OUR SPEECH FROM THE STAGE AT RIVOLTA PRIDE 2026

Intervention Cassero Rivolta '26

Holding Pride in 2026 means deciding to oppose the feeling of isolation and powerlessness that this reality of war, genocide, and global crisis brings us. Organizing, taking to the streets, celebrating the joy of being trans and queer, and shouting out our anger against those who want to erase us is still necessary. It is still possible. And that's why we want to express our solidarity with the comrades of Budrio, under attack from the right for organizing a Pride parade, and with all the comrades who are still being censored and blackmailed by those who want to remove us from public space. 

This government is obsessed with controlling who we are, how we live, and what we can know about ourselves. The approval of the Valditara law goes precisely in this direction.

EDUCATION

The Valditara Law isn't education: it's censorship. Under the guise of "informed consent," the state decides what children can know about their emotions and their possible lives, and it gives the most conservative parents a veto over everyone else's education. It transforms schools into spaces of omission.

The Valditara law is an attack on teachers' freedom of teaching, an attempt to intimidate an already underfunded and precarious school system. Bringing issues of sexual identity into the classroom will be risky in all schools from now on. 

The Valditara Law is an attack on childhood and adolescence. And we know what it means to grow up unaware of your existence. We've experienced it firsthand. Ignorance doesn't protect children; it leaves them alone. 

But this obsession with controlling bodies and identities doesn't end in the classroom. It has another facet, and it's called security.

SAFETY

This government's security decrees have a specific goal: to criminalize vulnerable people and intimidate protesters. To turn the streets—this street—into a place to be watched.

It's the same impulse as the Valditara law: to decide who has the right to exist in public space, who has the right to speak, who has the right to be seen.

We cannot feel protected by a government that gives law enforcement ever greater power to arrest, profile, and use violence. We are not safe in a country where the basic principles of democracy are being called into question, many of which are already unsafe for many. 

As LGBTQIA+ people, we are exposed to various forms of violence, often normalized and unrecognized. On social media, on the streets, in the media, at home, within the family, at work. But to think that the solution to this structural and pervasive violence is punishment, or prison, is to ignore reality. We want a cultural revolution that disarms violence and eliminates hierarchies of humanity that make some people expendable.

PALESTINE AND PINKWASHING

Today we marched under the slogan: No Pride in Genocide. There is no liberation struggle that tolerates genocide as a backdrop. We cannot invoke our right to exist and remain silent about the existence and survival of a people. Those who use our bodies as a banner while participating, remaining silent, or weaponizing a massacre are not our allies. They never have been.

We want to make it very clear: a Pride parade that doesn't take a stand on this issue today is an incoherent and complicit demonstration. We are asked: why is the liberation of the Palestinian people so important to a movement fighting for civil rights? Because Western imperialism, which for centuries has exported violence, sexism, and homophobia throughout the world, today defends and extols its superiority, also by virtue of an openness to civil rights. The superiority that weapons genocide in Palestine, in the silence of the international community, enables all the projects of colonialism and subjugation of non-Western peoples.

So our queer lives are this, a flag to be waved when it is necessary to mark a boundary between barbarism and civilization and to be hidden when it threatens the social order, reproduction, the natural family.

TRANS*

Trans people are the ones who threaten the social order and the binary gender divide. That's why when they attack trans* people, they attack the principle that each of us has the right to define ourselves. They attack all of us.

Trans* people in this country wait years to access the care they deserve. They are pathologized, hindered, and abandoned by services. With the potential approval of the new Schillaci-Roccella decree, these pathways would become even more inaccessible and psychiatric. Affirmation pathways for minors have already been blocked and severely hindered by protocol changes.

The same logic as the Valditara law, the body as a territory to be governed, the same logic as the security decrees, existence outside the norm as a problem to be managed. 

We want a law on gender self-determination that respects our identities and guarantees safe, accessible, rapid, and dignified pathways for all trans* and non-binary people. We want trans* healthcare to be included in health clinics, hospitals, and medical training. Not as a niche issue. As a fundamental right.

Because bodily freedom is at the heart of every struggle we've mentioned today. And denying it is an extreme, unacceptable form of violence. Ciro Cascina, our Madonna of Pompeii, taught us this well. He passed away just yesterday but marches with us today with all his revolutionary energy.

And today, Jacopo Camagni, an internationally renowned artist who has revolutionized the world with his art and his drawings that transform reality without ever asking permission, also demonstrated with us. 

We're here today because Pride is the moment when we formulate and share our political demands and perspectives as we want them, without compromise. The strength of being here in the tens of thousands behind such a powerful slogan is something we will always defend. 

They may try to erase us, but we will resist. In schools, in the squares, every day. 

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