It’s been a bad week for the homophobes and transphobes in Italy: first came the ruling by the European Court that Italy was breaching the Human Rights of gay couples by refusing them marriage or any other recognized form of union.

Then, on Monday, Italy’s Supreme Court leapfrogged their laws on gender recognition into global significance when they asserted the rights of trans individuals to self-determine their gender.

And while it’s not surprising the usual suspects have been declaring it the end of the world, one politician is on a crusade.

Paola Binetti, a representative of the Union of the Centre, has suggested same-sex marriage is unnecessary as gay people can just use the recent trans ruling to their advantage.

‘Why do we need to pass a law on civil unions for homosexual couples, and to engage in a lengthy semantic debate around what “marriage” means today?’ she has argued.

‘Why must we embark on a bitter parliamentary battle on the value of the family, to decide whether certain reforms will strengthen it or weaken it further?

‘It would be a complete waste of time: all debate has now been rendered void by the recent verdict of the Supreme Court in the case of the individual who has demanded the right to change sex without surgical intervention.’

She adds: ‘Sexual difference appears completely irrelevant. It is enough for an individual to claim not that they are a certain way or they look a certain way but merely they desire to be a certain way. Just present your documents, declare how you feel and how you want to be considered and the die is cast.

‘You can now marry legally and you can even adopt…That is the real meaning of the Supreme Court’s ruling, which in a single blow has thrown away centuries of tradition around sexual identity.

‘But why settle for a modest civil union if, when I go to register my new documents I feel in the mood for a full-on marriage? We need to get back to a basic concept of human nature, recovering the full value of sexual identity in its specific and inescapable difference and substance. Gender theory, despite desperate attempts to deny it, is stripping away all ambiguity from the message of Pirandello [an Italian playwright]: “you are what you think you are”.

‘At the same time, it makes it even more difficult to understand who we are and who is the person stood before us, for the simple reason that in place of factual objectivity you have put in its place a radical self-referentiality.

She concludes: ‘At this point everything becomes dramatically possible, even disorientation of the younger generation.’

Italy is now the only major Western European country with no civil unions or same-sex marriage laws, putting it in direct conflict with the European Court’s rulings on human rights.