Italy has never regulated the status of homosexual families with a proper law. Because there is no specific law in favour or against the recognition of children born into homosexual families, gay and lesbian parents have been taking it upon themselves to make sure their children could be protected by the laws that do exist in the country, through the help of some Mayors they were able to obtain the protection that the government refuses to give them officially. This has effectively made some children second class citizens compared to others and it has created the circumstances that allowed the Ministry of Home Affairs to take hold of the documents that for the past six years have granted parenting rights to gay and lesbian parents.
So it's happening exactly as I said it was going to, the Italian government has decided to retroactively remove lesbian mothers from the birth certificates of their children.
This brief sentence you just read is enough to make my heart feel tight in my chest, but that is because my heart isn't full of sand and my brain works well so the implications of the removal of a parent from a birth certificate are very clear to me. You however are seeing this from an entirely different perspective aren't you, you are seeing tradition and biology being respected, because a child can only have a mother and a father and that's it, the rule upon which your perfect society is built, the rule that has been stripping mothers and children of their bloodline for centuries, the rule that puts the father at the very centre of the family, after all it's the name of the father that the child will carry on, it's the name of the father that gets to live through while the mothers and grandmothers are forgotten. It works on paper doesn't it?
Biology is different though, biology says that mitochondrial DNA is only transmitted to subsequent generations through the maternal lineage, biology says that we carry a bit of our mother with us and she carries a bit of her mother and so on across millions of years until the very first mother. Biology says that your determination to create a male god and ruler is pretty stupid, but you only care about biology when it is wrapped with the old and thick fabric of heteropatriarchy.
Yes because the facts of biology are suddenly forgotten once the so called "non traditional" family is composed of a man and a woman. No government in any country is removing non biological fathers from birth certificates, even though the man in the birth certificate has no biological relation to the child, on the contrary most countries have pretty straightforward laws about the recognition of non biological fathers as long as the couple in question is heterosexual.
I live in a small Italian village, one of those places where secrets don’t exists and your problems are everyone’s problems - the happy nuclear family a few houses down the road couldn’t conceive a child naturally because the husband is sterile, not the end of the world these days, the Italian law allows IVF to heterosexual couples, the happy nuclear family simply picked a sperm donor, and a beautiful girl was born, she has her mother’s eyes.
The father on the birth certificate is not the donor, however the happy nuclear family didn’t receive a letter from the Italian government telling the husband that he is not the father of his child, no it only happened to lesbian families in Italy.
So where is your truth now? Your biological reality. Aren't we here to protect children and fight for reality? According to you this man shouldn’t have legal rights on the child his wife birthed, or does it work differently because their family is approved by the church? Oh but this is different, he has a wife, he is heterosexual, he could have been fertile! Well I could have been born male. To quote every mamma on the peninsula: if my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike.
No, let’s not kid ourselves.
You do not care one iota about children, you don’t even care that much about women, not if lesbians are still the inferior kind of women in your eyes.
If you cared you wouldn't be able to read the story of Vanessa Finesso and Cristina Zambon without grieving for them.
Vanessa is battling cancer, Vanessa gave birth to a child conceived through IVF with the egg of her wife Cristina, you see how both women are involved in the birth of this child, one egg from the mother, the uterus of the other mother, it's their child.
If at this point you are still thinking about the little bit of semen used to fertilise the egg I advise you to stop reading and go sit in the middle of a bike lane, maybe a concussion will help you.
If at this point you are still obsessing over the way the Italian ruling could be a weapon to help you fight against gender ideology then there is no hope for you anymore, it’s time to think of you as the old and injured race horse we should have mercy on. Because this ruling has as much in common with gender ideology as a truck has in common with a toothpick. I admit I am surprised to see people tag their opinions on this matter with #repel the GRA or similar hashtags, when this is not about gender, or trans people, or harmless teenagers with funky pronouns, this is about breaking innocent children’s lives, it’s about the real and tangible consequences of homophobia.
Let's reiterate the main facts, Vanessa has cancer, she may survive it, she may not, but her child has another mother, Cristina, she provided the egg, remember? The Italian government has decided that Cristina must be removed from the birth certificate of the child she had with her wife Vanessa, now the consequences of this decision should be clear as day but I will lay them out in front of you just in case you are wearing blinders: if who the government designated as the biological mother dies of the cancer she's currently battling and the second mother - who is arguably also the biological mother since she provided the egg - is not on the birth certificate then the child could be legally an orphan.
Read the last sentence again.
Understand that adoption is not permitted to homosexual couples in Italy, then read the last sentence again.
If you truly are incapable of seeing the tragedy in front of your eyes I don't want to live on the same planet where you live.
I don't want to believe that so many people can understand the implications of such a decision and still cry for the rights of a man who isn't even in the picture to be involved in the life of a child that he never even wanted while the very mother of this child is discarded and thrown aside worse than dog shit on the carpet.
I know what you are thinking, homosexual people should simply not have children, that's the solution, nobody has the right to have a child after all, only people who can make them by accident or by raping a woman in an alley, those people only should have children.
Society has been shaped around a very narrow perception of reality; aside from a very small number of undeniable facts everything else is made up to reflect the needs and desires of a single big group of people, once a different smaller group of people appears society has no space for them so it says no, your love is incorrect, your family is incorrect, your body is incorrect, the only correct way is mine and if the laws that work for me create a problem to you it is your fault for not being exactly like me.
You should have thought about it twice before being born homosexual in a world made for straight people, tough luck.
I’ve been aware of this homophobic decision taken by the Italian government since March, the horrible grief of it has been sitting in my chest for four months, when I first talked about it - hoping to raise awareness and anger - one of the biggest gender critical and feminist accounts on twitter called me emotional and a liar because thanks to her entirely misinformed analysis she concluded that the Italian government was actually protecting children from pedophiles and I was simply too emotional to understand the truth, for my own mental sanity I am choosing not to dwell on her fabricated point about pedophiles since nothing regarding the Italian ruling has anything to do with abused children, it has always been exclusively about lesbian families, but it’s very interesting to me that a self professed feminist would choose emotion as her silencing tactic, why would my emotions make my brain stop functioning? I have a pretty big heart and I am emotional about a lot of things, my brain doesn’t stop functioning just because my heart is involved in the thought process, the idea that emotion and stupidity are the same thing is pretty funny to me and my many neurons.
That exchange however unpleasant taught me a valuable lesson that I had yet to really learn: lesbians don't matter. Lesbian lives are less important than the old candy wrapper you stepped on on your way to work.
Does this sound harsh? It is harsh. It’s the truth nonetheless, and not a truth I came up with so I can play the victim or blame other people for everything that is wrong in my life. I am no victim. No lesbian is, we are not victims we are simply society’s afterthought, our voices are the least important, our stories are only useful if they can be turned inside out to include heterosexual women’s problems, gay men’s problems, children’s problems.
Lesbian problems don’t matter, lesbian voices don’t matter, lesbian lives don’t matter, sometimes not even to actual lesbians, (such is the shame we’ve been taught to live with). The sooner you understand just how little people care about your existence the better because then you can actually start caring about what is important, and you can spot anybody who is trying to take advantage of you from a mile away.
The past six months have been incredibly eye opening for me as a lesbian more than anything else I’ve been through in my quest to seek support, when it comes to so called gender critical matters I no longer care about things that don’t concern lesbian lives and needs, I no longer care to advance any cause that is not directly linked to lesbian lives, I love being a lesbian, I was born this way and I only regretted it when I was around the wrong people, people like the ones commenting on threads like this one, or this, or this, with lectures on the fairness of forcibly removing parental rights from lesbian families and leaving children to possibly become orphans. People whose consciences are still covered in bubble wrap just in case, people whose hearts and minds are so irreparably glued to a social media feed that they have become incapable of relating to the flesh and bones behind the stories they read.
I told you two names, Vanessa and Cristina, can you imagine their faces? Can you picture their first date, the day they declared their love to each other, the day they understood they wanted to be a family? Can you picture the doctor’s appointment, two hearts sinking at the word cancer. Can you see the long hours of chemotherapy, two pairs of hands clasped and clinging desperately to hope, can you see the love and the fear in their eyes? Can you understand what it means to carry through the days knowing that it might be the last you have to live together and on top of that to be told that your child will be taken by the state as soon as the woman you love is taken by cancer? Can you imagine the depth of this grief?
Let me ask you something simpler, can you remember being a child? Would you have wanted to be taken from your family after watching your mother pass away? I know I would find comfort in the hug of the mother I have left, I wouldn’t dare to take that last bit of hope away from a child, or from a mother. Not in the name of a political cause, not in the name of anything.
I wish I could believe you are capable of truly sitting with another person’s grief and weep like I am doing right now while typing this article, but I do not believe it. Not after seeing so many callous and cold comments praising the Italian government for “respecting reality”.
I want to grab you by the shoulders and shake you, I want to scream in your face, but it is pointless, all I can do is nurse my anger until it becomes a string of words on a piece of paper, all I can do is let myself feel the contempt you inspire in my soul while trying to make the world around me just a little bit better, protect even just one person from your maliciousness - all I can do is try my very best not to be like you.
Life is not black and white, it is not simple nor it is straightforward, and people are cruel of a cruelty that wild nature with its bloody and silent indifference can’t even hope to reach, I was tempted to think of you all as animals, to make myself feel better by picturing your callous comments as coming from a bunch of grotesque creatures competing for the highest place in the food chain but you see animals are better than any of us for one simple reason, animals cannot lie to themselves.
If you are a lesbian I am here for you, if you live in Italy and are affected by the current changes made by our government send me a message, I am opening them for this article only (be aware that I do not care about political debates here, this isn’t twitter, any comment that won’t be about lesbian lives and stories will be deleted) tell me your story if you want, I will listen to you even if I can’t do anything more to help. We only have each other to lean on and it is time we step away from parasitic alliances and embrace each other instead, our stories are important, our lives are important, even our differences are important, don’t let anyone make you feel inferior just because you want to build a life with another woman. Don’t let yourself believe that your story only counts if you are involved in politics or activism or feminism, being a lesbian comes with a lot of heaviness and it’s okay to simply want to live, your story is important to me, your life is important to me, and I know I am not the only lesbian out there who feels this way, gender ideology created a profound and terrible scission in our community, and now gender critical feminism is fracturing our new born groups, but we can find each other still, we can care about one another and through care we can build the strength we otherwise lack in numbers.
My heart goes out to fellow rainbow families in my beautiful country, the battle has merely begun.
—Letizia