If it hadn’t been there Grey’s Anatomy maybe there wouldn’t be Alice today. But luckily, sometimes an American series comes to save your life. “That’s how it went,” she says, “I was in the living room, in my hardest period, and I was watching this series. And there they explained that it was possible, even very young people, to start a hormonal path to be able to be what you are, beyond the name we were given at birth “.
Today Alice is 15 years old, lives in Naples, attends high school, is a chess champion, and has written a beautiful book that everyone should read, An Alice like any other (Joints publisher). A book in which she tells with delicate and profound words what it means to be a trans teenager. What it means to realize one day that you are in the wrong body. The effort of hiding and dealing at all times with «that son of a bitch with the penis, who treacherously took possession of me while I was a fetus sleeping in my mother’s womb. Because I don’t choose to be a woman, I’m a woman. “
I interview her via zoom, she is a beautiful girl with a natural elegance and delicate and gentle features. She finally she can wear a colorful dress and a pair of heels and indulge in a little makeup, but the road to get here was long, bumpy and painful. Even if she always talks about it with lightness and an extraordinary irony.
«At seven years old», he says, «I started to feel discomfort. An uneasiness that I could not even give a name to. At that age, you don’t have certain kinds of problems. I remember, for example, that I liked the shiny glass rings. But they said to me: “But no, it’s a female”. And then I replied: “Ok, as not mentioned, I don’t like it anymore”. But I still liked them though ».
Then that discomfort increased. “But it wasn’t that clear. I didn’t think: “I want to be a girl”, but instead I thought with all my strength “I don’t want to be a boy”. Maybe at the beginning it was a thought related to how people perceived me. The physical discomfort started in middle school. Since I was a child I had always been very feminine and I was mistaken for a girl, which also infuriated my father ».
That was the highlight of the dark. He tells: “The pain arose from having to live with my condition without seeing outlets. I was sick before, I was sick in the present, I didn’t see a future, it didn’t seem like there was room for improvement. I was so afraid that my body would change in an inexorable way. Every day I was terrified to notice a transformation. You cannot describe the fear I had of realizing that my voice had changed forever“.
There is no support from the family and school at that time. The question at home, Alice says, was not accepted or discussed at the beginning: «Then slowly we began to talk about it, but at first, my parents thought: it is a phase. The relationship with my mother has always been more visceral: “she knows me” (as they say in Naples), and she has perceived many things before her. With my father everything was more complicated ».
“Because of this Grey’s Anatomy saved my life “, he adds,”I found the light in the hormones, discovering that the transformation process that I was undergoing and that terrified me, could be stopped. There and then, I started crying with joy, I ran to my mother and told her: there is a solution. But she replied that they were fictional things, while my father kept repeating that there is no gene for transsexuality and that he would have preferred to have a gay child ».
At that point Alice convinces her parents to accompany her to the center for gender dysphoria in Naples and she can begin the journey to find herself. “Your willingness to make the transition is being thoroughly investigated,” Alice explains. “First there is a psychological journey of about six months and if it is exceeded, there is an endocrinological visit. Only at that point, if you are deemed suitable, do you begin to take blocking hormones. If everything goes as it should, the doctor explained to me, in four years I will have completed the entire course. It’s about starting the monthly injections and stopping the advance of hair, muscles, big feet, big hands, Adam’s apple and all the rest. But if for any reason the clinical process got stuck, my fate would have been infamous. I would have been attacked by testosterone, scarred by my beard and by a whole series of misfortunes that would have turned my life into hell. “
The path is not only personal but also family and social. So if on the one hand there is the mother who supports her, on the other there is the father who does not approve but does not hinder. “He keeps aloof,” as Alice says. And the grandparents who, after a period of ostracism («My grandmother passed out when I told her, my grandfather blocked me for several months on Whatsapp), now accept but prefer not to talk about it. And school, where things could be simpler than they are.
“The most complicated moment was the transition to high school, when I decided to introduce myself as a girl to people. Perhaps the previous moment was the saddest, but the settlement between not accepting it and accepting it was very hard, “says Alice. “The question of the name was also complex. Another one appears on the register and I had to kindly ask the professors to use either the surname or Alice. I preferred not to talk about it with my teammates. I don’t feel the need to confront them ».
The question of social recognition is also complex: “For the exchange of documents in Italy it is a bit complicated, perhaps one of the biggest problems», He explains to me,« It takes time, as if it were a state affair as my name is. I will have to do new psychological sessions, prove that I have started hormones for some time. Of course it is a detail that does not change your life in terms of personal condition, but it is very important for school or because if your documents end up in someone’s handsthen you have to find yourself explaining things that maybe you want to keep to yourself ».
Alice also suffered attacks in Naples, but tells me that those were not the most difficult moments: “Discussions with my father, talking with my grandparents, those were the hardest steps “tells, “but finally being able to wear women’s clothes was a long and complicated process. When I started the journey if I thought I was wearing a necklace I would cry because for me it was a huge milestone. Now I am happy because I have reached normalcy. I seek this, simply this: a routine, a tranquility. For me the goal is that having a necklace is no longer a thing to cry. I remember a very difficult episode on the first day of high school. My mom wanted me to wear a floral sweatshirt, but my dad didn’t want to, he screamed, he wanted me to tie my hair and dress like a boy. Even with the shoes it was gradual. My mother started getting me more feminine shoes that I could use at home, then I started wearing them outside as well. My father once broke a cuckoo in anger because he saw me go out with too feminine shoes. Now I am freer but in certain family circumstances I still get hidden. When there are people who know my father is ashamed and would like me to dress as a boy, then I prefer not to go at all. But that’s okay for the moment, I try to appreciate the victories and goals I have achieved ».
Because in the end, as Alice says in her book: “It is wrong to look for one’s place in the world, because that place simply does not exist … We are the ones who have to invent it, and we have to defend it every day“.
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Source: Vanity Fair
