When last November Marco (the name is fictitious), a trans student of the Cavour scientific high school in Rome, a few steps from the Colosseum, collected the art test corrected by the professor, he found his name crossed out by a stroke of pen. It was not the personal name on his identity document, but the one chosen by the boy in his path of gender affirmation. This possibility is allowed by a regulation adopted by the institute: it is called a career alias, and allows trans students to use their chosen name in schools (or universities).
Marco asked the teacher for explanations. He was told that he had “no right to use any other name” and that the school’s bylaws didn’t matter. All in front of the classmates and the support teacher present in the classroom.
The case of the Cavour high school has provoked protests from students, from the institute and beyond, who have condemned the episode by speaking of transphobia. Openly taking the side of the professor, on the other hand, was the Provita and family association, which has been committed for years against “gender ideology”. A battle that for some time has primarily involved the world of school and which sees a target in the career alias.
On December 6, the association launched “the largest legal campaign against gender ideology in Italy”, notifying 150 institutions that have adopted the regulation, ordering its cancellation and asking for the intervention of the education minister and thanks to Giuseppe Valditara. According to Provita, “assigning a different name to a student based on a mere self-perception of gender”, is not only a “procedure that is harmful to his healthy psychophysical maturation”, but is “in open contrast with the regulations in force in the field administrative, civil and potentially even criminal”, since “the school administration has no power to change the registered name and legal identity of an individual”.
A few days later, the CitizenGo Italia and Non si touching the family associations were received at the ministry, where they handed over the “Stop gender in schools” petition to Undersecretary Paola Frassinetti which, among other things, also railed against the career alias. On December 30, however, Jacopo Coghe, spokesman for Provita and the family, met with Minister Valditara, to whom he brought, among other things, a dossier “with the hundreds of ideological initiatives in schools throughout Italy”, a “detailed legal analysis on the illegitimacy of the career alias” and a copy of the warnings.
Although Provita and family speak of “legal identity”, the career alias does not affect personal data in any way, the eventual rectification of which follows a completely different procedure, which is often long and tortuous. Rather, it is a bureaucratic profile, a confidentiality agreement that allows students in a gender affirmation path to use, exclusively at school and university, the preferred name corresponding to their identity.
“It is an agreement that guarantees the possibility of being seen and known by others with one’s chosen name, without having to make a mandatory or continuous coming out in front of classmates or teachers”, explains Fiorenzo Gimelli, president of Agedo, a parents’ association, relatives and friends of lgbtq+ people. “It remains understood that the registered name is used in all documents that have legal value towards the outside world. They are two distinct paths. The sole purpose of the alias career is to protect people’s well-being”.
43 percent of trans people aged 12 to 18 drop out of school before completing their studies
The regulation was also born thanks to the reflection of associations and parents. The meaning is to make trans people’s right to study effective. “Italy is a country far behind in relation to this reality, which is too often denied and invisible. And invisibility leads to violence. They are people who, if not supported and encouraged to be able to express themselves for who they are, are forced to lead a life that is not theirs, but the one that society and the family expects”, says Elisabetta Ferrari, president of GenderLens. The association, born with the aim of protecting trans childhood and adolescence and their families, is a signatory together with Agedo and other realities, of a document in which the attack by Provita and the family is rejected, defined as ” devoid of legal basis” and “injurious to rights”.
According to data from the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), 56 percent of LGBTQ+ people say they always hide their identity at school. The percentage rises to 77 percent for trans adolescents or adolescents who do not conform to the gender assigned at birth. Studies and research cited by GenderLens identify the school as the place where there are more frequent episodes of violence and bullying against lgbtq+ people, with consequences on mental health and academic performance. In this context, trans people have the highest dropout rate, with 43 per cent of 12-18 year olds leaving school before completing their studies. “You can’t ignore this situation,” says Ferrari.
For some years the alias career has entered various universities and about 160 schools, based on the legislation on autonomy and on the guidelines on bullying and discrimination, and thanks to agreements with students, families and associations. At the moment there are no ministerial forecasts, which means on the one hand that the adoption of the regulation is at the discretion of the school management, and on the other that the application models can be different.
Pushing for the adoption of the career alias in the institutes are also the student associations, such as the Network of middle school students, which supported the protests of the Cavour high school and followed various cases in other schools, not without difficulty. “The resistances are the known ones. There is a big cultural problem, even if there is no bad faith: teachers or parents who see a career as a difficult thing. And then there are the instrumental oppositions of associations such as Provita and the family, which however are more dangerous ”, says Michele Sicca of the Middle School Students Network.
These oppositions intimidate the principals and often interrupt the process for the adoption of the career alias, or make it long and difficult. “There are schools where the regulation has not been able to be discussed by the representatives for years. All it takes is one parent or close relative or in contact with these groups and seven, ten, fifteen page letters arrive explaining why the alias career is immoral and illegal. Which is not true.”
A wider mobilization
According to Massimo Prearo, a researcher and expert in gender studies who has been following the so-called “no gender” movements for years, these groups have for some time kept under strict control everything that happens in the school and that concerns issues such as gender education, sexual orientation and gender identity. “It was natural that they railed against the career alias, because it is a topical issue, which needs a certain urgency,” explains the researcher. “They have observed the work done with schools by associations such as Agedo or GenderLens and have acted accordingly. Through the battle against the career aka they want to get a position as interlocutors with the ministry. With the new government in power, they know the moment is right”.
Close to the elections, the galaxy of associations to which Provita and the family belong immediately spoke out asking the right-wing coalition to choose an education minister “aligned with families and against gender in schools”, who “defends the educational freedom of parents”. Already in 2018 the Family Day associations had met the then education minister Marco Bussetti, from the League.
Acting on the school, according to Prearo, also allows the politics that welcomes the requests of these associations to avoid the accusation of wanting to backtrack on rights: “It is perceived as a cultural intervention, on the role of the school and the relationship with families, without framing it in the question of rights”.
There are groups that specialize in producing documents with some semblance of scientific value
However, reducing the opposition to the career alias to the Family Day groups does not restore everything that today is moving against the “theory of gender” and, in essence, the rights of trans people. As Prearo points out, the story highlights the emergence of a wider mobilization, which no longer involves only the neo-Catholic movements and which in Italy was cemented during the discussion on the Zan bill. The bill, which was never approved, aimed to extend the legislation on hate crimes to attacks and behaviors based on sexual orientation, gender and gender identity.
The requests against gender transition arise above all from a series of groups, mostly imported from the English-speaking world, specialized in the production of documents with a semblance of scientific value on the issue. “These are researches based on some very problematic and criticized studies, often invalidated by the scientific community itself”, explains Prearo. “The basic idea is that there is an explosion of gender dysphoria diagnoses, even that there is a factory of trans children due to dynamics of ‘social contagion’. There is an enormous production of material on the subject: brochures, leaflets, reports”.
These ideas also contain some elements of what is called feminism gender critical – that is, which sees a correspondence between biological sex and gender and in general critical of the trans experience – and they arrived in Italy in part through the Genitori De Gender group. The “no gender” movements then took them up and used them to gain media and political visibility.
In the document in which they reject the warnings presented against the institutions that have adopted the career alias, GenderLens and other associations accuse Provita and the family of boasting “non-existent statistical and scientific data”, and of having set up an operation “aimed solely at disseminating moral panic towards families, schools and in public opinion”.
The institutions were asked not to follow up on the warning. Meanwhile the associations work to improve the regulations. “The processes concerning trans people are constantly evolving. Two years ago we built an alias career model with a series of characteristics that should now be reviewed, however,” says Sicca of the Middle School Students Network. “We are thinking of a process together with the Gay Center to question them, for example on the part of medicalization. Tying a path of gender affirmation to a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, as Career Alias does right now, is very limiting.”
The criterion of the diagnosis of gender dysphoria is also foreseen in the law 164 of 1982 which regulates the procedure for obtaining the registry correction of the name and gender. For Ferrari of GenderLens, it is “an obsolete and highly punitive law, which forces people to go through long, tiring journeys and medical evaluations that cost a lot”.
Among the areas in which GenderLens is engaged, there is also the claim of the depathologization of the trans experience. “Let’s not talk about illness. The World Health Organization itself has removed transsexuality from the list of mental illnesses”, says Ferrari, adding that “if all the procedures were simpler, without going through medical reports and court sentences, as happens in other countries, even the career alias may have less importance”.
What remains fundamental and urgent for the associations, despite the opening of the ministry to “no gender” requests, is that a normative basis for the alias career be issued to be applied in all institutions. To achieve this, according to Gimelli di Agedo, the narrative should be reversed: “Ideology has nothing to do with it. We have found that our children have needs, needs, and we ask that the institutions address them”.
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