#graham-linehan

#graham-linehan

Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan has arrived at court to face trial, accused of harassing a transgender woman. The 57-year-old has denied harassing transgender activist Sophia Brooks on social media and a further charge of damaging her mobile phone in October. The Bafta-winning writer, who also came up with TV sitcoms The IT Crowd and Black Books, has become a strong vocal critic of the trans rights movement in recent years. His trial will begin at Westminster Magistrates' Court on Thursday.

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.

I understand the concern caused by such incidents given differing perspectives on the balance between free speech and the risks of inciting violence in the real world. Most reasonable people would agree that genuine threats of physical violence against an identified person or group should be acted upon by officers. Such actions can and do have serious and violent real-world implications.

The Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan was once known for his charming, sometimes surreal sitcoms- Father Ted, Black Books, The IT Crowd -on British TV. These days, however, he is better known for his online crusade against transgender activism. His X feed takes the same approach as Libs of TikTok, cherry-picking videos of criminals and fetishists in a full-scale assault on "gender ideology."