How Graham Linehan's gender activism led to comedian's career and personal armageddon

"It was as he was lying on a hospital trolley, after surgery to treat testicular cancer in 2018, that Graham Linehan picked up his phone and first definitively waded into the issue of trans rights. According to his memoir, Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy, and subsequent media interviews, the Irish-born comedian could not remember quite what he wrote in those groggy early tweets but it nailed my colours to the gender-critical mast."

"The explanation as to how Linehan went from a nasty Twitter (now X) spat seven years ago to career and personal armageddon lies in a peculiar metamorphosis. Linehan used to be known as a superlative comedy writer. Today, the creator of Black Books, The IT Crowd and most popular of all Father Ted, describes himself as a writer about the current all-out assault on woman's rights."

"To his supporters, Linehan is a brave warrior, whose relentless campaigning online and off is characterised by some as being ahead of his time, after April's supreme court judgment that the terms woman and sex in the Equality Act refer only to a biological woman and to biological sex. Others see monomania, and, at times, cruelty. He has sent hundreds of tweets a day at times, often in the early hours."

Graham Linehan began publicly opposing trans rights after surgery in 2018, posting tweets while on a hospital trolley and later acknowledging the posts identified him as gender-critical. A hostile response included a reader saying, "I wish the cancer had won." Linehan says that marked the start of an ordeal that cost him his career, marriage and reputation. He transformed from a celebrated comedy writer into a campaigner who aims to reveal perceived havoc caused by gender identity, expose enablers and end it. Supporters call him brave; critics call his approach monomaniacal and sometimes cruel. He has tweeted obsessively, created a fake dating account to expose pronoun use, and was dropped by his agent amid controversy.

Read at www.theguardian.com