“Extraterrestre alla pari”

My favorite book as a teenager was “Extraterrestre alla pari” by Bianca Pitzorno. 

I don’t even know how it turned up in our house… Maybe my parents found it or traded it in at some local library thinking it was a science-fiction book, from the title, and that I would thus enjoy it because of my love for science & sci-fi. I don’t know. Somehow, one day when I was fourteen or fifteen, I found this book hidden in the back of a bookshelf and read it out of curiosity, knowing nothing about it and also expecting it to be only about sci-fi. So what a surprise when it turned out to basically be a children’s manifesto of feminism and what could now be hailed as an “LGBT book” and/or a critique of the gender-binaries (& probably banned in many places here in the U.S. because of it)!

It’s the story of Mo, a teenager from Deneb, who spends a year as an “exchange student” on planet Earth, in an Italian household where the main/nuclear family is composed of father, mother, and twin siblings (a boy & a girl). The “alien” Mo & all inhabitants of Deneb look very much like humans, except for some “small” differences, some of them genetic (like the inability to tell a person’s sex on Deneb from external sex characteristics or DNA tests), some of them social. The main social difference is that persons on Deneb aren’t assigned any sex at birth: every baby is raised and educated and dressed and treated in the same way, regardless of their sex; when Denebians turn twenty, they go up a mountain where an old sage tells them their sex; and then they just move on with their adult life, free from the influence of sex having determined what they studied or what they chose to do or how they behaved or whom they loved. 

When Mo is sent to planet Earth, the host family is given detailed information about their guest: basically everything except for Mo’s sex. So of course, the first thing everyone in Italy asks themselves is whether Mo is “a boy or a girl” and the host parents put a huge amount of time and effort into trying to find out Mo’s sex (through “psychological tests”, “behavioral tests”, “genetic tests”, etc.) because that will influence how Mo will dress, with whom Mo will be allowed to play (the brother or the sister in the host family), how Mo will be expected to behave, etc. And throughout the book, the various tests performed on Mo give different results, sometimes “boy”, sometimes” girl”, sometimes “unknown”. 

I remember reading this book (twice) and feeling strong, mixed emotions: an intense yearning for it to be that way (like on Deneb) on Earth as well; a voice deep inside me crying, “See, I’ve always thought this, I’ve always said this, why don’t we do it already, why doesn’t anyone listen to me?!?”; pain, anger, hope; and, like now with TJ Klune’s stories, a sense of living my wishes vicariously through that book. 

Now, I have several friends or friends of friends who are having or have recently had babies and are not gendering them (even if the parents are in a cis-heteronormative relationship): they’re giving them gender-neutral names, referring to them simply as “the baby” or “child” rather than “boy” or “girl”, using “they” or mixed pronouns. I find this wonderful. It gives me hope — hope that at least in some areas we’re going in the right direction, towards a better, more equitable world. 

But sometimes, on days like today, that hope isn’t quite enough to lessen my own grief and pain and anger…