Why I Stand with Graham Linehan

Back in September, Graham Linehan—best known for The IT Crowd and Father Ted—stepped off an American Airlines flight at Heathrow and walked straight into a scene that felt ripped from Orwell’s 1984. Five armed police officers were waiting to take him into custody over social media posts from earlier in the year.

“The moment I stepped off the plane at Heathrow, five armed police officers were waiting. Not one, not two—five,” he recalled in a post on his Substack. “They escorted me to a private area and told me I was under arrest for three tweets. In a country where paedophiles escape sentencing, where knife crime is out of control, where women are assaulted and harassed every time they gather to speak, the state had mobilised five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer for this tweet (and no, I promise you, I am not making this up).”

Here are the tweets:

Authorities claimed these posts amounted to “inciting violence.” The charges eventually evaporated, but the ordeal exposed a dark trend spreading across the West. Anyone who questions the approved narrative—especially on trans ideology—gets treated like an enemy of the state.

For years, the transgender cult has demanded absolute obedience to the idea that a man becomes a woman simply by insisting it’s true. Those who refuse to play along face social shunning, professional retaliation, and, evidently, now the threat of arrest. Linehan has battled this movement for a long time. Despite coming from the political left, a camp usually eager to chase fashionable causes, he immediately recognized the lunacy driving this agenda.

He’s paid a steep price for daring to speak. Soon after his arrest, I bought his book, Tough Crowd, to support him, and I recently finished reading it. The book traces his life, the rise of his comedy career, and the way standing up against trans ideology wrecked both.

In the book, Linehan repeatedly affirms his support for abortion and gay rights, positions that put us on opposite ends of the political spectrum. That doesn’t change the fact that he’s an ally in this fight. While the left embraced every pillar of trans ideology, he refused to bend and dared to challenge it publicly. As a conservative Trump supporter, he and I share little common political ground, but on this issue, we stand together. I see transgender ideology as the most dangerous and destructive social movement in the West today. Political differences don’t matter when the stakes are this high. If we agree on this issue, we’re on the same side.

Linehan regularly refers to himself as a feminist in this book, and I think it’s spot on. He makes the point—and I completely agree—that no one can claim to be a feminist while insisting that men can become women, that men should be in women’s spaces and sports based on self-identification, or that children should undergo irreversible medical procedures to force their bodies to match an ideology.

Tough Crowd doubles as a memoir of his early years in comedy. Reading it, learned quite a bit about Father Ted, which I haven’t yet watched but plan to. Anyone interested in comedy writing will find the book insightful. My familiarity with his work comes mainly from The IT Crowd, the brilliant sitcom that ran from 2006 to 2013, which my brother introduced me to in 2020 and which I consider one of my favorites of all time. If I have one gripe with the book, it’s that it spends far less time on The IT Crowd than it does Father Ted. I wish there had been more.

The heart of the book is his account of fighting for women’s rights against the transgender movement. His description of how quickly trans ideology captured the culture is devastating. “My friends were giving me odd looks, ghosting and blanking me, not returning calls, giving my wife shit on the phone, writing nasty letters about the importance of kindness,” he writes. “I still believed it was only a matter of time before these friends and colleagues from the entertainment industry would fly to my aid.”

He was wrong. His colleagues in the entertainment industry, political allies, feminists, actors he helped make famous, and even members of his own family abandoned him over an ideology that had only been mainstream for a few years. Some were brainwashed like they were in a cult, others were desperate to protect their careers and social standing by distancing themselves from him.

“People, what a bunch of bastards.” - Roy, The IT Crowd

I speak regularly against trans ideology here and at PJ Media, but I don’t view myself as brave for doing so. As a conservative writer, I don’t face the professional ruin that awaits leftists who dare defy the orthodoxy. I make a solid living writing about politics, and criticizing trans ideology hasn’t harmed my career. Socially, I’ve lost plenty of liberal friends over the years, but they cut me off long before trans ideology became fashionable. If I had a different job, it would undoubtedly be a problem. But, without a doubt, leftists who challenge trans orthodoxy are far more likely to watch their entire world turn on them. When someone like J.K. Rowling or Graham Linehan speaks out, they deserve tremendous respect. Linehan lost a marriage and a thriving comedy career.

Linehan’s story is not an outlier; it serves as a warning. When the government views dissent as a crime, the West ceases to be free. The transgender movement’s demand for total obedience has nothing to do with fairness, decency, or equality. It’s about control. This issue isn’t limited to the United Kingdom; it also extends to the United States. Conservatives who value truth and liberty should see Graham Linehan as an ally. Buy his book and subscribe to his Substack:

Principles matter more than party lines when defending women’s rights and protecting free speech. The woke mob’s purge doesn’t just target the right; it threatens anyone who dares to dissent. Now is the time to draw a line and stand with Linehan, and all allies—whether on the left or the right—against this dangerous gender ideology.