common method, which would result in forms like médecin to become written like médecin.e. However, the aforementioned details are not uniform across accounts, causing confusion, and possibly lowering the usage of such writing in online spaces.