Mom after the transition "it will be me, in fact I was already who I will be!"

Testimony* of Luisa Turci, a Christian mother with a transgender child, partner Jonathan's tent and Agedo Rimini-Cesena.

Manu was sixteen years old. That evening, when I returned home, he threw his there coming out saying, "Ma, it seems to me that I like both boys and girls." It hits me like a crab in my stomach: what's happening? Have I done something wrong? Will he just be confused? I felt deep inside me, the sensation of having reached a turning point.

I come from a family with conventional religiosity and occasional attendance at liturgical celebrations. As a girl I didn't have a parish life or even a true life of faith, even though I had always felt the need for something that I didn't know how to define and that made me restless, inconstant, turbulent. It was the "germ", the profound need for the relationship, for the community - but I didn't know it.

At twenty-five I met Jesus, in the all-encompassing experience of Pope John XXIII Community. Directly sharing life with people with different types of discomfort, twenty-four hours a day, was my salvation, it gave me a meaning and a taste for life that I had never felt before. In the community I met Fabio, we got married, we opened a family home.

After a few years, Manu was born when there were already fifteen of us in the house! From the very beginning Manu learned not to make too many requests, not to bother, he was with whoever I left him with. This experience that Manu lived in the first years of his life remains with him as imprinting in that special way he has of listening, being reliable and often helpful to friends. Then the death of my husband when Manu was four years old, an acute suffering then transformed into a painful awareness of the father's absence-presence (so similar to our experience of faith: he is there but you can't see him).

The evening of coming out all this came back to me, in my heart and in my stomach, together with my feelings of guilt for my way of being feminist or sometimes denigrating masculinity when it is toxic, or even for the lack of a male figure in the house. And, again, I remembered his preferences for wearing Zorro or Spiderman at carnival, the mostly male friends he invited home to play with stickers or wrestle. And again, I blamed myself for never having been a mother who was free in her effusions, but above all for never having learned to play, something that Manu often asked me to do.

Over time, I had closed the family home, I had invented a job that allowed me to be home in the afternoon to be next to Manu in his small or large needs. My profound need to be in relationship with others has never failed, just as my relationship with Jesus has always remained my company and my main passion, but my posture in the Church has wavered for many years, perhaps even for reaction to the setting of the Pope John XXIII Community.

It was thanks to Manu and his attendance at parish activities and the scout group that I got closer to the Church through my parish community and its network of relationships, deciding to make myself available for some services. Since his birth I tried to convey to Manu my experience of faith in its various phases, both of great transport and of criticality, but perhaps he did not need my complications: Manu in fact lived in the tranquility and simplicity of his relationships, even after the coming out in the scout group and in the parish there were no particular reactions from its leaders.

But another turning point awaited me... In 2021 Manu began to ask both me and the scout group to use male pronouns towards him. I felt really lost, stiffened, I rejected this novelty, it seemed to me that I was already quite open, that I had never made a fuss... I thought I was open but instead I wasn't and above all I didn't know the reality of transgender people other than that known in the Pope John, which welcomed trans people mainly from Brazil with painful and dramatic stories and who by force majeure were prostitutes.

At first I told him harshly to make these requests outside the house, not to me who already had a lot of things to do, a lot of burdens to carry... I refused without listening to what Manu was discovering about himself, I didn't want to listen, I wasn't able to understand if not my desperation, I believed it was a dangerous trend, an unconventional whim of the moment.

But Manu never gave up and never closed the communication. He was surrounded by many friends in the same situation as him, they willingly came to the house, and for me it was the opportunity to meet people like him and to overcome my prejudices. This keeping the house open and the dialogue with Manu, even if difficult and always tense, was helpful but brought me even more confusion until I lost my way.

I felt alone, incapable of managing this educational innovation, I who had experiences of fostering teenagers with dramatic stories, I who had many experiences of "other people's children" entrusted to us, now I felt inadequate, incapable of understanding the steps to take , dismayed by the ignorance on these issues that I discovered around me. In this moment of darkness my problem was not the doubt about God's love for Manu and for people like Manu, but deep down I feared the judgment and discrimination he might find in the Church and in society.

It was February 2022 when, browsing the website La Tenda di Gionata (which I had already known for some time due to an interest linked to my previous profession as an educator), in one of the moments of greatest desperation, I noticed for the first time a yellow band at the top right that said "Listening service I trust you“. That afternoon I clicked that yellow band and the real possibility of finding myself and renewing my relationship with Manu opened up for me.

Crying, I wrote the story I was going through, the inadequacy I was experiencing, the fear of making a mistake that I felt in giving in and giving Manu that male pronoun that made him feel recognized and me like the wrong mother.

The volunteer who agreed to meet me online was the pedagogist Alessandra Bialetti: her words pulled me out of the darkness. I began to make my first attempts to get down from my sentry box and each time it went better with Manu, the tension soon eased, Manu began to feel that he could exist as he was discovering himself to be and that his mother was next to him .

I soon understood that a new path was opening up for me, a new way of seeing reality, that my profound need for a relationship now meant proceeding together with other parents, knowing, studying, deepening, sharing this reality that I didn't know until that moment. existed. At the same time, more serene days opened for Manu too, despite everything the breach in the wall had opened and every day another air and another light entered.

In October of that same year I started attending group meetings Families on the move of the diocese of Bologna and from then on I feel I have opened my wings and taken flight. As I attended the monthly meeting with parents in sharing, enlightened by the reading of the Gospel, in studying, in listening, in research on these themes, I felt that something was melting inside me, that reality was there in front of me and it was me. that I didn't see it.

If it hadn't been for Manu I wouldn't have been able to experience this new phase of personal growth and I wouldn't have become aware of the pain that our ignorance causes when it cancels out people's existence, forcing them to hide and make themselves invisible.

In this new phase of my life I felt the urgency to do something to improve things around me, talking about it with my family of origin, at work, with friends. We have contributed with other mothers to starting a consultation for rights and equal opportunities in our municipality and we are promoting training courses and sharing testimonies, but the biggest challenge was to start a group of parents with LGBT+ sons and daughters also in our diocese.

My journey is not over yet and there are still deviations and shocks. Sometimes I still make mistakes with pronouns, especially when I'm tired and less attentive. A year ago I had a difficult time imagining Manu's gender affirmation journey: I focused on what I would lose, I would no longer hear his voice with today's tone, I would no longer see this face of his, that expression of his that I love so much and that has won me over since his birth: once the hormone therapy started, nothing would ever be the same as before!

I cried a lot, until during a heated discussion Manu looked me straight in the eyes and said: "You give too much weight to these things, I am and will be me anyway, in fact I was already who I will be!". At those words I experienced within myself a rearrangement of priorities, a rediscovery of clarity: I understood that there are apparent realities that can be dispersed and realities that must come to light.

My mourning is over, a new life awaits us.

* Testimonial collected thanksas part of the “Born twice” project, with which the volunteers of Jonathan Project they want to tell the journey of faith of transgender people and their families. In May 2025, on the occasion of thePrayer vigils to overcome homotransbiphobia, some of these stories will be collected by Jonathan's tent in a free printed booklet that will tell the story of the faith journeys of transgender, Catholic and evangelical people, and their families in the various churches. A collection of testimonies with which we want to weave a bridge of knowledge between these two often distant worlds, to help break down walls and prejudices. To read the testimonies we have already collected click onhttps://www.gionata.org/tag/nati-due-volte/. If you want to add yours, write to tendedigionata@gmail.com Word of mouth