2024-02-11 06:38:33
by Susanna Tamaro
The writer recalls her childhood in search of an identity. And she warns: let’s give kids time to understand who they are
As a passionate naturalist that I am, I have always been enchanted by the extraordinary number of ways that evolution has been able to develop over millions of years to carry out its single, obsessive mission: that of reproducing. The ways are different and surprising, not even the most imaginative of magicians could have put together such a wonderland.
The great chaos that has been created over the last few years, thanks to an obsessive campaign on gender identity, leads me to think that there is a need to take stock of the issue starting from reality.
The identity model that is continually proposed to us now is that of the limpets, those tiny molluscs that live clinging in groups on the rocks to which the astonishing evolutionary creativity has given the protandric hermaphroditism that allows them to change sex at will: condemned to live on one rock, to have greater reproductive safety they must be able to rapidly transform. Am I a male surrounded only by other males? Et voilà, I transform into a female, or vice versa. Cases of hermaphroditism can also appear in mammals – for example, I had a cat with this peculiarity – but these are isolated phenomena.
In human beings things are more complicated because, if at a simple level of society the imperative of reproduction remains, when culture evolves and brings complexity of thought, other instances are added because the human being, unique in the living, has the gift of free will. It can thus happen that you are born male and wish to be female or vice versa, that you are attracted to people of the same sex or that you even feel no interest in this type of topic.
Personally, my childhood was devastated by gender dysphoria and for this reason I can speak about it with full knowledge of the facts. I started having problems since kindergarten, what in the early years was a primal and unconscious strength became a desperate awareness: I had come down to earth in the wrong body. Given the era, I never confessed this devastating certainty of mine to anyone but I spent the nights crying if I was given a doll or worse still some little girl’s dress. Around the age of eight or nine the suffering became uncontrollable, I had heard that one could change sex in Casablanca and that city was suddenly cloaked in a magical light for me. My grandmother, sensing my torments, bought me an officer’s costume at a Carnival, a uniform that I never took off until my knees got punctured.
During middle school, this suffering of mine began to fade; I began to have my own interests, to imagine a life different from that of the barracks. I would have been a scientist, there was no doubt. And then, in my freshman year of high school, I made an incredible discovery: boys existed, and they seemed to be extremely interesting. Power and wonder of hormones! Would they have been interested in me too? Faced with the exuberant femininity of my companions, I hesitated uncertainly. One day when I wanted to wear a skirt to try to reach their level, I remember it as one of the scariest of my life. But then I thought that maybe it was better to stay as I was, with jeans and a t-shirt, because if someone had fallen in love with me he would have been struck more by my interior than by my bodywork. And so it was. The atrocious suffering of gender dysphoria dissolved like a ghost at the crack of dawn.
For many years now, however, I have been wondering what would have become of me if, at seven, eight, nine years old, I had been taken under the protective wing of gender hawks? They would have convinced me of the legitimacy of my anxieties and, as in the darkest of fairy tales, with the persuasive smile of someone who is actually an ogre, they would have reassured me, they would have known how to solve my problems and I would have gratefully kissed the hands of those angels who promised to dissolve the fiery dart that had always wounded my heart. Psychologists, pills, hormones and then the big leap of becoming what I had always dreamed of: a male.
I firmly believe that history will judge sex changes imposed on children and young people as a crime. An ideological crime, because if I, dreaming of being an officer, had agreed to take the big step, I would not have transformed into a male but into a being in need of lifelong care, because nature is extremely stronger than culture or our desires and, to counteract it, apart from the consequences of the surgical interventions, I would have had to ingest hormones until the end of my days because the entire imposing biochemical apparatus of my body would have continued to shout only one thing: I am a female!
I have nothing against the fact that a person who is now an adult, in full possession of his mental faculties, consciously decides to take this step, convinced that he is achieving his right identity. Everyone is master of his own body and if he does not harm others he can do what he wants. However, I cannot find peace thinking about the crazy apparatus that has been set in motion in recent years to devastate the lives of children and adolescents, in the silence of an increasingly fearful and confused society, capable only of relying on experts and a science that he cares about everything except the good of the person. How can we think of blocking a child’s development with triptorelin while waiting for him to decide what he wants to be? Life is not made of polaroid photos. And since when do children have the awareness and ability to determine their future themselves? At ten, twelve, thirteen years old, without any experience of what bodily life is, how can one embark on a transformation from which there is no turning back?
And here we return to the entirely postmodern cult of the child as an omniscient wise being, to whom any type of suffering must be avoided and whose desires have become an unavoidable law. Educational wisdom, that reality that seems to have mysteriously dissolved, would require those who are close to children with gender dysphoria to leave them free to express their anxiety, their suffering – as my grandmother did with her officer’s uniform and as they made Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie with their daughter who as a child wanted to be called John and who has now become the fascinating Shiloh — accompanying them towards adolescence, when, if this aspect of life has not been ideologically loaded, in most cases the dysphoria dissolves. How many undiagnosed Aspergers girls and boys are undergoing sex change? When I think about it, I don’t sleep at night. And then, this obsession – that of locking up the complexity, richness and variety of human beings in an ideology – means forcing humanity into a cage from which it will be increasingly difficult to escape. Either you are male, and you must be male male, or you are female, and you must be female female. A female who doesn’t like to be frou frou, who doesn’t flirt, who has interests other than seduction, is immediately framed as someone who is uncomfortable in her role; and if she has any unhappiness, perhaps of another kind – broken families, lack of affection, educational abandonment – she will immediately be given a single point. Sexual identity. Or rather genital. The same thing goes for males. A male who loves quiet, thoughtful games, who prefers to spend his time with girls rather than getting into wild fights, will immediately be pushed to think that there is something wrong with him, something that could be remedied.
Since the world began, children have been free to experiment, among the shadows of bushes or courtyards, away from the gaze of adults, the identity and potential of their bodies, experiments protected by the sacrosanct veil of modesty and capable of pretending a continuous fluidity: «Let’s say that I was… let’s say that you were…». Childhood roles have always been wonderfully interchangeable. The richness of the person derives precisely from this continuous exploratory, often ambivalent, dialogue. We form by researching, investigating, accepting and rejecting. But when these natural movements of growth are militarily guided in a rigidly ideological perspective – the aim of which is to pigeonhole and chain any reality of man to his genitality – we find ourselves faced with a humanity pushed into the narrowness of a dead end.
Yet, despite all this evidence, contemporary society has abandoned itself to the sleep of reason, collective thought, cunningly and long indoctrinated, continues to crash with fury like a wave against a granite cliff and to indicate in the cliff the great limit that prevents that wave of conquering the freedom of the open sea. This cliff is actually an altar, and on this altar the sacrifice of all the children, girls, boys and girls takes place who, due to a moment of confusion and fragility in growth, are transformed into sacrificial victims, because to any person with common sense it immediately becomes clear that gender dysphoria in childhood is a symptom of some other profound discomfort, first of all, perhaps, that of living in a world that continually tells you that life has no meaning, that we we are only children of nothingness and chance and that no reality exists beyond that forged by our desires.
February 11, 2024 (modified February 11, 2024 | 07:14)
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