Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni has cautioned European women against adopting, internalizing, or submitting to the tenets of gender ideology, warning that the ideology’s increasing popularity and presence in the public sphere will be “to the detriment of women” who have become “its first victims.”
In an interview with the Italian weekly women’s magazine Grazia, Meloni refuted the idea propagated by culturally dominant, liberal Left that gender is a social construct, non-binary in its nature, insisting that it is an “incontrovertible fact” that masculinity and femininity are rooted in biological sex, the Milan-based newspaper Il Giornale reports.
“Today, the unilateral right to proclaim oneself a woman or a man is being asserted by any method—surgical, pharmacological, or even administrative,” the prime minister began. “Male and female are rooted in the body, and this is an incontrovertible fact.”
Meloni issued a stark warning that if gender ideology eventually becomes culturally hegemonic, it will ultimately be to the “detriment of women,” as it will infringe on their rights and security.
Today, to be a woman, one claims that it is enough to proclaim oneself as such; in the meantime, work is being done to erase a woman’s body, its essence, its difference. Women are the first victims of gender ideology. Many feminists think so too.
Meloni lamented that women, to the extent she has observed, all too often believe “they cannot compete with men and end up competing with each other, convinced that there is a lower level to which to relegate their skills.” She then expressed her conviction that “women have a great autonomous strength that must be freed from the thousand obstacles that cage it, but also from the taboos of which women themselves often become victims.”
Meloni’s statements found some unlikely support among prominent members of Italy’s LGBT community, including Cristina Gramolini, the president of the pro-lesbian and feminist association ArciLesbica, whose mission is to fight against discrimination, enhance the visibility of lesbians, and assist in the dissemination of lesbian and feminist culture.
“I agree with Meloni on the point that giving a man the ability to declare himself a woman by way of any method—surgical, pharmacological, or administrative—is damaging to women,” Gramolini said.
“I agree with the fact that… one can disregard the sexual body, i.e., a woman cannot be a male by self-declaration alone, this would harm reality and women, for example in women’s sports or in equal opportunity policies,” she added.
Gramolini did, however, take issue with Meloni’s position on gender fluidity, claiming that “gender ideology is right when it asserts one can be a man or a woman in different ways over time” since “masculinity and femininity are not natural” unlike the female and male bodies. “The roles sexual are historical, bodies are natural,” she added.
