What are the criteria for choosing to show a film like Tomboy to middle school students?
The film Tomboy, directed by Céline Sciamma, is suitable to be screened and discussed in a Tuscan middle school or instead it may require a decidedly more adult audience. It could be just a movie about adolescent doubts and confusion, but of course, if you ask transactivists, the girl Laure, the film’s protagonist, is not just a sexually non-conforming Tomboy, but a transgender boy.
The director herself stated: “I believe that preadolescence is a very sensual age, made up of very strong emotions and feelings simply because we are experiencing them for the first time. There is a kind of taboo about this age, we’ve all been there but we never talk about it. The children do not need categories like homosexuality, they only live by experiences. I think this story speaks to everyone, because at that age we all dressed up to allow ourselves to be someone else.” She added: “I made it with several layers, so that a transexual person can say ‘that was my childhood’ and so that a heterosexual woman can also say that.”
She realizes how complex the issue is: to be addressed it requires first of all an awareness that in the developmental age children are by no means miniature adults, which is why the habit of … LGBTQIA+ activists of projecting their own experiences onto children and adolescents, labeling them and thus ‘recruiting’ them early among sexually ‘non-conforming’ people, makes no sense. Or rather, it represents a political instrumentalization that stirs additional doubts and anxieties in younger people–and does so unnecessarily–since the vast majority of such uncertainties associated with identity resolve spontaneously over time.
Simply translated, in the age of preadolescence, there is a degree of indefiniteness that is physiological and should not give rise to rigid categorization. Prematurely labeling kids, which is what LGBTQIA+ associations and those who follow suit–even in schools–do rather uncritically, is child abuse!
What about the film in question? It is a well-made film, but its subject matter makes it suitable for an adult audience. Indeed, what would be the point of screening such a film for kids 10 years old and younger? That of fostering inclusion? There are splendid films, like Billy Elliot, for example, inspired by the story of an English ballet dancer, that open room for discussion of non-conformist life choices without rummaging through students’ sexuality, although in Italy today, talking about patriarchy or machismo, with so many celebrities playing on ambiguity and the air they breathe, seems utterly anachronistic … Or is the aim of those who approved the initiative precisely to urge students to publicly express their sexual uncertainties? Does this seem like an acceptable purpose?
It is precisely the entry of gender ideology into schools, especially through the anti-homophobia projects designed and run by LGBTQIA+ activists, as well as its thumping presence on social media, that has led to an exponential growth in cases, real or alleged, of gender dysphoria over the past decade, so much so that in several Western countries–such as the United Kingdom–they are beginning to backtrack resoundingly.
Doubts about one’s sexual identity are extremely painful: yet, what for almost all students was, until yesterday, peaceful: namely, that if you are born as Mary, you are destined to become a woman, has become, in the very last few years, uncertain, particularly for many young girls (3/4 of all cases of gender dysphoria are among girls), so much so that requests for sex-change, with all the serious physical and psychological problems associated with such practices, have risen exponentially.
Beyond the supposed good intentions of those organizing events such as this screening, it is not the school’s job to convey these kinds of misleading messages, which risk seriously harming precisely the most fragile kids and create divisions in the teaching staff and between parents and teachers.
We trust in the ability of the school’s teachers to accommodate each student, starting with those most in difficulty, valuing the peculiarities that make them unique, without going into sensitive areas for this, which require specific skills and continuous interaction with families.