Dear Salvini, are you really afraid of a yellow apron?

Dear Salvini

Let's clear the field of misunderstanding right away: in the best of all possible worlds we wouldn't need aprons and uniforms. In that world (spoiler: it does not exist) each child would express himself free from canons and superstructures, differences of class and class or gender and origin. But the Italy of 2022 is not the best of all possible worlds and, from many points of view, not even one of the most desirable to live in, especially as regards gender inequality and inclusion policies.

Any effort such as that of Alessandro Paone, head teacher of the nursery school of the Salutati-Cavalcanti comprehensive school in Buggiano in the province of Pistoia, who proposed the renewal of pink and light blue aprons for boys and girls, in favor of a neutral yellow for all (as reported by Luce - Gruppo Quotidiano Nazionale), can only be read from the point of view of overcoming rigid rules that no longer reflect - or should not reflect - the structure of the society in which we live.

The novelty, valid from the next school year, has become viral news on social media, unleashing the arrows of that large group of fine thinkers who sell in every attempt to progress on the theme of inclusion and, an imposition of the so-called gender theory, the complex conspiracy theory for which there would be an ambiguous attempt at social leveling aimed at eliminating any gender difference.

The news reached Matteo Salvini, who immediately took the opportunity to launch his anathema, first from the stage of the provincial party of the Lega in Adro, Bresciano - "The problem is not the blue or pink colors on 4-year-olds, but the values ​​that are given to these children "- then with the usual Twitter post thrown to the worries of the average Italian.

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What is so shocking about a yellow apron? There is the overcoming of a rigid gender binary between male and female, the foundation of any patriarchal society; that society in which the need to place in a box from an early age is functional to the recognition of values ​​that translate, as adults, into stereotypes and disparities. Labor, wage, social disparities.

Certainly, no one is convinced here that the color of a synthetic-mixed garment destined to clash with food, colors and mud has the power to subvert the social order, but Salvini and his family know perfectly well that the problem is not a color, but rather the innovative scope that choices of this kind can have in the immediate and medium term.

To wear a neutral color means to say to all children that not only are the differences of class not a limit to their identification and growth within a community like the school one - this is why uniforms were adopted in the fascist era and in many school grades they resist today - but it will not be not even their biological sex. Their immediate recognition of themselves as a man or a woman will not be, not so much because those two dimensions of being do not exist, but because it is now shared and well known that they are not the only two possibilities available in life experience.

Neutrality, or rather the variety - of colors, stories, models of identification - is not an indefinite magma in which "everything is worth it", but the opportunity to fulfill oneself as individuals, from an early childhood , without pre-established routes. Adherence to a single color, be it yellow, green or rainbow, is paradoxically the openness to any color, any shade of genre and any possible orientation that exists in nature.

Yellow - and here we mean the idea of ​​yellow as a symbol - it undermines the value of pink and blue and the cultural significance that those two colors, arbitrarily linked to the feminine and masculine dimension, have had for too long. It is a symbol of a freedom that can guarantee everyone to define themselves and not be defined, regardless of age. A principle strongly dissonant with any attempt at control by an established order and by a canon which up to now has represented the survival of a privilege for many.