* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Blurring the line between traditionally rigid, binary conceptions of male and female
*M. is a pretty, 27-year-old woman with dark hair and long-fingered hands that move excitedly as she talks.
It’s hard to picture her, ten years ago, as a teenage boy just about to begin his studies at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Bologna.
M. was born in a small town in the south of Italy where, in the mid-80s, the word ‘transsexual’ was largely unheard of. She is an actress who also happens to be an “MtF,” a male-to-female transsexual.
“My profession comes before my transsexuality,” M. said in an interview with TrustLaw in Milan.
Theatre company Atopos brought these aspects of her life together for the first time, she said.
Atopos was born in September last year after actress Irene Serini and Argentine-Italian director Marcela Serli met with playwright Davide Tolu, a former LGBT (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender ) activist and a female-to-male transsexual.
“After I met Davide, I realised I knew nothing about transsexuals,” Serli told TrustLaw in Milan.
Fascinated by Davide and eager to know more about the transsexual world, she decided to bring together a group of actors, dancers as well as people without theatrical experience to discuss gender identity, sexual orientation and diversity in general.
The resultant play – “Variabili umane” (Human variables) – tells the life stories of a doctor, an actress, a former Big Brother star and an IBM employee, just to name a few.
Some are transsexual, some homosexual, others “just” straight.
“By talking about diversity we are actually talking about equality,” Serli said. “By talking about them we are talking about you.”
The play challenges social stereotypes – such as being transsexual meaning one is a prostitute, or that if someone is transsexual they are also gay – and it deliberately blurs the line between traditionally rigid, binary conceptions of male and female.
Davide Tolu, one of the play’s co-authors, said he was eager to show that female and male are elements intrinsically present in every one of us.
Davide started living as a man in his native Sardinia when he was 17 and had already left home.
“If I had wanted to live as a woman I wouldn’t have had a problem; nothing was wrong with the way I looked,” he said.
“I was desperate though,” he said. “I have decided to go through with it (the sex change operation) because otherwise I would have killed myself.”
GENDER DYSPHORIA
Sexual transition is a matter of life and death for many people with gender dysphoria – the feeling of belonging to the wrong gender.
“What people don’t get is that one doesn’t choose to be a transsexual,” said Serli. “These are souls trapped in the wrong body, and they often fight their whole life to match their inside with their outside.”
Gender dysphoria is still considered a psychological disorder under many countries’ legislations. Activists, in Italy and worldwide, are now battling to remove gender identity disorder (GID) from lists of officially recognised mental illnesses – France was the first country in the world to declassify it as a mental illness.
In Italy, sex-reassignment surgery (SRS) is regulated by a 1982 law (n.164/1982) that also permits post-surgery ratification of birth certificates and all personal documentation.
SRS is very expensive even in countries – like Italy – where the public healthcare system funds it.
Individuals have to dig into their own pockets to pay for minor, but in many cases essential, surgery. And one will have to pay for hormones for his/her whole life.
At the end of the play, all of the performers take off their clothes in a sort of liberating dance. Looking at each of the naked people on stage, the audience can easily forget about gender classifications and merely see a body.
“I think one of our goals is to educate people,” M. said before the play started. “A lot is being said about us but it is hardly ever the truth.”
*M. has asked for her full name not to appear in this article. “It is not because I don’t want people to know (I have transitioned) but because I want to be taken seriously as an actress.”
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