VENICE, Italy — From the time he was a child, Edoardo Beniamin could envision paddling a gondola through the waterways of Venice, his native city. He saw himself, dressed in a striped jersey and ribboned straw hat, following his father and an uncle into a profession that has served as the enduring symbol of La Serenissima for a thousand years.
“To be a gondolier was always my dream,” Mr. Beniamin, 22, said one bright winter day in a Venice rendered vacant by a wave of Covid-19 sweeping across Europe.
Seated at an outdoor cafe near the San Zaccaria waterbus station on the Grand Canal, Mr. Beniamin explained why his childhood imaginings had felt to him unrealistic. “In the gondola business, it matters a lot if you are the son of someone,” he said. “But I really didn’t think it could be possible, since girls could not do it.”
A slight man with a thatch of coppery hair and facial scruff, Mr. Beniamin was assigned female at birth. For the first 16 years of his life, he said — turning up the collar of his shearling jacket against the chill — he had not felt a need to call that into question.
“When I was very very young — let’s say, 6 or 7 — I wanted to be a man but it was more for fun,” he said. “I preferred boy’s clothes, for example, and I used to say these things — ‘I want to dress like a man’ — that were not serious. I thought I was a girl and so I forgot all about it.”
Five years ago, while still in high school and dating his girlfriend — Claudia Nardelli, now 22 and his fiancée — he experienced what some in the trans community term an “egg” moment, an emergence. He began questioning whether the crippling migraine headaches and related health complaints that plagued him, most notably after gym class — and that led his mother to take him from one doctor to another — had origins that were not neurological.