‘Trans is a war on working-class women’

April’s Supreme Court ruling on gender clarified the meaning of ‘woman’ in UK law. But the battle to restore sanity and single-sex spaces is far from over. Trans ideology is still embedded in our institutions, from schools and hospitals to the media and the arts. Women, like NHS nurse Sandie Peggie, are still forced to fight legal battles to have their rights respected. Children also remain at risk from teachers, doctors and other authority figures who would ‘affirm’ them as being the opposite sex.

Graham Linehan – legendary comedy writer and veteran of the TERF wars – returned to The Brendan O’Neill Show to discuss the state of the trans debate and much more. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. You can watch the whole episode here.

Brendan O’Neill: I wanted to ask you about Sandie Peggie, a nurse who is heroically standing up against NHS Fife. Peggie was forced to share a changing room at work, while on her period, with a biologically male doctor. What do you make of this case?

Graham Linehan: I raised this case on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast a few days ago. It was around three hours long, and even then I was thinking, will I be able to fit everything in? Sandie’s story, as you know, is just one of hundreds like it. I’m so glad that she has taken the fight on, because there’s a lot of attention on her and on this particular story. From the very start, many of us were saying that allowing men in women-only spaces would cause issues – that couldn’t have been more obvious. But people reacted as if we were saying something completely outlandish. No one believed you. You just ended up being shouted at on Newsnight. It was insane.

The same thing went for sports when we said, ‘we’re going to have men beating up women in the ring’. Sure enough, at the Paris Olympics, two men beat up women in the ring – and we all watched it like it was normal! So I’ve long since given up on trying to predict which stories will make it big or not. But I brought up Sandie’s story on Rogan’s show, because it is such a clear-cut example of the dangers of letting men into women’s spaces.

The attempts to smear Sandie as a bigot during the tribunal were just contemptible. I think there’s a class element to it, too. They don’t like working-class women having opinions.

O’Neill: It’s certainly interesting how the trans ideology seems to be peddled by the upper middle classes – those who go to certain universities, or adhere to certain leftish ideologies – but holds almost no weight among ordinary working people.

Linehan: The people who are shrugging and saying, ‘It’s just pronouns, just mixed bathrooms, what are you worried about?’, are the same people hanging around private members’ clubs, where mixed toilets are just places you go to take cocaine. Elsewhere, imposing these kinds of changes has a lot more significance. A toilet in a homeless shelter that’s mixed-sex is a fucking disaster waiting to happen. A rape crisis centre that’s having mixed sessions is an absurdity.

Once you get out of the rarified environments of the middle-class trans lobby – the Garrick Club, whatever Soho haunts these people hang out in – the world is a lot rougher. Especially for working-class people. Because the left is completely lost, it sees working-class people just as an obstruction on the road to this beautiful middle-class future, where everybody’s dressing like they’ve come out of a Vivienne Westwood showroom and behaving as if reality doesn’t exist. But reality does exist for working-class people.

The fact remains that the adults in the room are not doing any adulting. Keir Starmer ran on the promise of ending the culture war, but he hasn’t done that. He just hides from it. He leaves ordinary people like Sandie Peggie to fight it. The upshot of that is this absurd punishment system in the UK. Despite the law now recognising what a woman is, people like me still have to go back to court to keep fighting. Meanwhile, people like Starmer are absent from the battleground.

Working-class people simply don’t have the time to be thinking about what identity they are, but middle-class people are now staring deep into their belly buttons and obsessing over which category they belong to within the ever-expanding rainbow.

O’Neill: We’ve had bans placed on puberty blockers here in the UK, and other similar things are happening in mainland Europe. But are children still at danger from this ideology?

Linehan: I think things are certainly getting better, and the knowledge that this is dangerous is getting wider. In 2024, the WPATH files came to light, which showed that all the information we had about ‘gender-affirming care’ had basically come from a bunch of lunatics and ideologues. The files revealed the most extraordinary things. There was a recorded attempt to give a homeless man a procedure. Can you imagine being homeless, getting a surgical wound where your penis should be, and then going back out on the streets the next day?

These people are insane. It frustrates me, because it’s still not understood that this entire ‘early affirmation’ protocol – which sustains the entire ‘trans health’ industry – is corrupt at the source. And the chain of trust which is supposed to exist among doctors has been broken to such an extent that a lot of doctors, possibly quite innocently, found themselves doing these terrible things to young people’s bodies because they believed the higher-ups knew better. But they didn’t.

As always, the real reason why we’re seeing sluggishness in dealing with this stuff, is because the press are just pretending it’s not happening. The BBC has been outrageous. Having been captured by trans, it now shows a complete inability to address the issue as it is.

Graham Linehan was in conversation with Brendan O’Neill. Watch the full thing below: