This is a speech I wrote, which was then delivered in Naples on February 26, 2026, in memory of Sister Beatrice, transsuicided.
Beatrice chose freedom. Beatrice was 14 years old, she was Sicilian, and she chose freedom. From this world plagued by transmisogyny, from this country whose nationalist government continues to ignore the south, Beatrice chose freedom. But Beatrice was also suicides by that same transmisogyny and anti-southern sentiment, the intersection of which still weighs heavily on the shoulders of so many southern Dolls. I am also Sicilian and can imagine the conditions that led Beatrice to take such an extreme step. At 36 years old, I am surprised to still be here myself.
Sicily is a territory completely abandoned to itself and its parallel government, whose lives are already inferior and ignorable, as reconfirmed by the climatic destruction of recent weeks, where the only chance for dignity is to leave, one way or another. A territory that, in order to try to survive systematic destruction, chooses the only means possible, those of conservatism, because we are not allowed to have anything else, reduced to a caricatured tourist destination that is fully gentrifiable and expropriable, whose backward inhabitants can only bow to the will of those above them. In this shadowy setting, the monsters that plague our South are born. Not only the mafia and the code of silence, not only the lack of work and vote buying, but also the monstrous Patriarchy finds fertile ground here. We cannot forget the territory when we talk about Beatrice’s suicide because that territory is one of the causes, because every trans suicide is a transicide. Always.
Because for the monstrous Patriarchy, nothing is more dangerous than a Doll. Beatrice was driven to suicide by the intersection of transmisogyny and anti-Southernism, which also manifests itself in the overdetermination and bourgeois denial of this intersection. We Dolls know transmisogyny well: it is the intersection between transphobia and misogyny, the effects of which we experience every day when we are harassed on the street, are denied a job or housing, when systemic transmedicalist oppression denies us access to the medical care necessary for the dignity we deserve just because we are trans women. This is compounded by life in the South, and the effects are multiplied to a level that we may not yet be fully aware of, but which we must have the courage to analyze and fully address. The struggle that we, as Dolls from the South, must carry on must take on not only the historical lineage of other, better-known Sisters from the past, but also and above all our most direct Sisters, those from the South, those like Beatrice. We must fight the intersection between transmisogyny and anti-Southernism, we must fight patriarchy and Northern supremacy in the name of all the Sisters who have been taken from us.
It is with our Sisters in our hearts that we must carry on the struggle for our liberation because only Love for our Sisters, which is systematically denied us by our families of origin, our territories, the State, Capital, and Patriarchy, can lead us to Victory. And Victory will not be ours, but that of the Sisters taken away. Beatrice included.
Arm the Dolls.