‘The trans lobby knows it’s losing – so now it’s lashing out’

Graham Linehan has paid a heavy price for speaking out in the trans debate. His comedy-writing career was shattered. He was shunned by the great and good. Most notoriously, he was arrested at Heathrow by five armed police officers. Last month, he was cleared of harassing a trans activist, in an unrelated legal case. Following his partial acquittal, spiked’s Georgina Mumford caught up with Linehan to discuss the latest attempt to have him silenced and to get his take on where we are in the gender wars. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. You can watch the full thing here.

Georgina Mumford: Where do you think the conversation on trans is in the UK right now? Have we turned a corner?

Graham Linehan: It’s difficult to say for certain. Sometimes I think that the world might be destroyed by embarrassment. By that I mean a lot of people are now realising they bet on the wrong horse, but simply cannot admit it – because if they admit it, they admit to all sorts of awful accompanying things, like putting children in danger, mutilating and sterilising gay people, putting rapists in women’s prisons and so on. The sheer embarrassment of that must be so extraordinary that I imagine people, who may have otherwise seen sense, have now backed themselves into a corner.

I’m not sure that’s what the rest of the fight looks like. I think my arrest at Heathrow recently is a sign that the trans lobby is losing, and now they’re lashing out. I think we’re going to see a few more examples of this. A man in Switzerland just got 10 days in prison for saying that male and female skeletons are different. I am hopeful that it just gets to a stage where the whole thing finally dissipates, but you never know. These people are really digging their heels in, and it’s very hard to move them. All we can do is keep trying. The fact that they know they’re losing makes them all the more dangerous.

Mumford: As a comedy writer, you’ve seen first hand how caught up the arts world is with trans ideology. Why do you think that is?

Linehan: I think it’s because there are so many gay people who are part of the arts world, and many gay people have an understandable empathy for outsiders that has been totally weaponised against them. The theatre is a very gay environment, but of course, mainstream discourse on gay rights has been totally dominated by trans rights in recent years – which is all the more annoying when you realise the majority of these men who are dressing up as women are actually straight. So I think it’s a case of the gay people’s decency being manipulated.

Sadly, this means that my industry is going to be one of the last to turn around. I think even publishing might fix itself faster, because Kate Clanchy’s recent essays on her cancellation have brought people’s attention to the matter. Hopefully, her story will loosen the grip of the pronoun people in publishing. But theatre still has a long way to go. Film isn’t so bad perhaps, but as we’ve seen with the extraordinary behaviour of the BBC over the last 10 years, TV is very captured.

Mumford: This has been a long process for you, involving endless legal battles, career damage and media vilification. What kept you going?

Linehan: Oh, I knew I was dead either way. I was completely cancelled. There’s this great quote in Macbeth about being stuck in the middle of a river of blood, and to go forward would be just as hard as to go back. This was an apt metaphor for the situation I found myself in. It was in the middle of all this craziness that I realised I was never going to double back and pretend that I believed that men could be women, or that children should be hurt in gender clinics – I was never going to do that – so I might as well just keep trying to get to the other side. I also didn’t have much choice. You don’t get to simply decide you’re un-cancelled – though this was something people didn’t really understand back then, when they were all telling me to stop. But I had already come to the conclusion that the only way to beat this is by going through it.

Graham Linehan was talking to Georgina Mumford. Watch the full conversation below: