‘Trans activists are using the police as errand boys’

Graham Linehan had only just stepped off a plane at London Heathrow before he was arrested by five armed police officers. The comedy writer – best known for Father Ted, The IT Crowd and his gender-critical activism – was detained and interrogated for posting three jokes on X that criticised trans activists. You could hardly ask for a starker illustration of Britain’s free-speech crisis: comedy writers can now have their collars felt, within moments of stepping on UK soil, for daring to poke fun at gender ideology. Linehan returned as a guest to The Brendan O’Neill Show last week, to discuss the truth about his arrest and the global battle for free speech. You can watch the full conversation here.

Brendan O’Neill: If anyone’s eyes were still closed to the free-speech crisis in Britain, I’m sure they’ve now been torn open following your arrest. How did we get here?

Graham Linehan: It’s critical that people realise how long this has been going on for. I’ve been the victim of aggressive trans activists for 10 years. These people function like a criminal gang, and clearly hold a massive sway over law enforcement. They use the police as errand boys.

My bizarre bail conditions speak to how screwed up the police force is at the moment. I was told that I’m not allowed to mention the ‘victim’ of my three tweets – which is strange, because there was no ‘victim’. My tweets consisted of three jokes. The vagueness is why we told them I would be ignoring the conditions. They make no sense. I believe the arrest itself was illegal, too, and I’ll be fighting that case alongside the Free Speech Union.

It’s important to understand that these hostile trans activists are still operating, and they’re dangerous. One individual released my family’s home address online. I was going to call the police in Norwich and ask them to put my family’s house on a patrol route, just so a police car would pass by it every so often, but my lawyer warned me that they wouldn’t do it. The police simply do not take these things seriously. They have no grasp on the issue. They believe everything these trans activists tell them, and refuse to believe that they could pose a serious threat to other people. I hope my arrest will demonstrate that they are a threat, and continue to be.

O’Neill: What was it like when you saw those armed police officers approaching you at Heathrow?

Linehan: It was completely enraging. As I said, I’ve had a decade of being harassed by dangerous men, and now here were the police to do it themselves.

When I saw the offending tweets, I sort of started laughing – particularly at the ‘punch him in the balls’ one. How do you punch a woman in the balls? How is it a crime to ‘hate misogynists and homophobes’? As for the tweet that implied trans activists smell… Well, they do! A couple of times in the gallery during my recent trial, people actually had to leave because of that. I’m not being hyperbolic. I’m telling the truth. But the police, like everyone else in the UK, have had 10 or so years of conditioning from institutions like the BBC which refuse to report on the trans issue properly. So most people aren’t aware that anything is going on at all. They have no idea there’s been an all-out war on women’s rights in the UK. Hopefully my arrest will make people wake up to that a little bit.

O’Neill: Previously, you’ve talked at length about those who turned their back on you, or went along with those who called you a bigot. How do you feel towards those people now?

Linehan: I think about that a lot. No one from the ‘old life’ called me about my arrest. Not Arthur Matthews, not anyone. It’s not that they haven’t had multiple chances to do so. But the thing that I find the worst was their distancing themselves from me from the start. They didn’t stand up for me. I say this over and over – all they had to say was: ‘Graham Linehan is not a bigot. Of course, women need fair sports categories. Of course, women need single-sex spaces. Of course, we shouldn’t be mutilating children in gender clinics.’ But that was beyond them. All these people probably think of themselves as good people, but they just let all this happen.

Sometimes I think, when the final bill comes in and we have to reckon with what’s been done to all these children, and the lawsuits that are going to come from it, the people who stood by are really going to have to look at their work. Because anyone who wasn’t fighting this stuff – actively fighting it – was complicit in it. I will try to be as magnanimous as possible, but I don’t think I will ever respect any of those people again.

O’Neill: I want to ask you about the horrific murder of Charlie Kirk, which lots of people witnessed. It seems that the trans issue figured in the killing. What is your take on that?

Linehan: Charlie Kirk was a very active Republican, to say the least. He was always taking his ideas to the public sphere. His assasination has made it even more terrifying for others to speak out – particularly women who want to talk on the trans issue, who don’t want targets on their backs. Antifa and similar types have been threatening them for years, and Charlie’s murder demonstrated how possible it is that one of them could decide to turn to violence.

People like Alastair Campbell – who repeated the untrue NPC talking point that Charlie Kirk was for ‘stoning gays’ – and other media talking heads, such as The News Agents, have either been ignoring this issue, or claiming that a group of very vicious people are actually a ‘vulnerable minority’. They’ve smeared conservatives and people on the right as fascists, Nazis and bigots whenever they’ve raised concerns. The upshot of that is the popularisation of phrases like ‘trans holocaust’ and ‘arm trans people’. Trans has always been a sort of pseudo-military movement.

Let’s hope that the Charlie Kirk tragedy has at least woken America up. People are finally realising that these violent activists are a real threat. There might be some truly vulnerable people out there – but they’re far outnumbered by a frenzied left-wing mind virus which has long convinced them that words are violence, and that conservatives want to kill them. We have allowed this kind of discourse to go uncriticised for far too long by the people who are supposed to be informing us.

Graham Linehan was talking to Brendan O’Neill. Watch the full conversation below: