On the occasion of the annual conference of the Gestalt School of Turin, Margins at the Center, among the guests we invited and engaged in dialogue with Rossella Bianchi.

Rossella is one of the first Italian transsexuals, a survivor of discrimination, violence, imprisonment, electroshock therapy, hunger, threats of the asylum, the sanatorium, deprivation of civil rights, and restrictions of freedom; in this book (her fifth publication) she tells her story. Her writing in some way becomes a manifesto and allows readers to understand, especially from a historical perspective, the attitude of a cross-section of society that induced—and probably still induces in other ways—people who do not conform to social conventions to remain on the margins, if not to eliminate themselves: “I am talking about 60, 70 years ago, in a small provincial town, when society was convinced it was composed of heterosexual men and women (…) Transgressing was not conceivable, except as madness, and so thousands of men and women suffered, estranged in their bodies” (p.7). People who did not conform were persecuted, avoided, or in the “best” case scenario, attempts were made to cure them.

Rossella was born in 1942 in a small village in the hills of Lucca with the name Mario Bianchi. From an early age, she felt a profound discomfort and could not adapt to her parents’ expectations: “I write so that everyone may know what it means to spend one’s childhood convinced of being a little monster, to spend the first part of adolescence with the nightmare of having to give up the future” (p.7). Rossella will not give up the future; on the contrary, she chooses to pay The Price of Being, and at all costs, rather than live a life of appearances, she will inhabit the margins: the diploma in accounting and the difficulties in maintaining employment because of discrimination, her arrival in the alleyways of Genoa and friendship with other trans women, her apartment next to what is today Piazza Don Andrea Gallo, she will witness the transformations of the city, the arrival of heroin and then AIDS, the loss of almost all her friends, travels to South America, the choice not to undergo surgery, her love story, her mother for whom she will remain Mario, and the founding of the Princesa association of which she is president. Rossella’s hope is that her story will reach parents above all, to bring them the message of those who no longer have a voice: “Love and help your children for what they are and not for what you wished them to be.”

An autobiography capable of overwhelming the reader because it is rich in experiences, at times harsh and disturbing, in which the author manages to be both ironic and terribly vital in narrating painful events and anecdotes. This book, like the previous ones, is dedicated to Don Andrea Gallo, who, as the author states with delicacy, entered her life not to change it, but to help her and realize her dreams.