She’s off again our Civil Liberties Minister, pandering to the gay minority, promising them heaven on earth in a way only liberal thinking can. Liberalism is delusional.
Evidently not happy with having redefined the concept of marriage in Malta to the point that it is today unrecognisable and incomprehensible, Helena Dalli has now launched a Gender Identity Bill for public consultation.
There is a month for submissions before the government goes ahead and does what it wants to anyway to please the gay lobby and consolidate its voter base.
Here’s one submission to the consultation document the government will ignore: stop exploiting the gay minority.
The Bill simplifies procedures for anyone who wishes to change his name and gender in all official government documents. Until now, people have to go through gender reassignment surgery to change their birth certificate. This will no longer be required.
All they will have to do is go to a notary and make a “clear and unequivocal declaration” of what they want their sex and new name to be. E voilà, all public documents would be subsequently changed. This is not a joke.
In announcing the Bill, Dalli said the law was intended to allow transgender people to “fulfil their potential”.
How on earth a change of name and sex in all official government documents, not just the birth certificate, will increase anyone’s potential is incomprehensible. It will neither stop the prejudice nor the discrimination against transgender people, something that Dalli readily admits.
The ease with which someone can just change his or her sexual identity will not promote the acceptance they rightfully desire, which is the root of the problem. If anything, it will take intolerance to a new high – ridicule.
Unlike the impression Dalli gives, the Bill makes no mention of transgender people but simply says that “it is the right of every person who is a Maltese citizen” to request a change in the recorded gender. Not only that: “The person shall not be required to provide proof of a surgical procedure for total or partial genital reassignment, hormonal therapies or any other psychiatric, psychological or medical treatment.”
Is this country going mad? Sexual identity is not a choice you pick off a supermarket shelf. Yes, transgender people, who need to redefine themselves, should have every opportunity to do so but we cannot trivialise this matter in such an irresponsible way.
It does not stop there. The Public Registry will keep a Gender Register of those who have rectified their gender and the index will not be open to public inspection or search. It sounds so Orwellian – a rewriting of one’s personal history – only Big Brother will know. Transgender people want acceptance. This move will leave them with a secret to live with all their lives.
What Labour wants to introduce is not new because it has been tried elsewhere.
What shall be new are the problems that the legislation will create in issues like employment, social benefits, sports and even the simple use of public lavatories.
The problem with this Bill is ideological and anyone happily branding himself a liberal had better have a rethink. This is not an issue of civil rights but of a government exploiting the weaknesses of people so desperate to be accepted as they are.
The answer to that is not liberalism, a disgusting ideology that compartmentalises people according to their perceived sexual identity and then exploits them.
The likes of Dalli and Cyrus Engerer, who was sitting next to her as she announced this latest flattery, want to make people believe that transgender issues are an extension of human rights. They are not. Their rhetoric, their claim they are fighting bigotry, hate crimes or outright prejudice, simply skews the real argument.
The solution does not lie with a secret register. The focus should be on the hormonal or psychiatric factors that cause some people to hate their own bodies and reject their own sex - only to subsequently feel rejected by society. Nothing in this Bill helps them there, inversely, it is delusional; it is pure Labour.
Here’s one submission to the consultation document the government will ignore: stop exploiting the gay minority
Dalli claims she knows many transgender people who are very talented but forced to live an invisible life. Talent has nothing to do with sexual identity. Listening to her is like listening to Prime Minister Joseph Muscat selling European passports.
He claims he wants to attract talent to Malta not money. Dalli claims her Bill will release transgender talent.
This Bill will overcome the last stumbling block to gay marriage. A simple notarial declaration will enable any same-sex couple to marry. This is not equality, this is an illusion.
Equality demands that we treat the same way those things that are the same. Conservative ideology does that. It guarantees human and civil rights to all, without pandering to minorities, flattering them with the impossible. A same-sex relationship is fundamentally different from marriage as no gay union can produce a child. This is reality and Labour’s exploiting of that reality is immoral. Yet, there may be hope.
At the recent national convention of the Nationalist Party, a man stood up on the podium and said he was a man trapped in the body of a woman. Alex Mangion said he has known this since he was nine but his parents hadn’t believed him. He spoke of the bullying he went through and the problems of using an ID card that identified him as woman when he looked like a man.
People like me, he said, are discriminated against more than others. You can only believe him and one can understand why he would look positively upon Dalli’s Gender Identity Bill because it hits all the right notes. It is the intentions that are suspect.
Mangion and people like him should understand that removing all shackles to changes in sexual identity, without any medical or other controls whatsoever, like it was a simple option, a whim, is irresponsible. Mangion should feel insulted by that Bill because it trivialises his lifelong pain.
But the man said something else which was equally important: “Do not think that I only care about LGBT issues. I am interested in the economy, business and peace of mind.” He is, above all, a Nationalist. Men like Mangion are the new face of the PN. He does not identify himself by his sex, to end up being exploited by Labour. He asserts himself first and foremost as an individual and identifies himself by his political ideology. He has principles.
The PN will need to work hard to get some responsibility into this Gender Identity Bill. It is improbable that it would manage because this is another populist trap by Labour to put them on the ‘wrong side of history’.
Labour played the same trick when they moved their Civil Unions Bill that implicitly included gay adoption, forcing the PN into a corner. It will try to do the same thing again through the decriminalisation of marijuana that is also the de facto legalisation of marijuana. And, now, Dalli comes up with a similar trick. It is a shame because her stand on immigrants was so commendable. But Labour does not change.
There was someone else speaking at the Nationalist convention, its leader, Simon Busuttil. His speech was astounding.
Not just because it revealed an immense sharpness of mind but also because he laid out principles as a basis for his political platform.
He spoke of honesty and truth in politics and an end to nepotism, which is a hard nut to crack, considering that Labour has institutionalised it and is reaping bountiful rewards.
But most of all he spoke of the individual, of empowerment and of “personal independence” that are guiding principles for his party.
The Civil Liberties Minister wants to make us believe that one’s sex is a choice and that we should be grateful to an irresponsible government that constantly undermines the social fabric to win the votes for a minority it itself compartmentalises to exploit.
Mangion and Busuttil have shown there is a different route based on principles and responsibility. Labour, under Muscat, will never understand that because they have long lost the plot.
Sexual identity is not an option or a choice. Labour was a choice and now look at the price the country is paying.