People of a transgender psychological bent have issues with their perception of self. They feel more comfortable being in a body of a person of the opposite sex. Transgender people need our support and sometimes opt for surgical or medical adjustment of their physique so that they may feel psychologically more adjusted. I have nothing against this. Neither do I have anything against adjusting government documents to help individuals feel more comfortable with themselves. These are, of course, issues outside the societal norm and need to be treated with compassion.
The legislation that Helena Dali is putting forward, allowing everyone to change their sexual identity at will, without any proof whatsoever of gender reassignment, is making a laughing stock of us all and is highly insensitive to both those facing the issue and the vast majority who are not. Through a simple visit to the notary, one may now simply change sex while still looking very much the same as one has always looked! To me, this creates an issue as, in ordinary life, much of our identity is associated with how we look and who we are. Now suddenly we are to be allowed to become an illusion of who we really are, with no accompanying physical changes at all. This is absolutely ridiculous and begins to blur the boundaries of civilisation and of reality.
Not only that, but it means that those who are in a civil union relationship between two people of the same sex, or even those who are not, can now have one partner change sex through a notarial deed, meaning that because of the changes introduced earlier by the PL allowing transsexuals to marry (not only enter into civil unions), two people of the same physical sexual features will now be allowed to marry (not only contract a civil union)! The concept of marriage in society between a physically real man and woman, with a view to emotional bonding and procreation, has now been inverted to one between people of the same sex within a solely emotional bond, who are considered of the opposite sex only as a legal illusionary construct of society, rather than that as defined by their objective physique and role in the family and community.
Our hard working President has recently said that, at the rate things are going, it will probably take another 50 years before full gender equality is reached in Malta. It seems that Minister Dali has just now resolved the problem for all of us!
Before the American Revolution, slavery - which contradicted natural law and natural rights - was a well-accepted social construct in the southern USA. The Civil War put an end to all that, with President Lincoln insisting that the US Constitution makes slavery illegal before the Confederate army surrendered. Society is now creating another false construct that flies directly in the face of natural law and natural reason and is in itself essentially an illusion, a hallucination. What will be the outcome of this?
At one time there was a Roman Empire, until the day that it was unravelled from within, as convenience became the order of the day and principles fell by the wayside! At this rate, it will not be long before our civilisation is unravelled for the sake of pure subjective political expediency. I can accept other forms of accommodating different family lifestyles, such civil unions, created by the state to make things easier for persons with problems, but I find it extremely hard to digest the unravelling and redefinition of marriage from one between a man and a woman to one that accommodates all sexual combinations! I also believe it is highly insensitive to hard realities.
While on the issue of insensitivity and hypocrisy, I find the whole current national obsession about a monk who stands accused of sexual incongruencies to be wholly inordinate, bar the yet unproven case of sexual abuse which I consider the more serious issue here. I am not defending what is wrong and sinful, but I have grown up to realise that sexual incongruencies are not the biggest sins that we may ever commit, although they do hurt others very much, particularly as I look around me and realise that many of the people who are bound by similar promises of chastity, go about breaking their promises to each other as if they are doing nothing wrong at all.
Priests are bound by a promise of celibacy as their particular form of chastity. Married people are bound by their promise to be chaste to each other, too! However, the way many people go about their daily lives as if they were not married at all and are often unfaithful to their wedded or even co-habiting partners, makes me realise how hypocritical we all really are sometimes. A little more mercy and compassion are needed here, especially since the case is not yet over and we do not yet know what really happened!
[email protected]