"I was in Paris, I witnessed the clashes, I was gassed by the police's tear gas: I saw with my own eyes the black blocs setting trees and things on fire, taking advantage of the protests, but I also saw, and I want to underline this, the violence of the police, attacking students, young people, entire families, elderly women, treating them like terrorists. I don't agree with the violence, but I witnessed the violence of the police": Judith Butler, great American philosopher of LGBTQIA+ rights, of feminist and queer thought, of inclusion and above all of non-violence, calmly pronounces the words, in the Maggior Consiglio room, in Palazzo Ducale, in Genoa, on Wednesday evening, in front of an audience (tickets sold out in three hours weeks ago) full of young people such as you have never seen so many together, except in the square, in the oldest city in Italy. The event, "Let's talk about gender. A conversation about gender, politics and violence", was organized by the magazine About Gender, and by two professors from the University of Genoa, Emanuela Abbatecola and Isabel Fanlo Cortes. Butler observes the protests in France: “We need to understand how they can take place, without being manipulated by one side, and without being brutalized by the police,” he warns.
The philosopher points straight to Italy, where she observes and studies the continuous, subtle, unambiguous actions of the Meloni government, from the limitations on rescuing boats at sea to the witch hunt of the elusive "gender": "In Italy there are partial rights - she determines - partial rights to parenthood, reproduction, access to gender affirmation therapies: we all think that our governments, by eroding rights a little bit every day, will never manage to do another step, but then that step happens in the USA, with President Trump: if we accept partial rights, if we accept the compromise, if we think that contracting the rights of trans people is ultimately limiting the rights of a small community, we too are becoming a cog in an authoritarian machine". Not only that: "If we allow, without opposing, a contraction of the rights of a small group, we are only authorizing further erosions, these contractions become a precedent on the basis of which the government feels authorized to continue, until the small groups are eliminated, and then move on to all the others".
Butler shines a light on the construction of the fear of "gender": "I listened to Giorgia Meloni speak in Andalusia, with Vox: she described the destructive potential of gender, as if self-determining people, or rather as if human complexity were a threat to everyone else, as if others were robbed of their own gender. Making the population perceive trans people as a danger, targeting them, is the beginning of authoritarianism. We must oppose all this, because if we allow this campaign to continue, the rights of fragile minorities are eroded, democracy is eroded and authoritarianism grows"
Butler linked all the mobilizations that are taking place all over the world, starting from Europe: from the housing movement in Spain, to that of students in France, and now in Italy, to the "cockroaches" protest in India: "They are asking for access to housing, to quality public education, they are fighting against the poverty created by neoliberalism: they are only trying to save democracy." And it is the way, according to Butler, to stop "authoritarianism, fascism, Nazism that are growing everywhere - he repeatedly cites the arrests of LGBTQIA+ people by Erdogan in Turkey and all the chain-linked arrests of those who support their fight - all these instances must unite, in transnational movements".
For Butler, who grew up in a Jewish family, a passage on the Middle East and Israel is inevitable: "Just as it happens in Europe or America, with the denial of the existence of groups that ask for rights, so the denial of the existence of a group, such as the Palestinian one, happens in Israel." Butler claims that "denialism led the government to genocide in Gaza." And he quotes the documentary "Naza": "It is a very important document: the producers, however, have lost their citizenship because they are accused of having committed a crime against the State. Those who accuse them are precisely those who committed a crime against the State, with the genocide in Gaza".
