Times - Graham Linehan interview: ‘Gender row is an onslaught on rights, returning women to pre-suffragette era’
Graham Linehan interview: ‘Gender row is an onslaught on rights, returning women to pre-suffragette era’
The creator of Father Ted has been ostracised for his stance on trans rights reform but is determined to keep ‘ringing the bell’
There’s an obvious question to ask the comedy writer Graham Linehan. What would Father Ted, his greatest creation, make of the angry debate surrounding trans rights, and impending reform of the Gender Recognition Act in Scotland?
“I know where you’re going with this,” Linehan says, with his lopsided smile, but he bears with the scenario anyway.
Imagine, there’s the ever-so-reasonable Ted in the big house on Craggy Island, made famous by a Channel 4 sitcom, holding his head because he’s surrounded by raging obsessives. What would Linehan say to Ted? “I’d say to him, ‘Don’t you care about Mrs Doyle? Don’t you care about your mother? If your mother goes to an old people’s home, she may not have the right to ask for a female to help her. She might be called a bigot if she asked for that’.”
Then he turns the question round. “What I don’t understand, and I mean this in the nicest possible way, is why aren’t you obsessed with this?
“Why aren’t you going absolutely insane with what’s being done to women? It’s outrageous that a woman in Scotland is being taken to court for speaking up. I can’t relax while that is happening.”
Over the past four years he has lost almost everything, campaigning obsessively, not against trans rights, he insists — “I know more trans people than the people who call me transphobic” — but for women’s rights.
His 17-year marriage to Helen Serafinowicz ended in March, the strain of harassment by his online enemies apparently bringing it down. He lives in Norfolk, close to the home that he shared with his wife and two children. Many old friends have turned their backs on him, and he shed 200,000 Twitter followers before he was finally barred from Twitter.
He’s faced vexatious legal actions, police visits, magazine articles misrepresenting his positions, threatening letters hand-delivered to his home. A production of Father Ted, the musical, has been in the works for five years, but when it opens at last, he knows there will be a campaign to close the show down.
All this could kill his comedy career, but still he carries on. “If my house was on fire, I wouldn’t be able to sit down and write a sketch,” he says. “It’s not only on fire, half the house is gone.
“All I can do is keep ringing the bell because, as far as I’m concerned, this is second only to climate change as being the most important thing happening today. It’s an absolute onslaught on women’s rights, they’re actually returning them to the pre-suffragette era.”
This week he has been in Scotland, because of the SNP-Green coalition and their determination to amend the Gender Recognition Act, enabling people born male to “self-ID” as women, and females to identify as men. It’s a move that is stripping away women’s right to safe spaces, he says, and threatens the safety of children.
That’s why, on Tuesday he was outside Glasgow sheriff court, among a crowd of women dressed as handmaidens, lending moral support to Marion Millar, the Airdrie accountant facing prosecution for allegedly sending transphobic tweets.
Two days later he was at the Scottish parliament, leading the applause at a women’s rights rally, in opposition to the planned reforms, and posing for pictures next to a banner, in Ted-like Gothic script, reading “Wrong side of history my arse”.
He’s found the time to blog 22 times since Sunday, and appeared recently in a panel discussion on YouTube, looking pale and peaky.
For this interview, he is in a bar on Glasgow’s Great Western Road, a big lump of man, twitching nervously, drinking a negroni late on an afternoon, and talking ten to the dozen. Over the course of an hour he piles one example after another of the “farcical” world we live in. He cites the case of two girl guide leaders who lost their jobs because they won’t accept new equality and diversity rules, drawn up with the help of Stonewall, the charity advocating LGBTQ+ inclusive policies.
The rules are open to abuse, he says, not by all trans people, but by men who are criminals, who could pose as women to gain access to girls. “Remember this guy?” he asks, reaching for his phone.
He googles a picture of Jacintha Brooks, a sex offender formerly identified as Duncan Smart. “Would you ever call this guy she in an article?” he wonders. “I think you have to.”
He goes on: “I’m friends with a woman in Keep Prisons Single Sex. She tells me they are finding it hard to identify how many men are in women’s prison, because they are not listed as men.
“Why wouldn’t they want to be held in a women’s prison? You get an easier bit of porridge and you might get the chance to sexually assault a woman. There’s an idea that people are just naturally nice — and they mostly are — but there is a small minority of men who are very dangerous and they’ve been given the keys to the kingdom.”
His conversation is so full of dark details and grim warnings, so at odds with the affable persona reflected in his scripts, it is difficult to reconcile the two. Linehan, 53, was born in Dublin and started writing comedy in the 1980s while he was working as a critic on Hot Press magazine. There he met Arthur Mathews, his future writing partner, before moving on to London and Select magazine.
With Mathews he began to sell sketches to Mel Smith, Harry Enfield and Alex Sayle, as well as creating the characters Ted and Ralph for The Fast Show. The even more famous Ted soon followed, along with Black Books and The IT Crowd.
With his wife he was part of the writing team behind the 2016 pilot episode of Motherland but Linehan left midway through the creation of the first series, broadcast the following year. By then he was becoming embroiled in sexual politics and he links his rising interest in the trans rights debate to his work during the campaign in Ireland to decriminalise abortion.
He and Helen took part in a short film made by Amnesty International, which focused on their own tragic case. After an 11-week pregnancy, Helen was advised by doctors in London to terminate the pregnancy because her foetus had been found to have a condition known as acrania, and there was no chance that the baby would survive longer than an hour after birth. In Dublin Helen would have been forced to carry the pregnancy or face a 14-year prison sentence for procuring an illegal abortion. The film about their experience, says Linehan, “helped to moved the needle in many ways”.
Then something took him by surprise. “It was such an odd thing but I was in Dublin at a protest. Someone was going, ‘Women’s right to abortion!’ And we went, ‘Yeah!’ Then they said, ‘And trans people need to have their operations paid for by the state!’ And we went, ‘What?’
“I couldn’t understand why trans started to attach itself to the abortion fight. I was more puzzled and confused because then people who had fought beside us started calling me a ‘terf’ [trans-exclusionary radical feminist] when my biggest crime was objecting to the word terf.
“I did what everyone does: you’re very polite, calling for debate. You say things that you cannot imagine anyone would disagree with, like ‘a lesbian does not have a penis’. And yet the pushback was so ferocious.
“It was from everyone on social media, from those people with anime avatars all the way up to ‘blue ticks’ who I followed and had been friends with for years.”
He was dubbed “the most hated man on the internet” before his exclusion from Twitter. The final straw for moderators arrived when he trolled the Women’s Institute, who had wished their transgender members a happy Pride by tweeting: “Men aren’t women, tho”. He was barred for “hateful conduct”.
He emphasises repeatedly that he has trans friends and says many agree with his views. He distinguishes them from the activists, who he reckons take their cue from Donald Trump, to achieve their ends at any costs.
“Trump is like Napoleon,” he says, “much more influential than people realise. If you look at the tactics of trans rights activists it’s all Trump tactics. It’s all, attack, deflect, lie your head off.”
There is a “bully class” in the world, and “in the upside-down world of the trans rights discourse at the moment, they have seen a way to get their foot on the ladder”.
He cites two of the best known trans women sports competitors. “Laurel Hubbard is Trump; Rachel McKinnon, the cyclist, is Trump,” he says. “Anyone who can get on a bike, or beat women easily and take the money, and take the crown, that’s a narcissist, that’s a narcissistic psychopath. These are the people who are being emboldened by activists who think they’re helping transsexuals”.
He seems wearied by it all: “It’s exhausting, it’s heartbreaking. And I want to stop doing it. But I can’t until other people pick this up and start doing their jobs.”
It’s easy to imagine that it’s even more exhausting and heartbreaking for the people around him. Is his family worried about him?
“You know, my kids are OK — they just let me get on with it. My mum realises what’s happening now, and knows that it’s something I have to do. But I still have people who go, ‘Why do you have to do it all the time?’”
Maybe they would like him just to get back to comedy — the thing that he does best. “And do what? Dance round the maypole? I’m not in the mood. I’m happy to put on the hat with the bells on it but only when the house isn’t on fire, but the house is on fire. The. House. Is. On. Fire.”
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