Mick Hartley

Graham Linehan is getting more publicity now that his book, Tough Crowd, is about to be published. He's interviewed by Camilla Tominey in the Telegraph:

What started as a defence of a 2008 episode of The IT Crowd after it was criticised for being transphobic has spiralled into a full-time crusade for the father of two, who has become one of Britain’s most vocal critics of trans ideology and activism, claiming it is eroding women’s rights and harming children. Linehan has been especially vocal about women sharing safe spaces with men who identify as women and is fiercely opposed to transgender athletes competing in women’s sport.

Some have accused him of being bullying in his tactics, having mocked Twitter users who include their preferred pronouns in their bios and tweeted: ‘almost every central trans figure is a nonce’.

Despite causing upset by comparing prescribing puberty blockers to gender-dysphoric children to Nazi experiments, he doubles down, saying: ‘It is eugenics. The Nazis experimented on gender non-conforming autistic children, and we are experimenting on gender non-conforming autistic children.’…

Today he seems almost surprised by the fact that few of his friends and colleagues publicly supported him. ‘The thing about this that really upsets me is that it really would have only taken a few more people. If a few more people just stood up and said something, it would change the whole conversation.

‘[Instead] they all just disappeared. I genuinely didn’t expect that. I thought people would hear: kids are getting double mastectomies, women are having their language erased and their spaces destroyed, how do we help? How do we stop it? Instead, even those closest to me distanced themselves, didn’t give me any support and left me isolated. I would constantly be trying to explain what was going on but people didn’t want to hear it. I had one person literally put their hands over their ears.’

But surely he can understand people disagreeing, or wanting to keep their opinions to themselves? ‘I thought that once they saw that it was having such a devastating effect on my life, that they’d be alarmed, but I didn’t realise how terrified everyone was of these activists.’

Never one to shy away from calling people out on Twitter, he cites the example of tapping up celebrity friends to sign a letter of support for JK Rowling, who has faced similar abuse from trans activists.

‘I got a bunch of people to sign it, including John Cleese and Tom Stoppard. But the people I’d known like Dara Ó Briain said, “I won’t sign it, I’m confused by the issue.”

‘How can you be confused by signing a letter saying JK Rowling should not be receiving death and rape threats? It’s a total cop out because a few weeks later, he’s on Twitter calling Eddie Izzard “she”.’

On Izzard, who identifies as trans, he adds, ‘I find the idea that I can’t make fun of Eddie Izzard and Sam Smith, two of the most ridiculous people around at the moment, absurd.

‘I wouldn’t say he’s sold out. But he’s in the grip of the same mania that a lot of other people are in. Eddie Izzard is trans? Really? He’s a fully intact crossdresser. How is he trans? I am as trans as Eddie Izzard.’

When I suggest that he is misgendering Izzard, he replies, ‘How am I misgendering him? He’s a man.’ I point to the Equalities Act 2010, which protects people against discrimination on the grounds of gender.

‘The Equalities Act also protects my belief that he’s a man. What I find extraordinary about Eddie is he’s an intelligent man. He’s an enormously talented person. For him to not understand that his going into women’s toilets means that men like Adam Graham [the transgender double rapist who identifies as Isla Bryson] can go into women’s toilets. I just don’t get how he doesn’t see that. I can only imagine that he does see it and he’s ignoring it.’

Louis Theroux is apparently another big name friend who he claims has dropped him. ‘In the end, you stop calling people because you’re worried you’ll pick up the phone and they’ll be abusive to you. They have to call you and, you know, no one did.’…

Comedy, he believes, is in the grip of censorship over the issue. ‘Someone told me that a comedian friend of theirs was in a dressing room and the host came in and said, “Just to say, no jokes about trans people.” But you can’t walk in lockstep with the herd and be funny. You just can’t.

‘And I’ll tell you another thing, I never used the word “tranny”. You see all these people with “tranny” all over their timelines. When it was fashionable to say tranny, they said tranny. When it’s fashionable to be a trans-rights activist, they’re trans-rights activists. It’s often people who are trying to make up for some past indiscretion… Jimmy Carr has a line. He says the joke that will destroy my career is already out there. That’s what’s most disturbing about this.’

He had intended to use the musical to fund his retirement. Today he is ‘kept alive’ by his Substack subscribers on ‘roughly half of what I would have normally made if I was doing TV shows’.

I ask if it has all really been worth it?

‘It obviously would have been great if it hadn’t played out the way it did. But it’s the right thing to do. I mean, if you drill down into the core of it, I do believe that transitioning children is a crime against humanity. I could have gone through my whole life without facing something like this, but it just happened that I did. And, you know what? We all sleep like babies.’

When I suggest that he has been somewhat kamikaze in his methods, Linehan insists: ‘I just don’t think you can take the protection of children too far. And also the complete assault on women’s rights.’…

He is adamant that cancel culture is perpetuated not just by keyboard warriors, but key institutions, saying: ‘The worst cancellations come from what you might call the middle-class industries: the media, publishing, theatre, the arts. I have a friend who works for a big publishing house and she said that the young women there despise Rowling, despise her. This is a top-down project; an elite project.’

Then he goes on to argue that the transgender movement ‘produces no art’, adding, ‘There’s no great trans film. There’s no great trans creators of music. All the books that come out by trans authors are universally panned because of their incoherence.’

Some may be minded to point out that Detransition, Baby, by trans author Torrey Peters, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction; that a trans young adult novelist, Aiden Thomas, is a New York Times bestseller; that there are a growing number of celebrated trans people in the creative industries, among them actors Laverne Cox and Elliot Page, but Linehan is still full flow.

‘It’s a white middle-class movement,’ he continues. ‘There’s no poor people, no working-class people – well, there may be one or two, but the vast majority of trans-identified people are middle class and white. I think it comes from a feeling of wanting a cause, and just looking to their friends and seeing one. But it’s not a valid cause, trying to get your mate into women’s sports because he wears fingernail polish.’…

‘I think the tide is turning,’ Linehan says. ‘I think people are beginning to realise what’s going on.’

He believes that the trans debate could end up ‘deciding the next general election’. Really? ‘The Tories are going to be all over this and it will be like lobbing balls into an open goal. Every woman I know on this issue will never vote for anyone who will throw women under the bus, so Starmer is f—ked. They will never vote for him and I wouldn’t trust anyone who could be so easily bamboozled by this nonsense.’

Does he still class himself as a leftie? ‘Well not this Left, whatever the f—k this Left is.’