You can simply check whether the multisets with the elements of x and y are equal:
import collections collections.Counter(x) == collections.Counter(y)
This requires the elements to be hashable; runtime will be in O(n), where n is the size of the lists.
If the elements are also unique, you can also convert to sets (same asymptotic runtime, may be a little bit faster in practice):
set(x) == set(y)
If the elements are not hashable, but sortable, another alternative (runtime in O(n log n)) is
sorted(x) == sorted(y)
If the elements are neither hashable nor sortable you can use the following helper function. Note that it will be quite slow (O(n²)) and should generally not be used outside of the esoteric case of unhashable and unsortable elements.
def equal_ignore_order(a, b):
""" Use only when elements are neither hashable nor sortable! """
unmatched = list(b)
for element in a:
try:
unmatched.remove(element)
except ValueError:
return False
return not unmatched