by Christian Raimo and Giulia Siviero

Auronzo di Cadore is a long town in northern Veneto: a strip of houses, hotels, and restaurants, winding to the right of an artificial lake until it thins out into the Misurina woods. Leaving the village to the north, the light on the provincial road becomes darker as the Dolomite mountains rise up on either side. Three kilometers outside the town there is an old disused power plant; at that height a path begins on the left. You should park at the beginning of the small road; transit is forbidden to motor vehicles, but everyone enters anyway. You go up and after 500 meters, instead of continuing you can turn left toward the abandoned lead and zinc mine. There is a clearing in front of the fenced quarry where sometimes campers park.

Cloe Bianco had also parked here when she decided to take her own life. The skeleton of the charred camper, surrounded by the red and white tape, is now the only presence in the clearing. Everything inside has burned away. Melted plastic and metal have made objects indistinguishable; the few things not completely burned are a few mugs, a left shoe, an Agesci T-shirt cut out like an undershirt, and an Italian vocabulary.

His body was also unrecognizable, according to reports from the St. Stephen’s fire department that arrived on the scene on the morning of June 11. They had been called by a couple of people who, on their way to work very early in the morning, had noticed a column of smoke in the woods.

Cloe Bianco’s name was arrived at through the camper’s license plate. But the investigation is not yet closed; the results of the DNA comparison are missing. There was no funeral, no place to bring a flower for her, and even here, near the camper, no one thought of it.

The words she wanted to leave behind are those written on her blog, personetransgender.wordpress.com, which she started seven years ago. In his farewell letter he says, “Immediately after the publication of this statement I will bring into being my self-chyria, even more definable as my free death. On this last day I celebrated with a delicious meal and excellent nectars of Bacchus, enjoying for the last time wines and foods that I like. This simple celebration of the end of my life was accompanied by listening to good music in my little house with wheels, where I will now remain. This is the most courtly way to live my life to the fullest and end it in the same style. Here it all ends.”

Many newspapers read in her words a description of a desperate act. But she herself had written in other posts that what inspired her was an in-depth reading of a text by Jean Améry, the Jewish-born intellectual who was deported to Auschwitz and died by suicide in 1978. Two years earlier Amery had published Levar la mano su sé. Discourse on Free Death where he reasoned giddily about suicide: “By their absurd act, those who have chosen a voluntary death have not only provided mortally incontrovertible proof that life is not ‘the highest good of all,’ […] but they have resolved the contradiction of death (living-dying), albeit at the price of another and more horrible contradiction, which one might call: I die, therefore I am. Or: I die, therefore life and all that exists as far as judgments are concerned is worthless. Or again: I die, therefore I was, at least senselessly in the moment before the jump, what I could not be because reality did not allow me to be.”

The reality in which Cloe Bianco lived was often hostile to her. But that reality Cloe Bianco opposed with her words, her choices, and her body. In the place she chose to die, Auronzo di Cadore, no one says they ever saw her around. Was this the first time she arrived there in her camper? Why did she choose that place? Everyone who lives there says they heard about her from the newspapers. Not only is there no flower near the charred camper, but there is no trace in the whole village that remembers her; even Mayor Dario Vecellio Galeno-elected on June 13, two days after Bianco’s death-comments on the phone that he has no intention of paying tribute to her in any way and that he doesn’t care much about this story: we just took office, he says, we have other things to think about, starting with the budget. Same reactions in the bars (“Who are you talking about, that faggot?”), at the newsstand (“Why tell this story?”) or in the taverns (“One would have noticed such a character, we all know each other here, we are closed yes, we like to be like this”).

Not only is there not a flower near the charred camper, but there is no trace in the whole country that reminds one of her.

Telling the story of Cloe Bianco is not easy, she herself always tried to avoid simplifications: she did not agree to conform to a role, she did not want to tell herself as a victim, and after her death she should not be turned into a martyr or a symbol. Almost all the people who knew her remember her as an intelligent and educated woman, combative and often confrontational or simply very tough. A transgender woman whose private life became, at some point and perhaps in spite of herself, public and who made her personal story deeply political. Her death, deliberately politicized and exemplary, demonstrates this. But there was another moment in her existence when, unintentionally, Bianco hit the headlines. On November 25, 2015, after advising the principal of the Scarpa-Mattei technical institute in San Donà di Piave, in the province of Venice, where she taught, she decided to enter classes dressed as a woman; and she has continued to teach dressed as a woman ever since. It was a choice full of consequences. As a reaction, the father of one student wrote a livid letter to the education councillor of the Veneto region, Elena Donazzan, of Fratelli d’Italia, who institutionally corroborated it by relaunching it in a violent and widely shared Facebook post, hurling Cloe Bianco’s coming-out into the center of the public arena.

Then there is still a trace on the web – it was given as news by the newspaper Libero – of a petition made by some of her pupils who criticized their teacher’s attire: “We began to be annoyed by the discreet way in which the teacher presented herself/themselves in the classroom to the class. Mini-skirts, plunging necklines and garish mini-dresses. We don’t find it educational. Is it possible that we are constantly being rebuked for how we dress? Is it acceptable that we are required to show up to school in decent attire and the ‘now teacher’ shows up to class in petticoats instead? We don’t find that fair.” Others, like her former student Sara Mazzonetto in a recent interview in Repubblica, recall that some parents reacted by making fun of her, treating her as a freak. But to hear other of her former students, Cloe Bianco had continued to do her job as a physics lab teacher in a professional and engaging way: “She was very good, in teaching and explaining. In fact, we understood a lot more from her than from the theory teachers.”

After her death, attempts were also made to reconstruct the reaction of the educational institution, although many steps remain to be clarified. Carmela Palumbo, director of the regional school office, admits that there were three measures against Cloe Bianco: the first, after she came out in class, led to a three-day suspension from teaching. The second, which ended in a dismissal, came after she was accused of addressing “inappropriate phrases” to her pupils. The third, in 2016, led to a one-day suspension for showing up in class wearing a miniskirt. “But,” says Palumbo, “there was no demotion.” Was there? Or, as seems more apparent, did Bianco struggle to resist very strong pressure in the workplace? She was on two rankings, that of teaching staff and that of administrative staff. The following year she left the school in San Donà di Piave and went to work in Mestre, where she continued teaching until 2018 when she chose to work in the secretary’s office.

Reading the labor court’s September 30, 2016 ruling, it is clear that 2015-2016 was not an easy year at all for Bianco. He appealed to the labor court against his suspension from school, but his claim for moral damages was rejected with a series of humiliating remarks: the ruling spoke of “inadequacy,” of “non-compliance with the duties of the teaching employee in having implemented with that timing and in that way the claim of his gender identity.” In essence: she should have been more cautious, more respectful of a public morality inspired by decorum. Bianco is being criticized for coming out without assessing the “need for prior and adequate information and preparation of the school environment, without gradualness, without a prior training/education of the largely underage students.”

She was also forced to compensate the public administration; the judgment is written in a reprimanding tone: “Quite reckless also the claim for compensation, for that matter not even supported by benchmarks (on quantum), which must therefore be rejected. […] Taking into account the principle of succombenza, especially with reference to the compensatory claim (almost unfounded) the costs should be refunded to the public administration, albeit in a symbolic amount.”

Today the union stands by her. Tiziana Basso of the Veneto CGIL in a note explicitly states that there is a need for cultural battles but also for new legislation for workplaces, including schools, but at the time no one said anything.

“Look at me. I am there. I am here. I exist. I am talking, are you listening? Don’t you want to hear me? Then I will raise my voice. Don’t you want to see me? Then I will become more and more conspicuous.” Cloe Bianco had written this in a post on her blog and that was what she did, even at school: she became more and more flamboyant. To those who wanted to make her “adequate,” “decorous,” invisible, she had responded by making her body fluorescent, exhibiting her transgender being in an unseemly, performative, political way.

She had also written that hers was an act of “sabotage,” a “derailment” from the more traditional path of transition that asks or mandates one to go from one sex to another: to become a “real man” or a “real woman” by adhering to a model of masculinity and femininity already given, yet paying the price-as, for example, Sandy Stone wrote in 1987 in her post-transsexual manifesto Empire strikes back-of invisibility. A price that Cloe Bianco clearly did not want to pay.

In defending her struggle without mediation, in claiming to feel doubly discriminated against, as a woman and as a trans woman not intending to make the classic transition, Cloe Bianco had often found herself isolated and in disagreement even with the counseling centers and collectives she had passed through: her radicality was sometimes not recognized except as irreducibility, and her conflictuality was often read as litigiousness. “Her presence,” says Ilaria Ruzza, president of Sat Pink, the service for trans people in Verona that Bianco had attended, “had been for many and many quite destabilizing.”

Laurella Arietti and Cloe Bianco had met in 2014 at Sat Pink, which Arietti had helped found in 2005: at the time, it was called Transgender Pink and was Veneto’s first counter for trans people.

White had not yet made the social transition by presenting herself to others in the gender she identified with. The goals of the counter, says Arietti, “were depsychiatrization and overcoming the patriarchal and binary system based on man-woman concepts.” As with Bianco, Arietti’s transition did not mean going from a male to a female condition: “I deconstructed the traditional path through my history and my body, but tried not to judge those who chose differently, thus those who followed psychiatric transitions in order to become a trans man or a trans woman by conforming to binary patriarchal canons and thus not transforming their body into a political body. My critical targets were and are society, culture, knowledge and politics; I am not interested in attacking the different ways of thinking of individuals.” Arietti recounts that Bianco was often intolerant of those who did not fully adhere to that same radicalism of his. He also criticized associations or counseling centers that while understanding his perspective also supported trans subjectivities through more traditional paths. “Cloe kind of wanted to impose her own thinking, she demanded the immediate deconstruction of secular norms and models. I tried and still try to maintain a balance between political struggle and my search for serenity. Instead, it seemed that Cloe could only and exclusively find happiness if the world, out there, was suddenly changed. What she was saying, her ideas, her struggle had great cultural and political value but she had not been able to find the right way to communicate them, and she had not even been able to find allies and allies even among those who thought exactly like her for that very reason. It must be said that a trans subjectivity in this society is not allowed to have difficulties, or a bad character.”

What is the line between a bad temper and a permanent political conflict?

“Cloe Bianco’s was a declared irreconcilability,” argues Lorenzo Bernini, professor of political philosophy at the University of Verona, where he founded the PoliTeSse-Politics and Theories of Sexuality Research Center, which he now directs. He had met Bianco at the university; she had taken his courses for a few months. “Beauty is a device of social control that, as Frantz Fanon already said about the Black Body, gives or denies access to full humanity. In the case of trans women, beauty means first and foremost ‘passing’ as women, and Cloe Bianco had made her not passing as a woman a political act.”

While Bianco’s “scandalous” presence was claimed by her, “embodying what one should not be” had been a very painful “source of rejection.”

In one of her last blog posts, one reads what seems to be a political manifesto or, on the other hand, perhaps, a caving in beyond the harshness of her allegiance to the line: “An ugly woman does not have at her disposal the opportunities to tell her story offered by life to other people, except only a tiny little pertugio from which she can externalize her existence, her yearnings, her desires, her experiences. The possible of an ugly woman is so gripping that it takes one’s breath away, takes away almost all vitality. (…) I am ugly, definitely ugly, I am a transgender woman. I am an offense to my gender, an offense to the female gender. I don’t even pity, not even that.”

Visionary

Cloe Bianco’s ultimate choice was free death. “And even death, like her life, was nevertheless and again a political choice,” says Arietti. To recognize the political quality of Cloe Bianco’s perspective, then, we need to go beyond reading her story as a psychiatric case or as the tragic parable of a dissident, an eccentric or a victim, a discriminated or a symbol. It would be fairer to understand the ideas she herself had defended in so many different contexts, even when her struggles seemed difficult or seemingly impossible. After all, how to be visionary without wanting to change everything?

One of her former students remembers the last time she met her, a few years ago on the train to Mestre: “Always polite and gentle.” With affection Bianco asked her what she had done in the years after school. She was beautiful, says her former student, and very elegant. Many remember her as a tough and eccentric person; no one can forget the power of her call for freedom.