I have often wondered how people can house two diametrically opposite concepts in their heads. You’d think that logic would eventually dispel one idea over another but, apparently, when it comes to our politicians, the world of half-baked rhetoric is their oyster.

So, this week, we had a rising politician who had just taken part in Gozo Pride apparently criticise the prime minister on social media for promising free gender reassignment surgery. His premise was that if there’s money for these services, there should be funds to help offer better aid to those with fibromyalgia. He accused the prime minister of being populist, which is a pretty interesting choice of words given the road he went down in his Facebook status.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all about people getting the medication they need regardless of what they suffer from.

Of course, people with fibromyalgia should get more help – isn’t that what we are all paying our taxes for? But what I absolutely don’t understand was why this particular politician thought it prudent to bring up transgender people in his argument. Perhaps if he had stopped to read the statistics about how many transgender people have considered completing suicide, he would have been less enthusiastic about choosing to pick this particular bone to bring up.

I honestly don’t get it. You attend Pride, which is entirely aimed at eradicating homo and transphobia and celebrating the beauty of being able to be yourself, and, not even a week later, you’re sitting there seemingly creating an us-vs-them scenario with a segment of the people you’ve just marched with. And don’t even get me started about all the fantastic, thankless work that activists do that statuses like this damage.

Many of our politicians don’t know or don’t understand the weight that their words carry- Anna Marie Galea

Everyone in pain should be campaigned for but to offer the transgender community as the proverbial sacrificial lamb to the man in the street is unfair, to say to the least. In a country still in need of basic education and so fraught with ignorance, comments like this set us back even more. It also goes without saying that someone so very young speaking this way doesn’t particularly bode well for the Nationalist Party’s future.

Regardless of the intention behind the post and the subsequent correction, the fact remains that many of our politicians don’t know or don’t understand the weight that their words carry.

Social media is not your backyard or a table in a każin: it’s a space where hundreds if not thousands of people get the opportunity to see what exactly it is you stand for.

It is their window into understanding who you are and a chance for them to see if their ideas align with yours.

A status like this one will have alienated thousands of people and it’s not an alienation that many will forget in a hurry.

If this is the best the Nationalist Party can do, I hope the chairs on the opposition side of the house are comfortable because, at this rate, they will be warming them for a long time to come.