Italian arts schools back transgender students’ name rights

An arts school in Rome has joined a handful of other high schools in Italy in recognizing transgender students by names other than those they were given at birth.

The Associated Press reports that the Ripetta school of art made the move in order to create an environment where more students feel secure. According to the news wire, some Italian universities also allow students to choose their name and gender on internal forms before such indicators have been changed on legal documents.

A 2016 survey by the Williams Institute at the University of California-Los Angeles found that Italy ranks 16th out of 23 studied countries in terms of support for transgender rights, the AP reports, falling below the U.S. and six other Western countries.

Psychotherapist Maddalena Mosconi, who leads a unit for minors at a gender transition center at the San Camillo hospital in Rome, told the AP that transgender students are more likely to drop out of high school than the general population.

“On many occasions, I have had to deal with adolescents who abandoned school due to bullying, due to being made fun of, due to not being accepted the way they are,” Mosconi said.

“I’m very happy about this,” Matteo Coccimiglio, an 18-year-old student at Ripetta who identifies as a transgender man, told the AP.

Coccimiglio said he hopes the new initiative will help other transgender students “feel more protected” and “go through a lot less trouble than I went through.”

Matteo’s father, Franco Coccimiglio, told the AP that he struggled with his son’s gender identity at first when he informed his parents at 14 that he wished to identify as male.

“My only regret is that we could have started earlier,” Franco Coccimiglio said.

“Somebody thinks that we do this to be recognized by others as [male or female],” Matteo said. “But we don’t care about this at all. We just do it because when we look at ourselves in the mirror, we can at last say ‘I am finally myself.'”

In the U.S., several GOP-controlled state governments have recently passed or are close to passing legislation that would target transgender students, in particular barring them from joining sports teams that align with their gender identity. Some of those bills that have been signed into law have already been challenged in court.