Families with LGBT+children: from safe ports to shipyards to build the future

Testimony of Lucia a Christian mother with a group transgender son New lives

As I write, a demonstration is taking place in Piazza del Popolo in Rome to support the unity of Europe. Of course, not all those present share the same prospects and the same ways of intervention. It would be naive to think of it. Rather, it unites them a fear and a dream.

In recent weeks I have followed with interest as the proposal of the journalist Michele Serra, born from an appeal on a blog and then relaunched on Repubblica, took shape, day after day. He himself was amazed by the quantity of adhesions and in an interview he said that it is not in his style to be a people's head, but that he had heard the responsibility of not holding back.

On the same days I had the opportunity to reflect on what I had learned and lived in an organized training and information event, from February 28 to March 2, in Padua, by groups of LGBTQ+ people and parents. In particular, I asked myself about the intervention of Professor Pilar Escotorin Soza. Expert in sociology of communication and management of conflicts, the teacher has presented proactive and assertive communication techniques, to be learned to use in the dialogue with those who deny or refuse the LGBTQ+condition.

If I still feel to define a precious pearl and prophetic voice what has been shared in Padua, stronger and deeper resonate in me fears and urgencies thinking of Miə Senaches and other transgender people in our country, but not only.

In the current political and social panorama, how long does it remain to change the paradigm? Will the communication tools inspired by assertiveness and prosociality be adequate to dialogue with those who feel threatened by the so -called Woke culture?

I am not talking about those who see a conspiracy of the LGBTQ+lobbies, but of those who, at such an uncertain moment, ask for sureness and certainties to cling to. How to blame them? How not to understand a legitimate need for clarity and confirm?

On the other hand, the story teaches me that from fear is born control and from the exclusion control, the need for goals to be sacrificed for the good of the many.

Three weeks ago the assembly of secular associations had taken place in Assisi to offer a contribution to the Italian Synod. Also in Assisi, in the same hours, a group of educators without borders (ESF) and MIQUE SONGRARC with them, have dramatized, in the squares, the reading of the story of a shipwreck of migrants in Greece. They were silent by fascist songs and warned….

In the twenty years the homosexuals were persecuted, not for moral issues, but because their unions were not generative and the homeland needed soldiers to form.

We didn't even talk about Trans Gender, they just didn't exist. Those who found themselves living this condition suffocated every expression, those who succeeded sublimated, others lived their affections in clandestinity.

Today our children walk on the streets, study, work, educate, with their androgynous appearance, with their faces that do not correspond to the bodies, with their clothes that make them feel good. Today our children tell us that reality is blended and colorful, that every reality is not only binary, right and wrong, inside and outside.

Today this, but tomorrow? This open perspective is very threatening for those who need axioms and unquestionable principles.

Professor Escoterin said he organized a LGBTQ+ mass in the Familia Sagrada, in the most open Spain, but that they had held for the safety of trans people, while for homo officers there would have been no problems.

What unites an event like the event in Rome with the invitation to assertive dialogue?

I believe that to combine these two expressions we are precisely we who have guessed to be "lucky parents" because life has led us to walk on slippery and unpublished soils. The gift we have received and that we share can and must be spent in responding to the appeal of the present.

Firstly, each family could become a port in which ə nostrə figlə can dock the boat slammed by the waves of the inner storm, collect and put the wrecks together after the shipwrecks, practice when in the open sea they are not yet ready to swim.

However, I imagine our homes also as a safe country and a naval construction site in which ə nostə figlə can study new nautical cards, confrontation with trusted sailors travel effective routes of activism and civil commitment,

The parents are then narrators of stories, aedi of experiences, poets of experience. Parents are the ones who cannot help to share and exchange stories about their children. We did it at the park in front of the kindergarten when we went to get our children, we did it in the parish or in front of the school. Now we do it among us, in the parents we have chosen. However, we can also do it with parents not united by faith, with colleagues and friends, with the people with whom we are making paths of civil commitment. Let's start with those who are not of us, but it is not against us.

We go down to the square, and the Jubilee of September 6 is an opportunity to be a next, peaceful, constructive way. There are many spaces and ways of being there and being visible that our creativity can suggest; Let's share them, dare to make proposals. We feel the responsibility of not pulling back.

We parents then can have a decisive role because faith has helped us understand that only love can be the answer.

A love that makes thought and action, dialogue and voice in the desert. We have been given for free, free of charge we are called to give.