–Analysis-
TURIN — I have no idea what kind of questions there are in a psychiatric test to determine whether a person is gay or not, maybe they ask if you love your mom, hate your dad, like flowers, want to be a florist. The news of the Italian policeman forced to take a psychiatric test to determine his sexual orientation lies at the intersection of tragedy and farce.
Here’s the background: two inmates had reported that a certain prison police officer in a corrections facility in the northwestern Piedmont region was gay. Can we presume that the officer had allegedly done something illicit, because to my knowledge being gay is not a crime in this country, nor should it be “investigated.” At that point, instead of investigating the facts of the alleged crime, the head of the prison decided to submit the policeman to a psychiatric test.
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The story ends this way: the information given by the two inmates turned out to be false, the policeman then sued his workplace, and the regional administrative court ordered the Interior Ministry to compensate the officer with ten thousand euros for moral damages. The court wrote that questioning the officer’s suitability for work would help convey “the idea that the homosexuality attributed to him could be a personality disorder.”
The officer also spoke of repercussions at work, including bullying and mockery from colleagues.
Everything is wrong
Homosexuality is not a psychiatric disorder, it is not a mental illness, it is no longer in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — I don’t know if they have been updated in this prison yet.
So why does the management of a prison, representing the Italian government, conduct a psychiatric test to determine if an officer is LGBTQ? Would being gay make him unsuitable for the job? Where does this idea, this psychiatric notion, that sexual orientation affects the ability to work come from? Incompetent workers, as well as competent ones, come from every sexual orientation, not to mention race, religion and gender.
There’s an idea far more widespread than believed that gay and lesbian people are not just like everyone else, not quite as worthy.
Senator Ivan Scalfarotto, reporting the news via a tweet, wrote: “Italy, 2024. A country where a public administration forces an employee to take a test (?) to verify his or her sexual orientation illustrates better than a thousand treaties the creeping idea, and far more widespread than it is believed, that gay and lesbian people are not just like everyone else, not quite as worthy as everyone else.”
And now what?
First of all, I would like the public administration to use the taxes we all pay wisely. Then, it would also be time to stop hearing about psychiatric testing, as if the fight to take homosexuality out of the Mental Health Department never happened, as if we are not in 2024, as if it is still possible to have some kind of moral distinction in our heads between people of different sexual orientation.
No one wants to live in a society like that, no one wants to live in a place where your sexual orientation qualifies you, or gets you into or out of a job, or puts you in a situation that you wouldn’t want to or shouldn’t live in. If the officer had been gay — because that’s what the test was for — does that mean his sexual orientation would have been an element to be taken into account?
That a man had to go through such a procedure, a humanly humiliating experience, and have a test done to determine his sexual preference is simply unacceptable, something that cannot be part of a civilized country.
