Another teachable moment from the sharp end of the Terrygate/free speech fallout

In the Maltese desert of comedy, many different experiences have met at the cultural faultlines of the way gender has changed

I have been sanguine over free speech because as a journalist I endured defamation lawsuits and a never-ending stream of “bad taste” accusations whenever someone felt ‘offended’ or simply annoyed by factual writing.

I am still concerned about calls to censor, deplatform and ban those whose free speech can cause ‘offence’ (mindful of that questionable distance between free speech by assholes, and free speech by hatemongers).

So speaking from my – privileged Maltese experience (male, white, cis, straight, the list goes on…) – I know I can manage offence or the discomfort of free speech without having to employ any sanctimonious viewpoint on identity issues.

But every day since Terrygate kicked off, friends, women, and LGBTQI people I spoke to or shared stories of what it means to live at the sharp end of misogyny and transphobia, have imparted really important lessons on this saga (I will mention experiences recounted by Alex Caruana, and my conversations with Franco Rizzo, Teodor Reljic, Sasha Vella with whom I spoke about this on 103FM, and Cyrus Engerer).

In this case, it matters that the offence was not necessarily abstract, but targeted and personal (in smallville Malta, where it hits home harder). Terry Muscat might have some really shit takes on the social media platform she has created for herself; it does not mean she is not ripe for picking on – but nobody can deny her the right of umbrage if the joke reduces her existence to the crude figuration of what she spent her life rejecting.

Queerness is hardly part of my identity’s bandwidth (although at MaltaToday as editor I championed the fantastic production of Gayyaġni), but in the last 20 years, the political struggles for LGBTQI and feminist rights, as well as being father of two daughters, have taught me much about the straitjacket of patriarchy, and how I had to learn to reframe gender away from roles and performances. Apart from being consonant with my worldview about the individual pursuit of happiness, it allows us to question the tropes we’ve inherited around gender, what lies outside the binary, and beyond the strictures of “what a man is supposed to be/act/look like/act.”

I don’t want to accuse anyone of having been intentionally complicit in cruelty in Terrygate; I saw the joke on a leaked video and I understand the comedic device and why its merciless quality makes people laugh. Terry was the candidate for the joke because of the kind of ‘transness’ she represents with her messy and unsophisticated social media prattle and inelegance.

But there I go. Thinking that unsophisticated prattle merited a joke that reduced her difficult existence as a transgender woman from the working-class south who lacks social agency (context matters…), to a punchline about genitalia.

(I could discuss the issue of media literacy and why it matters for us to learn not to “set yourself up” with bad posts and questionable opinions, for it might turn us into the spectacle. Maybe that’s secondary right now.)

Laughing at someone’s gender identity, particularly someone who fought hard to escape that version of herself as if it were up for public dissection, is another matter. I am still extremely wary of prosecuting such cheap laughs, because failed ‘hate speech’ prosecutions can inspire revanchist attitudes. And because these same type of time-wasting criminal prosecutions are employed against other good comedians and dissenters.

I dislike prescribing what should be right for those who enjoy dark humour. But then I cannot simply suggest to others to internalise, as I did, the machoism of “taking the joke and not bitching about it”, li tkun sports, or ignore the fears of transgender people warily clocking the changing of the tide from rising fascism in Europe and Trumpworld.

Certainly enough we live in a time where, and this is what BUB’s comedy dimension shows, gender nonconformity is still a provocation – even though that’s par for the course in the genital-tugging world of locker-room bros. But here we are, at the faultlines of the way gender has changed – we must be able to explore it fearlessly, and learn.

What is surprising, maybe, is that BUB is somewhat the only kind of subversive comedy we seem to have in Malta, a society where we truly skipped the slow evolution of satire. We went straight from uncle’s racist jokes on Sunday and sappy, low-stakes laughs on TV, to a “roasting culture” absorbed right off YouTube where irony often masks old-school bigotry. Maybe BUB stole an early march on the polished podcast production, and the clever provocateurs and truth-tellers are yet to balance out the crude ones. In Malta, they’re mostly missing.

We cannot ignore the lack of this “comedy ecology” – in a society where all you get is either crass or the safe, the punch-down or the sentimental, and rarely a smart, self-aware voice who can punch up, we easily find ourselves either calling the police or defending the indefensible.