First woman gondolier turns out to be transgender
VENICE: A decade after joining the male-dominated arena of Venice’s canal rowers, the city’s first female gondolier has announced that “she” is a transgender. According to Alex Hai made this revelation on Facebook and in an interview on Radiolab on Wednesday. In “her” Facebook post, Hai said “she” had mastered rowing “while in the body of a woman”. But that “she” was not a woman. “The struggle of feminism is not my personal struggle. I simply want to do the work I’m passionate about,” Hai added. Hai had won a legal battle in 2007 to become the first female gondolier to row tourists in Venice.