The hills we choose to die on: An interview with women's rights activist Graham Linehan

Graham Linehan

is a multiple BAFTA winning Irish comedy writer best known for his popular TV sitcoms Father Ted and The IT Crowd. Around six years ago he was cancelled for the mortal sin of criticising trans activism. He was banned on Twitter/X for a while, and lost work contracts, friends, and eventually his marriage.

Linehan says things like men can’t get pregnant, or that practicing gender medicine on kids is child abuse. He misgenders trans-identified people and forcefully opposes self-identification laws. All literal violence, according to his detractors.

Linehan is characterised in mainstream media as a transphobe or opponent of trans rights. I think it’s fair to say that Linehan’s style in his commentary and interactions with trans activists is combative and aggressive. He can’t stand them.

However, the portrayal of Linehan as ‘anti-trans’ rather than ‘pro-women’s rights’ or ‘pro-child protection’ (or a blend of all these positions) is interesting, given that his opposition to anti-trans ideology seems to stem as much from his concerns about its impact on women’s rights and on child welfare as it does from his professed hatred of trans activists.

A tension between women’s rights and trans rights is necessarily brought about by the fact that in some case they are mutually exclusive and therefore are in competition with each other.

The Australian Tickle v Giggle lawsuit is illustrative. Roxanne Tickle, a natal male who has taken social, surgical and legal steps to transition to a woman, is suing Sall Grover, founder of a women’s only app (Giggle), for excluding trans-identified men.

There can only be one winner in this case, which will set an important legal precedent. A win for Tickle will mean women do not have right to create and access female-only spaces - a right that women previously held until the Sex Discrimination Act was amended in 2013 to remove the definition of man and woman altogether, and to include gender identity as a protected attribute alongside sex. A win for Grover will mean trans-identified men do not have the right enter women’s spaces where the ‘owner’ of the space wishes to exclude them.

The Tickle v Giggle case has been covered as a challenge to women’s rights or as a challenge to LGBTQI+ rights, depending on the bias of the outlet. It’s interesting to note, though, that where competing rights are reported in the media, they are most often reported from the lens of LGBTQI+ rights, with little or no acknowledgement of the cost to women’s rights that this necessarily entails.

The obvious counter-argument is that trans women are women. The fact that many (I would suggest most outside of hyper-progressive circles) natal females disagree, and that a good many actually feel threatened by the implications of this statement should stimulate robust discussion, not shutdowns and cancellations.

Against this backdrop, Linehan has maintained his staunch allyship with TERFS (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) in defense of women’s sex-based rights and child protection from gender medicine/ideology.

Last year Linehan published a book, Tough Crowd, about the climb and climb of his comedy writing career until his fall from grace forced a transition (pun alert) from full-time comedy writing to unwilling unemployment, and eventual full-time activism. His Substack is dedicated exclusively to tracking what he calls “the war on women.”

I sat down with Linehan while he was in Australia touring with the Free Speech Union of Australia earlier this year.

Most of all, I wanted to explore why Linehan chose this hill to die on.

Mine was the Covid vaccine mandates. For others, it was the subprime crisis, or Iraq or Ukraine or Palestine or Net Zero.

What makes someone feel ‘enough is enough’, to the point that they’re willing to be un-personed? To be socially cast out, to risk reputational suicide, to take professional and financial losses? And why this issue but not another? And are these issues in any way connected?

I enjoyed speaking with Linehan, who came across as candid, sensitive and sincere in our conversation. His head is as big in real life as it is in photos, his glasses were wonky at all times, and his drink of choice was a margarita.

Linehan’s talk and social drinks were attended by people who have been personally impacted by gender ideology, including one mother I spoke with whose bearded daughter cut her off for not unquestioningly facilitating her sudden-onset teenage desire to transition. The people who came were grateful and admiring of Linehan’s activism.

Me with Graham Linehan at his Free Speech Union book talk in Perth, April 2024. Photo by my dad.

The following exchange is lightly edited for brevity and clarity. When I arrived, we had a brief discussion about how the Covid fiasco had brought my commitment to free speech into sharp focus, and from that point we jumped into the interview.

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RB: In your book Tough Crowd, you kept saying you couldn’t believe your friends and colleagues didn’t back you up. Why did it take you so long to accept that people weren’t coming to your defence or joining the fight?

GL: I think it’s more the subject matter. The details of where we were fooled and where we were conned [on Covid] are very confusing. I still don’t have a grasp on it. I don’t really know what to think. I got two shots and now I’ve stopped but I still don’t know if that’s the right thing to do or not. 

RB: So it wasn’t crystal clear to you, whereas this was.

GL: This is men and women’s sports. Men and women’s prisons. Men and women’s rape crisis centres. I thought as soon as people heard, they would be like ‘how can we help.’

RB: How many years was it until you realised that they wouldn’t?

GL: Probably about four or five years.

RB: And what was it that made you realise, ok they’re not coming?

GL: There were so many stages where I thought ‘oh this’ll do it!’ First when Martina Navratilova came out in favour of women’s sports - she’s a gay icon. Then they started calling her a bigot, even [LGBTQ advocacy group) GLAAD. 

Then J.K. Rowling, I thought, she’s beloved, but no, they completely destroyed her. Then Genevieve Gluck from Reduxx on the WPATH files link to a page of child pornography. Again I thought, this is such a huge scandal. But it just never happened. 

RB: How do you explain it?

GL: It’s the ring-fencing of it by journalists. Journalists who are captured. Like, every middle-class industry fell to gender ideology - the media, theatre, publishing, television, all of them are just sewn up. And this is the way we interpret the world, through these industries. 

RB: So there’s a similarity with Covid, being that it’s a class issue. Mary Harrington wrote about this for UnHerd, about how Covid restrictions and mandates were cheered on, and in many ways beneficial to, the upper-middle class, but were most harmful to the working class.

GL: I see this as the French aristocracy just before the revolution. There’s a real ‘let them eat cake’ aspect to all this. Or actually, the thing it’s most like is the city in the Hunger Games where all the fashion victims live, the Capitol. 

And I thought of all my friends who wore t-shirts saying ‘this is what a feminist looks like’ - and a lot of them had daughters.

RB: You expected them to live up to their professed values.

GL: Yes. But the other thing is there’s an instinctive, reactive knee-jerk thing to defend my daughter and wife, my mum. 

RB: So you had intense personal identification with the issue. I had that with the Covid stuff, I had a personal reason to care.

GL: The daughter, wife, mum. I think it was self ID that really pricked up my ears because I immediately knew if self ID was in place then suddenly there was no such thing as women-only spaces. 

RB: How old was your daughter?

GL: She was about 13, 14. 

RB: So she was at a vulnerable age.

GL: [Nods] The other thing that happened very early on was I went to a pub one night and met a guy. I asked how are you doing? He said, “Not great, I’ve just come off a two-week bender. I’m an alcoholic and my daughter’s taking testosterone and I can’t stop her. She is disappearing in front of my eyes.”

Because he’s a loving father, he researched it. He found out what testosterone might do. Nothing about it seemed good to him. He knew that she was in greater danger of osteoporosis, he knew that she was in greater danger of heart attacks.

I found out too that women who take testosterone are four times more likely to die of a heart attack than men. Cos their bodies can’t take it. Their vocal chords swell up, but they still have the same slender necks, like [actor] Elliot Page.

RB: Do you see overlap with any other orthodoxies where there’s a similar response from the media? Like Covid, climate, wars…

GL: Only Covid I’d say, but I’m kind of taking your word for it. All I know is the people who said it was a lab leak were mocked but it seems very likely that that’s what happened. 

What’s interesting about this is that there was a disease called Covid, there is a thing called climate change -

RB: And there is a thing called gender dysphoria but it’s always a much smaller thing than they make it out to be - 

GL: But I would say there’s no such thing as trans. Not in the way the word is being used. 

RB: But would you agree that all these things have a grain of truth, and it’s small, but it’s been massively blown up and it creates an industry that generates a lot of money, and if you threaten it, you’re on the out…

GL: Maybe another key difference is the money that it makes for people. You have pharma making money off victims for life. But then on the other end of it, you have individuals who just beg for money on their Twitter bios, links to fundraising, please help me fund this surgery.

So I think there’s a lot of people’s bottom lines being threatened by it, which is why the reaction is so violent and personal and nasty. If it was just the corporations it wouldn’t have that toxic aspect. But these individuals are benefiting - sport cheats, mediocre politicians, mediocre comedians.

RB: Well it’s bound up with identity - “You’re threatening who I am.” 

GL: I’ve never seen anything like it since Ireland in the 80s. The Catholic Church was banning [Monty Python’s] Life of Brian, The Meaning of Life - which had a song called Every Sperm is Sacred. They took that very seriously. 

But now those same two films would be banned by a different group of people, but for different reasons. 

So I kind of recognised it, but it was completely new at the same time. And again I thought that once people saw that people were being censored and losing their jobs, they’d all rally to help. I know, when I say it now it seems naive and stupid.

RB: I felt naive once I realised that’s not how the world is and it’s not how most people are.

GL: Don’t you think that this is completely new, don’t you think that it’s unprecedented?

RB: No, I think that human beings are innately religious. We keep creating religions. And so when humans abandon institutional religion, they go and make other ones. And I think that humans have always been superstitious. So I don’t see it as an aberration. I see it as a continuation of how people are.

GL: I agree, that makes sense .

RB: And maybe that’s why I was able to accept it so quickly [with the Covid stuff].

GL: Right. I was never able to accept it. I was like, men in rape crisis centres? What are you talking about??

RB: I’ve spent some time pondering the perspective of people who look away, who don’t want to engage on these issues. I think people are living in survival mode. They don’t want to be exiled from the pack. We’ve got all this technology, we’re globally connected, but we haven’t really evolved much, socially, past being social animals that don’t want to be exiled from the group. 

GL: Absolutely, and I’d add to that, I call what happened to me and to J.K. Rowling - we’re victims of village gossip on a global scale. 

RB: Yes and that is new. 

GL: It goes to what you’re saying [before the interview] where everyone you’ve ever met is on Facebook. 

RB: Context collapse - where every social context is flattened into the one digital space. It’s a petri dish for misunderstanding.

GL: Also, it’s a surveillance system that you spend your whole life setting up yourself. I think of it like a giant spider’s web. And whenever there’s a tremor, a million spiders come down and attack you. Because you put it on your Facebook with everyone you’ve ever known in your life. 

A big thing about this is we entered into the world of the internet and we never had a conversation about it. Is it a good idea that we’re in touch with everyone we ever met? That every word we say is now politicised because we’re saying it publicly? 

RB: So why do you continue to post on your social media accounts on these issues?

GL: I had a career and I knew that I would never work again if I didn’t destroy the ideology. 

RB: Yes I understood that from your book, that once you got to a certain point you felt you had to go all the way with it. 

GL: Yeah, there’s a great Shakespeare quote, it’s the image of a river of blood and he’s halfway across it… 

Someone very kind said to me, it’s not easy allyship. You’re in a movement full of women who are stubborn, and single minded -

RB: And maybe don’t want a man speaking for them. I see you have many feminist friends who have expressed gratitude for your support, but are there some who have said they don’t want you to speak for them?

GL: Yes… It’s one of those things, you can’t please all the people all the time. I was in it for the women but also for my career. I want my career back. 

I think the original thing is that I hate trans activists so much. Because they’re bullies and they pick on women. I don’t think there’s anything lower. 

RB: When did you first notice it?

GL: In the IT Crowd episode that has a trans character, the pushback was a little bit unusual. But I didn’t really notice it until later, until I saw them coming after people like [British lesbian radical feminist] Julie Bindle. Even I was scared to follow Julie Bindle, I thought, she must have done something. Then I realised all of these people had a toxic cloud spread about them very deliberately by these activists. It had no source. Quite the opposite.

RB: I thought that was interesting when you said in your book about how the police called your house to ask some questions, and then that was reported in the media as you receiving a formal caution, very dishonest. 

GL: Yeah and the guy who did that, I found out later he has a previous conviction for having sex with a 14-year-old boy. So, I kept saying, look at these people, look at what they are. 

[After a brief interlude, we change gears]

RB: What’s the highlight of your Australian tour so far?

GL: The Sydney Harbour. I didn’t realise how expansive it is, with three cityscapes, it kind of produced a lovely swooning feeling in me. 

RB: Me too!

GL: I’m in a strange position where I can kind of live anywhere in the world. I’m single, I lost every friend in my life. Except for a couple of journalists. 

RB: What about [long time comedy collaborator] Arthur Mathews?

GL: No. He went as far as to say I’m not a bigot, but that’s not good enough. It’s like, how hard is it to say women need single-sex spaces? It’s weird this fight. People can’t talk about it. They don’t seem to understand it. It’s so weird. And again, I’m like - but you have a daughter. How could you let this happen?

RB: One of the distinctions I eventually made was, I don’t need people to agree with me, but I need them to let me do me. The people I’m no longer friends with are the ones who couldn’t tolerate me being where I was at. But I’ve been able to stay friends with people who - maybe they didn’t buy in or this isn’t their fight, and they don’t understand it, but - if they ask me how I am and if I tell them how I really feel, they’ll give me the space and let me do that. Have you been able to make that distinction or do you need people - 

GL: I need them to step in. I just don’t see how… they’re hurting kids. These kids will die earlier. They’ll not be able to have children. They’ll not be able to have orgasms. They’ll get cancer, heart attacks, osteoporosis. Whenever there’s a protest with trans rights activists, there’s always some kids with walking sticks, walkers, wheelchairs. Maybe for some of them it’s not this, but I guarantee you for some of them it’s early onset osteoporosis.

And my friend Elaine Miller told me that a lot of these young girls who are being told they can turn into boys will have early menopause. Early menopause brings with it dementia, osteoporosis. These young kids, they trip over a paving stone, it changes their life. And no one’s telling them this. And everywhere is captured by it. Psychologists, doctors - I still can’t believe it’s happening. 

RB: I can. It’s happening on lots of issues. 

What do you know about trans medicine and laws in Australia? For example the anti-conversion laws in some states which treat trans identity as an innate characteristic that you cannot ‘convert’ a child out of. 

GL: It’s quite simple. There’s no such thing as cis. There’s no such thing as trans. Cis and trans are two imaginary conditions. 

RB: But you talked about transsexuals….

GL: Sure. There’s such a thing as having dysphoria and taking extreme steps to get that sorted. But that should always, always be the last ditch scenario. The thing about these conversion therapy laws is that they all have early affirmation as the answer to these kids’ problems. 

There’s no other field of medicine where people are told, well if you cut off a part of yourself it will help you. 

RB: I read Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage and I identified, because I’m in recovery from an eating disorder and it was severe when I was a teenager. I had extreme body dysmorphia, I imagined all sorts of surgeries where I would cut bits off myself - not breasts but thighs and so on. No one ever said to me, ‘yeah you should go and get the surgery.’ And I was intrigued that she quoted research in her book about the overlap between eating disorders and trans identification. I remember thinking to myself at that age, ‘it would be easier to be a man,’ because I was so unhappy in my female body. But no one affirmed it. They said let’s get you into therapy. Let’s get you better. 

GL: That’s it, it’s anorexia 2.0. Anoxeria with a better marketing budget. 

RB: Well we always said that anorexia was not ideal. We treated it as an illness. But now, we’re treating trans as your ‘true self.’

GL: Now the problem is seen as a solution. It’s really disturbing. And it’s the same cohort of girls. It’s autistic, sensitive girls who are very smart who get into this. This kind of group hysteria. I don’t want to be offensive. 

RB: They call it symptom pooling. Where girls manifest distress and it pools into these symptom groups. Teenage girls are super prone to this apparently. Which I relate to. That’s what I experienced at that age. 

How is the Australian culture differing from the UK on this issue?

GL: More TERFs! I’ve met so many more TERFs here. It’s been really interesting. When I got over, the mood here was very down. Everyone was saying we’re 5 years behind England, we don’t have the same sort of infrastructure and established movements… but as I’ve been here, everything’s changed in the UK with the Cass Review. And I’ve seen people seem happier, people smiling, there’s a lighter feel. 

RB: Do you think that’s because of the Cass Review?

GL: Yeah, I think it’s changing everything. I think it’s a matter of time before the conversion therapy laws disappear. 

RB: So you think we’re drawing to the end of this cultural moment, and there’s going to be a shift?

GL: Maybe. The trans rights activists are really going for me at the moment. They’re sharing fake screenshots of me saying I’m lusting after my daughter’s friends - 

RB: Can you sue for that?

GL: Well they’re just faceless accounts…

RB: Report them to the eSafety Commissioner!

GL: Haha, yeah, she’d probably give them a job. There are fake screenshots of me apologising for sending dick pics on Mumsnet. 

One of the things that’s flared up recently is I use the word ‘groomer’ because I think it’s ‘le mot juste’, that’s what it is. They’re grooming a whole society into thinking nothing of sexualising children, of mutilating children. So they think because I use the word groomer they can call me a predator. But that doesn’t bother me so much because it’s so absurd that no one really takes it seriously.

RB: What would it take for people to see it how you do?

GL: If I could figure out why they behave the way they do I’d be having a much easier time. I just don’t understand. They’re like aliens to me. You know, things like a dead rat nailed to the door of a rape clinic and thinking, yeah that’s a good thing to happen to them.

I just don’t get why they’re not as outraged. I don’t get why they don’t care about women’s sports. That’s the most clear visible problem. It may not be the most significant one because the safeguarding aspect is more significant, but in terms of womens sports you can see it, you can see it in photographs, these men towering over women …

RB: I’m Reformed Woke so I could offer a perspective on this. 

GL: Go on. 

RB: There are many reasons but one of the primary reasons is that bleeding heart woke people don’t see these individuals as men. I think they see them as confused and suffering, and so they are driven by the idea that we need to alleviate this suffering, and that those women [alongside a trans-identified competitor] on the podium have not had to suffer like the trans person.

I think people are so conditioned by the ‘oppression Olympics’ mindset [coined by Gad Saad to describe the pathological privileging of victimhood as the ultimate virtue] that they just see a victim on the podium, and they want to alleviate the victim’s suffering, and they are so focussed on that, that they cannot see anything outside of that frame. 

GL: That’s really interesting, I think you’re right, I think that has to be what it is. 

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Graham Linehan told me his next job is a TV script which is currently in development with an American company. You can follow Linehan on Substack and on X. His book Tough Crowd is available ideally from independent bookstores (ask your local) or on Amazon and Audible. Bonus points, Linehan narrates the Audible version himself.

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