Tiny Italian school centre of latest bizarre culture war battle

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Louise Thomas

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The latest in culture wars has erupted over a kindergarten’s decision to introduce a unisex school uniform, instead of pink for girls and blue for boys.

The kindergarten in Salice Salentino, an Italian small town in the southeastern region of Apulia, said it would ask first-year pupils to wear green aprons.

The aim of the measure, adopted at the end of July, is “to cultivate a more open and inclusive mentality by preparing aware and gender-sensitive citizens,” the school said on its website. The decision angered members of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s hard-right Brothers of Italy party, which is critical of LGBT rights and has campaigned against what it calls the “LGBT lobby”.

“Enough with these follies! HANDS OFF OUR CHILDREN! KEEP GENDER THEORY OUT OF OUR SCHOOLS,” Deputy Transport Minister Galeazzo Bignami wrote on Facebook this week, his message partly in capital letters to emphasize his fury.

The term “gender theory” is often used to discredit academic studies or policies that challenge traditional notions of masculinity and femininity, or state that gender identities are not fixed.

The opposition centre-left Democratic Party (PD) accused the government party of “starting yet another pointless crusade” on the aprons, and of encroaching on schools’ freedom to set their policies. School uniforms are not compulsory in Italy and individual schools are free to decide whether to adopt them.

“In a normal country, choosing the colour of kindergarten aprons should certainly not be news. But ours clearly is not a ‘normal’ country,” PD lawmakers Ilenia Malavasi and Claudio Stefanazzi said in a statement.

The school principal, Michele Serra, played down the dispute, saying having a debate about education and inclusivity, in whatever way, was something positive.

“I wouldn’t call it a controversy, I think these are normal observations and doubts which are understandable, because this is a new measure,” he told Reuters on Friday. Meloni and her allies had already waded into a gender row at the Olympics games in Paris, saying that a female Algerian boxer won unfairly against an Italian opponent.

Imane Khelif failed a gender eligibility test at the 2023 World Championships but was ruled eligible to compete in Paris and went on to win a gold medal.

Italy is ranked 13th out of 27 in the latest annual index by the European Institute for Gender Equality, a European Union agency that tracks progress by the bloc’s member states towards male-female equality.

Italy’s score was 68.2, compared to an EU average of 70.2 and a top score of 82.2 by Sweden. But the report said Italy had the posted the largest score improvement across the EU since 2010, driven by markedly higher representation of women in positions of power.