The condition of trans people in Italy before 1982

Before April 14, 1982, trans people did not exist in Italy. Not legally, at least. No law provided for the possibility of changing one’s legal sex. No document could reflect a person’s true identity. And far from ignoring them in silence, the legal system actively persecuted them: with articles from the public security code dating back to fascism, with nighttime raids, with internal exile [1][4]. This is the story of what it meant to be trans in Italy when the state not only did not recognize you, but considered you a public order problem.

A legal void that was a sentence

Legal non-existence

Until 1982, the Italian legal system did not contemplate in any way the possibility of changing the sex recorded at birth [9]. The very concept of gender identity was absent from legal vocabulary. Sex was determined at birth based on external anatomical characteristics and remained immutable for life — regardless of any medical or surgical transition the person might undergo.

This meant that a trans woman, even after completing a transition and undergoing surgery abroad, remained legally a man. Every interaction with bureaucracy — from employment contracts to ID checks, from opening a bank account to medical visits — became a potential humiliation [1]. Documents did not match physical appearance, and every discrepancy exposed the person to judgment, discrimination, and often violence.

The impossibility of a normal life

The absence of legal recognition had cascading consequences on every aspect of daily life. Finding regular employment was extremely difficult: few companies were willing to hire someone whose documents openly contradicted their visible identity [5]. Renting an apartment was complicated for the same reasons. Accessing the healthcare system was paradoxical: trans people could not receive gender-affirming care in Italy because no state-recognized medical protocol existed.

The most common consequence of this systematic exclusion was prostitution. For many trans women of the 1960s and 1970s, sex work was not a choice but the only means of survival in a country that had excluded them from everything else [4][14]. As Porpora Marcasciano recounted in her book Tra le rose e le viole (2020), the trans women who animated the nascent movement were largely connected to street work, not by vocation but by the absence of alternatives [14].

Criminalization: how the state persecuted trans people

Article 85 of the TULPS: the crime of “masquerading”

The most commonly used legal instrument to target trans people was Article 85 of the Testo Unico delle Leggi di Pubblica Sicurezza (TULPS), a 1931 royal decree that prohibited “appearing masked in a public place” [13]. This provision, originally conceived to regulate the use of masks during carnival, was systematically applied to trans women: wearing women’s clothing, for a person registered as male at birth, was equated with masquerading [4][13].

The prescribed penalties were fines and, in cases of repeat offenses, more severe measures. But the real harm was not the fine itself: it was the pretext that Article 85 gave law enforcement to stop, identify, register, and humiliate trans people at any time and in any place.

Solicitation and indecent acts: the vicious circle

In addition to Article 85 of the TULPS, trans people were targeted through provisions of Law no. 1423 of 1956 (preventive measures against persons dangerous to public security and morality) and charges of indecent acts in a public place [4]. Since prostitution was often the only means of survival, trans women inevitably fell into the crosshairs of the police for solicitation as well.

This created a perfect vicious circle: the state denied trans people any possibility of social and professional integration, then punished them for the survival strategies that same exclusion made necessary. Fines, warnings, special surveillance, confiscation of passports and driver’s licenses, detentions, and imprisonment were all part of the repressive toolkit used to govern — rather than protect — the presence of trans women in public space [3][4].

The raids

Police raids were a constant in the lives of trans people during the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in large cities like Rome, Milan, Turin, and Naples [4][14]. Law enforcement conducted targeted nighttime operations in prostitution areas, systematically stopping all trans women present. The methods were often violent: insults, humiliating searches, beatings.

The activists of the MIT (Movimento Italiano Transessuali) later produced a “Self-Defense Manual for the Transvestite”, a document designed to provide quick information on how to behave in case of arrest, interrogation, and trial — and also, as the authors themselves specified, in case of beatings by officers [3][10]. The very existence of such a manual says everything about the normality of the institutional violence that trans people endured.

Casablanca: the forced destination

Georges Burou and the Casablanca clinic

Since sex reassignment surgery was effectively impossible in Italy — no law authorized it, and no surgeon would risk the legal consequences of performing it — Italian trans people who wanted surgical intervention were forced to go abroad.

The best-known destination was Casablanca, Morocco, where French gynecologist Georges Burou had begun performing vaginoplasty at his Clinique du Parc starting in the late 1950s [8]. From 1956, Burou developed a penile inversion vaginoplasty technique that would remain the global surgical standard for decades. Casablanca became the “mecca” for trans people from all over Europe, Italy included [8].

Marcella Di Folco, who would later become one of the most important figures in Italian trans activism, completed her surgical journey in Casablanca in 1980 [6][7] — two years before Law 164 made such procedures possible in Italy. The trip to Casablanca was not only expensive and medically risky (until the 1970s, the success rate of the surgery was estimated at around 50%) [8], but also represented further proof of the Italian state’s total indifference to the needs of trans people.

The first voices: the Italian trans movement

FUORI! and the genesis of the legislative proposal

The first initiatives for the recognition of trans rights in Italy emerged from within the radical movement. In October 1979, two members of FUORI! (Fronte Unitario Omosessuale Rivoluzionario Italiano), Enzo Cucco and Enzo Francone, drafted a first proposal for a law on sex change [4]. FUORI!, founded in 1971, was Italy’s main homosexual organization and operated in close collaboration with Marco Pannella’s Radical Party.

However, it was the courage of those directly affected that broke the deadlock. Pina Bonanno, a trans activist from Catania, on the advice of artist Marzia Siclari, wrote to Marco Pannella asking him to take up the cause of trans rights [3][4]. Pannella responded positively, and Bonanno began organizing her companions.

The founding of MIT

Between 1979 and spring 1980, trans activists founded the MIT — Movimento Italiano Transessuali (later renamed Movimento Identita Trans), the first trans association in Italy [10]. As Pina Bonanno recounted: “When I returned to Milan, where I was living at the time, I talked about it with various friends, who initially called me crazy. At a meeting at EUR we founded MIT” [3].

The MIT made itself known immediately with bold actions. The most famous was the protest of July 4, 1980 at the municipal swimming pool at Piazzale Lotto in Milan (the Lido di Milano, in the San Siro area). About fifteen trans women entered the pool wearing bikinis, then removed their tops, remaining bare-chested. Their explanation to the authorities trying to make them dress was simple and devastating: “We can only wear the bottom half of the swimsuit because, according to our documents, we are considered men” [2][3].

The protest lasted about an hour. All participants ended up at the police station, charged with public indecency [2]. But the action received wide media coverage — the Corriere della Sera reported the story the following day — and brought the issue of trans identity to the attention of the Italian public [3].

Marcella Di Folco: from actress to activist

Marcella Di Folco (1943-2010) is one of the most significant figures in Italian trans history. Before her transition, she had been discovered by director Federico Fellini and had acted in several of his films, including Amarcord (1973) [6][7]. After completing her transition and surgery in Casablanca in 1980, Di Folco joined the MIT, of which she became president in 1988 — a role she held until her death in 2010 [6].

In 1994, she founded a gender identity clinic in Bologna — the first in the world run by trans people, in collaboration with institutions and with the support of healthcare professionals [6][7]. In 1995, she was elected to the Bologna city council on the Green Party list, becoming the first openly trans woman to hold an elected political office in the world [6].

The European comparison: Italy was not alone, but it was behind

Sweden (1972)

Sweden was the first country in the world to introduce a law on the legal recognition of sex change, in 1972 [12]. The Swedish law allowed modification of legal sex following sex reassignment surgery, but imposed severe conditions: the person had to be a Swedish citizen, unmarried, and — a requirement now considered a human rights violation — sterilized [12]. It is estimated that between 1972 and 2013 (when the sterilization requirement was abolished), between 500 and 800 Swedish trans people were subjected to forced sterilization as a condition for obtaining legal recognition.

West Germany (1980)

West Germany passed its sex change law in 1980 — the Transsexuellengesetz (TSG). The German law provided two pathways: a name change only (the so-called “small solution”) and a complete legal sex change (the “large solution”), the latter contingent on surgery. Sterilization and marital status requirements were also included.

Italy (1982): third in Europe

Italy came third, with Law no. 164 of April 14, 1982 [1]. Unlike Sweden and Germany, the Italian law did not explicitly require sterilization — although surgery was effectively considered necessary until Constitutional Court and Supreme Court rulings in the 2010s [9]. This is an often-overlooked point: by the standards of the time, Law 164 was progressive. Italy adopted legal recognition when the vast majority of European countries had none at all. France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands would have to wait decades more [1].

The road to Law 164

The parliamentary process

After the Lido protest and subsequent mobilizations by the MIT, Radical Party MP Franco De Cataldo filed the legislative proposal that would lead to Law 164 [4]. MIT activists also brought their testimony to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, in one of the first occasions trans people spoke before a European institution [10].

The measure was approved by the Senate Justice Committee on February 16, 1982, with the final vote on April 1, 1982 receiving twenty-four votes in favor out of twenty-four — a unanimous result that reflected a rare cross-party consensus [1][4]. The law was published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale no. 106 of April 19, 1982 and entered into force on May 4, 1982.

The content of the law

Law 164 established that, upon the interested party’s petition, the court could authorize the necessary medical-surgical intervention and, following it, order the rectification of the birth certificate regarding the attribution of sex [9]. With this law, the Italian legislature embraced a concept of sexual identity that was new and different from the past: no longer based exclusively on external genital anatomy ascertained at birth, but on a broader and more complex dimension of personality [11].

Confirmation by the Constitutional Court

In 1985, the Constitutional Court was called upon to rule on the legitimacy of Law 164 with ruling no. 161/1985. The Court confirmed the full constitutionality of the law, emphasizing that it “embraces a concept of sexual identity that is new and different from the past, in the sense that for the purposes of such identification, relevance is no longer given exclusively to external genitalia, as ascertained at birth or naturally evolved, even with the aid of appropriate medical-surgical therapies, but also to psychological and social elements” [11]. It was a fundamental ruling that anchored the right to gender identity to the right to health (Article 32 of the Constitution) and to the free development of personality (Article 2) [11].

Before and after

What changed on May 4, 1982

The day Law 164 came into force, trans people in Italy went from legal non-existence to recognition. It was not a smooth transition. The law required a long and medicalized process, with court authorization and, in practice, surgery. It was not a law of self-determination in the contemporary sense. But it was a starting point — and, for the historical context, an extraordinary achievement [1].

For those who had lived through years of clandestinity, raids, and documents that lied about their identity, that law meant being able to finally exist. To be hired with a name that matched their appearance. To rent a home. To go to the doctor without having to explain why their body did not match their documents. To, in a word, live.

The debt to those who fought

The activists of the MIT, Pina Bonanno, Marcella Di Folco, Porpora Marcasciano, and many others — often homeless, jobless, without documents that represented them — achieved a law that changed the lives of thousands of people [4][10]. They did so starting from a condition of total marginality, in an Italy where their very existence was considered a crime. The debt that Italian society owes them is not a matter of opinion: it is a historical fact.

---

The history of trans people in Italy before 1982 is not a distant story. It is the story of people that many of us could have known, and in some cases do know. Remembering it helps us understand where the rights trans people enjoy today came from — and how fragile they can be if they are not defended.