Marcella Di Folco

Marcella Di Folco (7 March 1943 – 7 September 2010) was an Italian LGBT rights activist, actor, and politician. In her film appearances, played in male characters before transition, she is credited as Marcello Di Falco.

In 1988, she became president of the MIT - Movimento Identità Transessuale (Transsexual Identity Movement) and in 1997 vice-president of the Osservatorio Nazionale sull'Identità di Genere (National Observatory on Gender Identity, ONIG).

She was elected municipal councilor of Bologna in 1995, with the Green party. She was the first open trans woman to hold a political public office in the world. In 2014, at the 32nd Torino Film Festival, the film Una nobile rivoluzione (A Noble Revolution) by Simone Cangelosi, which tells her story had its premiere. In October 2019 Italian Journalist Bianca Berlinguer edited Storia di Marcella che fu Marcello (The Story of Marcella that was Marcello before) a confession of Marcella Di Folco's life she recorded before Marcella died.

Di Folco had gender corrective surgery in 1987.