The far-right Italian politician Giorgia Meloni is set to become Italy’s first female Prime Minister after her party, Brothers of Italy, secured the largest share of votes in the Italian elections. Sadly, this is a result that will have urgent and serious consequences for the LGBTQ+ community living in Italy.
Italy does not have the best track record on LGBTQ+ rights, with the community facing more challenges when compared to other European countries. This is a potential consequence of the Vatican City and the Catholic Church still having a lot of influence on the voting public and decision-making bodies. It was only in 2015 that trans people were allowed to change their gender without needing a medical intervention. In 2016, the Italian senate passed a bill recognising same-sex civil unions, not marriage. Since then, queer and trans lives have not significantly improved.
Earlier this year, however, Italy reached a significant milestone regarding trans rights. While trans and non-binary people still require a judge’s approval to legally change their name and gender, this was the first time in the country’s history that a court in Rome recognised a non-binary person’s gender identity. Non-binary people are yet to receive full legal gender recognition, making this ruling significant, and one that will hopefully lead by example.
With Giorgia Meloni, the lead of the right-wing party Fratelli d’Italia, or ‘Brothers of Italy’, becoming Italy’s first female Prime Minister, the LGBTQ+ community and allies are worried. The idea of Italy’s first non-cis male leader, without context, would be a positive development. However, Meloni’s values and policies regrettably do not reflect a progressive moment in Italy’s history, but a regressive step back toward a darker time.
Meloni became involved in politics at an early age, joining a youth group that was established by a Minister of Benito Mussolini’s government. Mussolini was Italy’s most well-known fascist dictator who founded the National Fascist Party a century ago. While Meloni seemingly distanced herself from Italy’s fascist past, her party Brothers of Italy still maintains the motto Dio, patria, e famiglia, or translated ‘God, fatherland, and family’. This slogan does not have fascist undertones, so much as its own fascist marching band.
Last year, the Zan bill, named after Alessandro Zan, a gay rights activist and politician who proposed the bill, was refused by the same party Giorgia Meloni represents. The bill would have made violence against queer and trans people a hate crime. It was denied due to right wing parties, such as Brothers of Italy and the Lega, or ‘League’, believing it to promote ‘homosexual propaganda’ and the suppression of freedom of expression – meaning suppressing the freedom to commit hate crime people based on their victim’s gender and sexual identity. Not freedom for those affected from violence and harm, but freedom for the far right to hurt.
Refusing to make hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people illegal means clearing the way for violence against queer and trans people, abandoning the community with no governmental support.
With Meloni’s win, queer and trans couples will continue not to have the right to adopt a child and build their own family. According to the Brothers of Italy, a child should ‘have the right to a father and a mother’, ergo by their view, letting queer as well as gender diverse people adopt would subject the child to a lesser quality of life (Gay.it). Meloni believes this decision to be in the child’s best interest. Her binary idea of parenthood dismisses all parents who do not identify as fathers or mothers and parenting couples who do not manifest within this binary, heteronormative paradigm.
Abortion rights are also at risk now that Meloni has become Prime Minister. In Marche, a region in Italy that is led by Meloni’s party Brothers of Italy, the majority of healthcare professionals refuse to provide abortion services as it goes against their ‘moral values’ and religious beliefs. Meloni herself has stated that instead of focusing on the aspect of the 194 law which gave people the right to abortion, her aim is to prevent any future abortions from happening.
Reducing the access to abortions will only lead to unsafe abortions and people being forced to give birth to children they do not want. This issue not only affects cis women but also countless trans and gender diverse people with uteruses.
Moreover, this June, Meloni held a speech in which she criticised the on-going discourse around gender inclusivity, which in Italy is now often referred to as the ideologia del gender, or ‘ideology of gender’. She claimed that this ‘ideology’ only further perpetuates the extinction of womanhood and motherhood as we know it, given the inclusion of men and non-binary people as pregnant people and birth givers.
Including trans and non-binary people in discourses that affect them personally does not take away from the experiences of cis women and mothers. However, reducing womanhood and motherhood to the capacity to procreate only reinforces the same misogynistic ideals women have fought decades to move away from.
Through various statements Meloni has made about the LGBTQ+ community throughout the years, she seems to remain firm on the fact that her identity as a woman and a mother is in jeopardy, taken over by gender-neutral terminology, such as ‘parent 1 and parent 2’ (translated from Gay.it’s article on Meloni’s statements). This is evidenced by her famous words which have been turned into a viral remix video, ‘Io sono Giorgia, sono donna, sono mamma, sono cristiana. Non me lo toglierete’, or translated ‘I am Giorgia, I am a woman, I am a mother, I am Christian. You will not take this away from me’.
With this right-wing conservative Giorgia Meloni winning the political race, trans and gender-diverse people in Italy face their rights being further taken away and suppressed. We hope that progress can again be made in Italy’s future elections in order for the LGBTQ+ community to be treated with the simple expectation of equal respect and basic human decency.