Whenever confronted with the horror of people who just cannot stop inflicting pain on others we ask ‘how can they sleep at night’. I stopped asking this question years ago when I realised: easily, and well.

Yet when faced with the smiling and gorgeous face of Joanne Cassar, who, for well nigh on five years now, has been dragged through the Maltese courts trying to salvage her right to marry, that question, once answered so blithely, resurfaced in my mind. How, indeed, can ‘they’ sleep at night?

First it was the Registrar of Marriages. When the story broke back in 2006 I could just imagine this man (way, waaaaay too many men in these powerful positions), moments after her marriage banns had landed on his metal government-issue desk, exclaiming ‘Mhux hekk ukoll! Din mhux li kienet ragel? Kemm hi tosta!’ and then wondering if he should have said ‘kemm hu tost’ instead. Some people still find the he/she references, when applied to people who have had a trans-gender operation, perplexing, even funny.

It isn’t really. I cannot even start to understand how awful it must be to feel trapped in a body which is alien to you. And this is the crux of it all: most of us don’t.

These men – the Registrar, the magistrates – who are deciding Joanne’s life and what she should do with it, obviously have no idea. How to put together your spirit – in the case of Joanne, very obviously female – and body, once male, together? When she appears in front of them they cannot understand why this stunningly sexy woman who probably looks 800% more womanly than their wives, wants this. It must have been awful enough, in their minds, that she won the right to be called a woman on her ID card.

Many, many years ago I worked at a bank. Every branch has its own man to woman transgender customer. This one, so pretty she should never have been born a boy to begin with, would come in with her ID card to do what we all take for granted: deposit, withdraw, generally carry out transactions. I would feel sick to my stomach as some of the male staff would make as much as they could out of this exciting occurrence of the day, including calling her, loudly, by her male name.

When I waitressed at a very popular restaurant in St. Julians we also had another very regular customer who would come in with her mother. Every time, the male waiters would scuttle out of the kitchen to ‘see’ her. On one occasion they gave her hell, telling her we didn’t have any tables with views, when we didn’t have a single booking for that night. I cringed. I felt as if the very fact that I shared an employer with these people made me complicit to their reactions.

Call me stupid but I cannot understand this kind of behaviour. What is lacking in these people’s lives that they need to take it out on others by making their social lives a misery? Men who are comfortable with their sexuality and their lives do not need to have it questioned every time they are confronted with a gay man, a transsexual or a transgender person.

Now Joanne has yet again, in the highest court of the land, been refused her right to marry. Our constitutional law is outdated and needs to be updated. It is politicians that do that, not magistrates. She is fighting for a right, which, incidentally, she doesn’t even need right now: following the drama which ensued in 2006 she had broken up with her then boyfriend, which is so heartbreaking to begin with.

Her lawyers Dr. Jose Herrera (a Labour MP himself) and Dr. David Camilleri are taking this to the European Court of Human Rights where hopefully Joanne will be able to be heard without the kind of noise of social judgement drowning her voice out in Malta.

I was also shocked – and I was not the only one – that the court also suggested that she co-habit. Joanne has ended up a ‘victim’ not just of the body she was born in but of the convoluted arguments going on in this country right now.

Dr. Camilleri disagreed with the title on timesofmalta which cried “Joanne Cassar loses Transexual Marriage Case’, an unfortunate and inelegant way of putting words, considering that it is just marriage, not ‘transexual marriage’ that Joanne is asking for. He commented thus later on in the afternoon of the day of judgement,

‘I am commenting as one of the lawyers assisting Joanne Cassar. I disagree with your title. Actually the Consitutional Court's judgement was partly in her favour. It declared that the fact that she was not allowed to marry breaches her fundamental human rights as per article 8 and 12 of the European Convention. What the Constitutional Court overturned was the remedy given to her by the First Hall Civil Court in it's Constitutional Jurisdiction. Instead of ordering the Director of Public Registry to issue the relative bans the appellate court declared that parliament should legislate to cater for a pertnership for life for instances like hers. We will still be appealing from this decision to the European Court.

All of this must be turning out to be very expensive which is why her legal counsel is now going for the compensation jugular in Strasbourg. As well they should. If Joanne Cassar wins the right to marry I for one will most definitely not be complaining about ‘our taxes’ being allocated to such compensation. In fact it may be one of the rare cases where I would happily pay up. It is so sad that she has to suffer so much to get to that point.

Read the full sentence here