In Italy, the transcult came as a surprise. We would never have believed it.
Some of us had been following events in the UK - starting with the ultimately shelved attempt to reform the Gender Recognition Act - and overseas for some time, but we mistakenly thought that nothing like this would ever happen to us..
In Southern Europe, gender identity is presented as an cultural injustice.
When I try to tell my Anglo-Saxon sisters about the millennial culture of sexual differences in the Mediterranean basin, I often use the example of the jute of the femminielli, trans pilgrimage every 2 February to the sanctuary of Montevergine on Mount Partenio - 'della Vergine' - also known as the sanctuary of Mamma Schiavona, not far from Naples.
The femminiello is a very important figure in the millenary Neapolitan culture. It is a person born male who identifies as neither a woman nor a man.
The femminielli they stay with women, you could say they stay close to their mother, but they do NOT call themselves women, do not claim to be recognised as women. There are also the masculille -see here- born women who live, behave and dress in a masculine way, but these are less frequent cases. As in the case of the current MtF and FtM transitions -see here- it would be wrong to read the two conditions as perfectly symmetrical.
Tradition represents the attempt to bring order and social recognition to the breaking of gender stereotypes -without violating the bodies-.
Because of this prerogative, the femminiello has always been an sacred creatureWhen a child is born, it is placed in the baby's arms as a good omen, it is entrusted as the 'celebrant' in group games that preserve the characteristics of the ritual, such as the 'fiesta', the 'fiesta' and the 'ritual'. Femminiello raffle (from which men are strictly excluded) which refers to the Smorfia, the secret meaning of numbers.
E' direct descendant of the Coribanti, eunuchs consecrated to the Goddess Cybele, males who self-erected in the Dies Sanguinis and dressed in women's clothes to celebrate the Great Mother.
The shrine of Mamma Schiavona stands on the ruins of the temple of Cybele. The myth tells that it was Cybele who revealed to Virgil about a virgin who would give birth to a child god. So that Mary would give birth to Jesus and the goddess would abdicate in favour of her son. Jesus Christ is still imbued with the divine matter of his mother, he is an androgynous figure, an anomalous male in his time. Today we would say that even Christ breaks with the gender stereotypes of his time, he does not align himself entirely with the culture of domination.
The tradition of the femminielli is therefore part of the cult of the mother, is a tribute to the mother. Another ritual, the femminiello's daughter -who gives birth to a doll, the birthing bed surrounded by her peers, imitates and honours female fertility. And in the working-class neighbourhoods of Naples, it was always the women who decided which femminielli could be admitted among them and which could not.
The tradition of the femminielli fits perfectly - as Luisa Muraro puts it - into the symbolic order of the mother.
But this symbolic and social status is changing. One could speak of a progressive transition from the order of the mother to that of the father. Today, the femminielli are called trans, are trans people like everyone else, demand to be recognised and named as women, claim rights and support gender identity politics. It is a real cutting the roots.
The Anglo-Saxon import Lgbtq membership has eradicated the femminielli from their fabric. La Femminielli jute is increasingly politicised. Taxonomy and technique take the place of the sacred.
Losing the Mother, turning to his mother -first movement of patriarchy that is renewed in the initiation of every child- they too are a full member of the male world. They lose their sacredness and radicality in exchange for emancipation from the mother to be enrolled in the symbolic order of the father. The paradox is that by 'becoming' womenby naming themselves as women and in some way trying to replace them, they sever their link with the female world, which is no longer the place of their nourishment and become part of the masculine neuter.
This is similar to the movement we observe between the increasingly defeminised gay men. Over time, gays have lost any characteristic of effeminacy, accentuating stereotypical male characteristics - beard, muscles, social aggression. They often present themselves as more macho than heterosexuals, they emancipate themselves from the feminine by claiming a perfect homologation to the world of straight males -careers, home, children and everything else- including the right to have women bear children for them, in exchange not for marriage but for a one-off payment. During a Pride conference, one of them explained it to me in this way, in a way that I found shocking: straight people support women in exchange for children, I don't want a woman to support but I pay her anyway, in one go. What's wrong with that?
It can therefore be said that there is a neutralisation of differences in the direction of the masculine, because the neuter is masculine. In this movement in the direction of the masculine Gay and trans MtF relations also seem to have improved a lot. The gay world has always despised and ridiculed trans women, and trans women have never appreciated 'fags'. Today, both gays and trans people - at least the loudest and most 'politicised' part of them - converge their conflict against women, ridicule them, inferiorise them, misogynistically make them the 'fags'. lumpenproletariat of womanhood. Many behave no differently from the worst heterosexual males.
In our country the cult of the mother is still very much alive. Almost everything refers to the mother. The world smiled when the players of our national team, after winning the European title at Wembley, first called their mothers to share in the happiness of the victory. Madonnas continue to appear all over the place, there are apocryphal Catholic rites in which the people give Mary back the prominence that the canons of the Church have taken away from her. But the conditions for practising this 'cult' have become increasingly difficult. The paradox of our record low birth rate can also be read as a response of real women to a social and symbolic situation of loss of centrality of the mother figure and absolute ingratitude towards him.
If you have a child you risk losing your job, There is a lack of services and aid, and increasingly small and disintegrating families are unable to support you. Remaining in Naples, the case of a girl kicked off the bus in labour pains because she didn't have time to buy a ticket. She had to walk to the hospital in pain. A story that says it all. In telling the story the girl used precise words: there is no more conscience, he said. Co-science in the sense of shared knowledge about theirreplaceability of the mother-daughter relationship - as the foundation of civilisation.
It is not a question of each person's freedom to choose to be a mother or not to be a mother. We are talking about the symbolic order, not about singular experiences. These are reduction to insignificance of the experience of being a mother, an experience that only women have, to the point of frank persecutory hatred, a anti-maternal policies and technologies. And this has to do with the freedom of all.
Much of the violence we are resisting in recent years has as its object the maternal relationship: uterus for rent, sale of oocytes and medically assisted reproduction, 'male' pregnancies, well-funded research for artificial uterus and uterine transplantation; lack of services, pay injustice, low employment levels, layoffs; fathers who in the Courts snatch daughters and sons from their mothers; to the male redesign of the bodies of girls and boys brought into the world by women, bodies that are hormonised, operated on, redesigned, disassembled and reassembled by men who make significant profits in this process of bringing them into the world.
It is simply thethe last and final articulation of what has always been the movement of patriarchy: to take the place of women, to take their daughters and sons, to put them back into the world of men.
Erasing their being born from women's bodies: the new 'spirit' into which they are reborn is the free gender identity, a substitute for the 'old' incorporeal soul.
Also In the resistance to gender identity, therefore, the re-valorisation of the maternal relationship is decisive.
The whole transhuman project of replacing sex with gender is based on symbolic matricide and the liquidation of women.
The alternative can only be a civilisation with female roots.
Marina Terragni
