I’m a proud queer mum – here’s why I’m horrified by Italy’s laws against LGBT+ families

As a proud queer mum and children’s author specialising in books featuring same sex parents, I have watched with mounting horror the crackdown on LGBTQ+ family rights taking place in Italy.

This week, Italian authorities announced that the non-biological mother’s name will be retroactively removed from her children’s birth certificates, and she will, in effect, be stripped of the status of parent. The move and its implications are hideous and heart-breaking.

If the non-biological mother wants to take her children out of the country on holiday, she now may need a letter from her partner providing permission. If the biological mother were to pass away, their children risk being placed in state care, rather than be looked after by a parent who has loved and cared for them their entire lives. Despite having been a loving parent since birth, she is now deemed unfit to look after her own child.

If I’m honest, I have found it very difficult to look closely at what is unfolding in the land of pizza, pasta and Peroni. I haven’t wanted to think about how it might feel for my family to be told by authorities that we don’t count; that the loving, supportive and happy environment we have created for our children isn’t valid, simply because we are queer and in a same sex marriage. How dare anyone cast those judgements on us?

My wife and I are 100 per cent partners when it comes to bringing up our children. We have the same discussions as our straight parent friends about everything from sharing school pick ups and drop offs and who’s turn it is to book the next dentist appointment, to how best to support our kids’ interests, talents and burgeoning sense of who they are.

But we are lucky enough to live here, where we are both named as parents on their birth certificates. We always knew that it wasn’t going to be straightforward for us to have children. And maybe it’s partly because of this that, despite tantrums, having to ask small humans to put shoes on at least five times before they actually do, and the very specific pain of stepping on another tiny piece of lego barefoot, we are grateful every day for our family and that we were lucky enough to become parents.

But those writing their bigotry into law purport that their decisions aren’t about the parents, which is as it should be. We should all be looking at what is best for the children.

Research consistently shows that children with same sex parents do as well as, and often better than, their counterparts from mixed gender families. A 2023 study from the British Medical Journal analysed 16 studies from 34 countries and found that whilst there was no difference at all in most areas, LGBTQ+ parent families showed higher levels of parent-child relationship quality, particularly when it came to levels of warmth, interaction and supportive behaviour.

This Italian law is part of a worrying global trend across the world toward anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, one which includes the Floridian bill dubbed ‘Don’t say gay’, with its dystopian echoes of our own Section 28, and this Government’s continuing demonisation of trans people.

Whilst I have experienced issues: religious parents campaigning against LGBTQ+ representation at school; trolls unhappy with queer people in kids’ books; the everyday, low-level worry that someone will spout homophobic bile to my children, I feel privileged to live in a country and a time where my two mum family is seen, mostly, as valid, and the law is on our side.

But I also feel hot rage, that this isn’t the case for everyone, whether fellow queer parents elsewhere or any member of the LGBTQ+ community.

Roe Vs. Wade in the States demonstrated how easy it is for rights we take for granted to be rolled back. So today, I’m sending love and solidarity to queer people in Italy, and to the families being attacked for who they are.

As long as politicians and people in positions of trust, wherever they are in the world, can stand up and say with impunity that our lives, our gender identities, our love and our families are wrong, and put laws in place that punish us, we all remain at risk.

Jodie Lancet-Grant is the author of The Pirate Mums and The Marvellous Doctors for Magical Creatures, published by Oxford University Press