Italian lawyer vows to fight gender-segregated electoral voting queues

A lawyer has pledged to fight in court a decades-old Italian election law that in widespread implementation on Sunday led to thousands of voters, including trans people, being forced into gender-segregated queues.

Hundreds of LGTBQ+ activists denounced discrimination at polling stations in Sunday’s general election. Many told of their experiences on social media, citing how the binary queues failed to consider the “complexity of thousands of voters in Italy whose identity cards do not reflect their gender” and forced them to publicly identify themselves as trans people.

“Gender-segregated queues are a violation of privacy of all those who are making a gender transition,” said Cathy La Torre, an LGTBQ+ activist and lawyer. “Enough is enough. I am not a trans person and I cannot sue the state for violating my privacy, but I am a lawyer and I can launch a battle to change this law.”

Voting procedures in Italy are regulated by a law dating front 1967 that allows for the infrequently implemented separation into men-only and women-only queues at polling stations and states that electoral lists must also be divided by gender. The law, which has never been repealed, also provides for a married woman to be identified at a polling station with her husband’s surname.

La Torre said she asked her polling station to make an official record in their minutes of her belief that the “subdivision in lists of men and women is a violation of privacy rights and personal dignity”, but while the police accepted her request, one ballot counter insulted her by calling her “crazy” in front of other voters. La Torre has sued him for defamation.

“Thousands of trans people are forced to stand in a queue different from their gender and therefore forced to let everyone present know that they are trans people,” La Torre said. “And if you ask the authorities why, the answer is always the same: it has always been like this. And for those who tell me that these are trifles, I say feeling humiliated is never a trifle.”

La Torre said her goal was to take the case to the constitutional court and ask for the abrogation of the law. Italian trans people have previously campaigned against the 1967 law, and a petition to repeal the law was first launched in 2018.

Gender-segregated queues are not a regular feature of Italian elections and many on Sunday reported being asked to stand in them for the first time.

Electoral authorities have not given an official explanation, but according to some sources, the decision to implement them was intended to better manage long queues at polling stations with waits of an hour or more to vote.

Media reports suggested the sluggishness was due to the “anti-tampering sticker”, a system devised to counter the possibility of switching the ballot while voting. The perforated and rectangular sticker has an alphanumeric code and is applied to a corner of the ballot. An authorised worker at the polling station removes it before inserting the ballot in the ballot box.