True equality means not championing other people’s differences

Malta’s first openly gay member of parliament was a Nationalist – Karl Gouder. On the Labour side, they stayed in the closet, despite all the talk.

Now Malta’s first ever transgender politician – Alex Mangion, who has been elected to the Attard Local Council – is also on the PN ticket.

The only thing that Labour does with gay men and transgender people is parade them about like show-girls and useful tools, who occasionally have to be mollified at significant cost to the taxpayer and with deleterious effects on the principle of meritocracy, before they get dangerous, like Cyrus Engerer.

And as for gay women, they are nowhere in Labour. It’s only gay men (the younger the better) who are paraded about.

When I argued before the general election that they are stupid to allow themselves to be treated like this, that women have been there before them and most sensible women would now never stand for being paraded about in that manner like special cases or different to a mainstream considered to be made up only of straight men, I received an onslaught of highly-worked-up responses from – you’ve got it – gay men. There was no similar problem with gay women. Being women first and foremost, they knew exactly what I was talking about.

I also did my best to explain that it is the Nationalist Party, most definitely not the Labour Party, which behaves towards women, gay people of both sexes, and transgender people, in the only correct manner – by considering them to be just another person, with both sexuality and gender being completely irrelevant.

But to certain kinds of gay men, this meant they were being ignored, that their sexuality was being sidelined, because what they really wanted was not equality or to be just one of the crowd like everybody else. They wanted special attention. They wanted to be different and championed for their difference. Joseph Muscat championed their difference. The Nationalist Party treated them like everyone else. Which is better for the cause? The latter, of course.

We women learned these lessons long before gay men began coming out of the closet. We had a much tougher time of it than gay men ever did because gay men were primarily men, and in macho, misogynistic Maltese culture, with its chauvinistic laws and practices, sex counted more than sexuality.

We women learned long ago that when men try to champion us, put us in special ghettos, talk about women’s special place in society, celebrate us and tell people to respect us, what they are really doing is patronising us and keeping us in what they consider to be our corral. They behave as though they are doing us some kind of favour, making it clear that they – the straight men – are the ones who dispense favours to cultural inferiors like women, and that it is by their grace that we are allowed to play any part in society or work.

It’s sort of painful watching some gay men go through the exact same thing now at the hands of the Labour Party. How stupid they are, and they don’t even know it. The young Labour Party women who wear thick, heavy make-up, elaborate hair-styles, inappropriate clothes and hooker shoes, then pout at the camera and behave as though they spend the best part of the day on the casting couch, epitomise the party’s attitude to women and that of its supporters and do great harm to the cause of women in Malta. It’s the same with gay men. They’re doing themselves and others no favours at all.

If Karl Gouder (now, incidentally, a PN local councillor in St Julian’s) had been a Labour MP, Joseph Muscat would have paraded him in public forums like a dancing bear or bearded lady. And if Alex Mangion, who is just 25, had been elected on the Labour ticket, Muscat would have been carting him around on a leash and sitting next to him at every public appearance, while instructing Super One to give wall to wall coverage of it, turning a normal person into a freak show.

And while I am at it, I might as well touch on what is obviously going to be a sore point. Alex Mangion, 25, looks like the boy next door and couldn’t be more different to Labour’s transgender trophy and horrendously vulgar circus act, Joanne Cassar. That, too, illustrates perfectly the difference between the two parties. Normal, sane, balanced and intelligent people – whatever their sexuality or gender – do not define themselves by their sexuality and gender and turn it into a circus.