Politics of Monstrosity and Resistance: Movimento Identità Trans in Italy’s Contemporary Far-Right Radicalisation

The radicalisation of far-right ideologies across the United States and Europe has intensified anti-trans rhetoric and policies, reshaping the terrain of trans activism in Italy. These discourses have become central to the Italian state's governance of gender, casting trans life as a threat to national coherence and social order. Through an affective justice framework, this paper explores how Movimento Identità Trans (hereinafter: MIT), Italy's longest-standing trans-led organization, navigates these pressures. Grounded in an ethnographic research design involving participant observation, semi-structured interviews and politically committed scholarship, this paper asks: How do MIT activists navigate the pressures of visibility, expectation, and erasure within both institutional frameworks and activist coalitions? And how are care and rage mobilised to build trans-centered infrastructures within an increasingly hostile sociopolitical landscape? The analysis unfolds across three major nodes by: (1) presenting MIT's history and current political practices; (2) analysing the contemporary Italian context at both institutional and social movement levels, with particular focus on trans politics and MIT's intersections; and (3) examining MIT's monstrous political thresholds. Defined by hypervisibility, exhaustion, and resonating forms of traumatization, these thresholds arise as sites of epistemic and political agency, from which emerge transgressive, intertwined practices of rage and care.