I can say with some confidence that I always surrounded myself with left-wing students. Often bourgeois. Sometimes not.
I come from Livorno, a city allegedly known for its open mindedness: red city, it’s know as. Having spent time as an Erasmus student in Northern Europe I became even more convinced to know what it would be like to live in a multicultural and open environment.
Nothing, however, prepared me for Sarah Lawrence College in New York, one of the most gay-friendly US colleges, as well as the most expensive and, above all, specialized in liberal arts. In short, I had painted myself quite the picture, I was thrilled and excited. Being the unsuspecting student of languages I was, I had never delved into gender studies and I always thought about diversity in a way that someone who had never seen that diversity with their own eyes would have: Livorno is an important city in Tuscany, however, despite the supposed open-mindedness that I previously mentioned, few gays, lesbians and transgender people can be seen. That is why arriving at Sarah Lawrence changed my life.
My left-wing friends say that there are many more important issues, at a time like the one Italy is going through at the moment, other than surrogacy or civil unions. They say that they’re fine with them, that they have nothing against them, but that certain things can wait when dealing with other more urgent matters.
I shrug. Maybe it’s true. I don’t know. Sometimes I think of my college friends, who organized protests to demand gender-neutral bathrooms. As a student of the University of Florence, the first reaction to a protest for gender-neutral bathrooms was to stare with eyes wide open, because the scheduling of classes didn’t even work back home, let alone demanding for bathrooms respectful of all sexual identities.
But this is not the point. The point is, regardless of the whims or the will of a group of super rich hipster art students, that these eighteen-year-olds are not the only ones asking for the respect of their individual genders. When I sat down for my first class of English literature, in a lovely lodge in the middle of the campus, a professor who had a remarkable resemblance to Jude Law greeted us by asking each one of us our name, our year of study and the pronoun to which we wanted to be associated with.
Imagine my classmates, one after the other, rattling off their pronouns while I, filled with panic, had no idea what the question even meant. Logically, I was and I felt I was a woman, so I had to feel associated with the pronoun she, right? Ok. Yes, I told myself. I was right – but no one had ever asked me a question like that before.
I mean, I wasn’t yet aware that a little later, in Sweden, they would announce the introduction of a new pronoun that could identify who was not feeling associated with the male gender, nor with the female gender. And that speaking using they regarding a single person of “neutral” gender or unidentified, was already common practice and widespread in some areas of the United States. I had no idea.
In other words, despite what I thought was a background ready for everything, made of solid certainties and open-mindedness, I found myself feeling like someone who came from a provincial town that had just landed in a totally and incredibly new world.
I cannot deny that I roamed the campus, throughout the entirety of the first month, often wondering of what sex the students around me were. In my brain, mine was not a way to frame them in precise and well-defined categories – it was pure and simple curiosity. Trying to imagine some of these students (with traits, names and vocal timbres that did not help me at all in the identification of their starting sex) in an environment like my little Livorno was simply absurd. They would have been considered human cases.
Nevertheless, after a month I began wondering around the campus without asking myself any more questions. I no longer wondered because I was used it, or, perhaps, because I understood (or at least assimilated) something much more important: that certain things are important or make sense only if we give it to them. I know it sounds silly, but it’s true. Since coming back from my time at this great little New York College, I stopped obsessing over hair removal and I began to realize that those little stretch marks and wounds on my body were not imperfections I had to hide, to be ashamed of and to cover as I walked half-naked in front of my boyfriend. They were almost traits of my personality. Of my specific way of being. They almost, to break through the rhetoric, told my story. They were parts of me. Yes, that’s right, all those “flaws” that we see inconsequentially flattened and buried on the glossy magazine covers.
My American companions, however, shaved their heads, let their armpit and leg hair grow, they walked around with their bellies out despite being obviously overweight. The heterosexual guys shamelessly asked to borrow my leggings printed with Roy Lichtenstein’s patterns. And there were thousands of girls named Sarah turned into Thomas and many Thomas’s turned into Sarah’s. Or Sarah and Thomas that chose a neutral name like Andy or Alex.
At Sarah Lawrence College I discovered that even in the smallest things one must have courage. I discovered what it means to love your body and to do everything to feel comfortable with yourself. I’m not saying that the students had no defects and that some bigotries of American mentality didn’t slither, often and gladly, within the walls of a College that was so open and tolerant. But it is true, that the Sarah Lawrence College has changed my life. In one way or another. And I’m sure that, in many ways, even a city of a provincial mindset such as Livorno will open its doors to change. Along with all Italian cities. Step by step.
