Verità, gender, politica: Sulla “fondamentale e incontrovertibile” realtà biologica dei due sessi

Beginning with Trump’s 2025 executive order imposing a binary definition of sex and Meloni’s alignment with Trump’s anti-trans and anti-intersex agenda, this essay examines the convergence between anti-gender politics and sectors of Italian feminism. Drawing on Ayoub and Stoeckl’s “double helix” model, it argues that such convergence is the outcome of a process in which opposing forces mirror and appropriate one another’s discursive frames. Since the 1990s, Catholic doctrine has appropriated feminist notions of sexual difference to oppose LGBTQIA+ rights and queer theories, while simultaneously promoting a “good” feminism grounded in the biological reality of heterosexual reproduction. A parallel process of appropriation can be observed within Italian difference feminism today. Drawing on Arendt’s essay Truth and Politics, Cavarero and Guaraldo present binary sex as a self-evident biological truth threatened by LGBTQIA+ movements. Set against these claims are the responses of major American scientific associations to Trump’s executive order, which emphasize the biological complexity of sex and the existence of intersex variations. If politics, for Arendt, presupposes a common world of facts within which opinions may clash, contemporary disputes over sex reveal a conflict not only over the political consequences of biology but also over who has the authority to determine what counts as a biological fact. In the double helix of gender wars, biological truths have become a political stake, claimed by Popes and Presidents, Supreme Courts and female authorities. As politics speaks in the language of science and science is drawn into politics, the common world itself is lost.