The tortuous path of Lgbtq+ rights

Once again, the Constitutional Court will deal with homogenous families: with an order published this week, the Court of Lucca referred to the Constitutional Court the question of the status of the children born from the parental project of two women carried out abroad through assisted fertilisation. And, in fact, in spite of the Consulta's invitation to legislate as early as March 2021, our Parliament has remained silent, even preparing, today, to introduce a universal crime of gestation for others in order to prevent new families from coming into being. After all, it was only with Law 76 of 2016 introducing civil unions that the family life of homosexuals had been recognised, but the parliamentary compromise had expunged any regulation of filiation relations, generating a jurisprudential disorder of rare latitude. As if not recognising in law could mean eliminating from history.

In short, the recognition of the rights of LGBT+ people in Italy is tortuous: while the laws of other European countries have long since accepted their requests and claims, Italy has ignored them, entrusting them to a now weakened judicial substitution. If, then, we turn our gaze from sexual orientation to gender identity, the legal abyss widens: so many subjectivities are excluded from the regulation of a law dating back to 1982, with a serious sacrifice of regulatory effectiveness and efficacy. Historical judgments have made it possible to overcome the need for the demolition of sexual characteristics, but a complete reform of law 164/1982 is now urgently needed to free trans and non-binary persons from the shackles of pathologisation or invisibilisation. So much so that, precisely on these aspects, the intervention of the Constitutional Court is once again awaited, after the hearing on 18 June. And again: no specific protection is recorded in the penal field and no regulatory hearing is offered to underage persons, painfully lacerated, precisely by legislative gaps, in their intimate experiences of identity. Inevitably, demands for synthesis here spoil the variety of instances, but we would like to bring out a specific tone of reflection. The history of legislation and jurisprudence on LGBT+ persons, precisely because it relates to constitutionally guaranteed rights, requires the entire community not to remain dormant, but to participate in the implementation of the Constitution in every furrow of humanity, without ideological shocks and without fear of welcoming the extraordinary wealth of identities and bodies, which colours existences without staining any of them.

*President Lenford Network - Advocacy for LGBTI Rights