I found
this cringeworthy Daily Mail article by Graham Linehan. Not only have I added it to the main page, I'm gonna break it down here:
Today I am one of the most loathed figures on the internet. My speaking events have been cancelled. I have been sued. The police have visited my home and former friends have turned their backs on me.
Yet I’m the man who wrote the much-loved Father Ted! Why is it that I’ve become so suddenly unpopular?
Father Ted was just as much Arthur Mathews' baby as yours.
More to the point, working on a beloved TV series doesn't absolve you of any wrongs you may have committed. See also Jimmy Savile, Bill Cosby and Louis C.K. Extreme examples, I know, but the same principle applies.
The thought crime for which I have been tried and found guilty is that I believe biological reality exists.
I believe women are females. I believe everyone should be able to present themselves as they wish but that women’s hard-won rights must not be compromised for the benefit of men suffering body dysphoria – which is to say men who feel they are stuck in the wrong body.
And you're front-loading this article with unscientific claims that trans people are just delusional. We're off to a great start, aren't we?
Most of all, I believe that gender ideology, in its currently fashionable form, is dangerous, incoherent nonsense.
I believe trans people –those unfortunate enough to suffer body dysphoria – are having their condition exploited and trivialised by abusive, controlling and authoritarian trans rights activists. And I think women and children are suffering because of it.
Worst of all, I say so, loudly. This makes me Public Enemy No 1.Your victim complex is as transparent as it is pathetic. Climb down from that cross.
I make my arguments forcefully because I’m concerned, sometimes with humour because I’m a comedy writer and often while cursing, because I’m Irish. It’s the humour they hate most. It’s kryptonite to these activists.
"Why do people think I'm an asshole? All I do is act like one!"
I’m 51 and I’ve never seen anything like the authoritarianism on display, the desperate desire to shut down the conversation. No genuine civil-rights movement advances in secret but this one has as one of its mantras ‘NO DEBATE’.
Stop pretending you want to have a conversation, Glinner. If the shoe were on the other foot, you and yours would be doing pretty much the same things, if not worse.
So, while we are in a world where male sexual offenders in bad wigs assault female prisoners,
Citation needed.
where rape crisis centres are defunded because they won’t admit men
Rape crisis centers
should admit men. After all, men can be rape victims too.
and where a bloke in a full beard tells schoolchildren that he’s a lesbian, we’re informed with venomous aggression that we may not talk about any of it.
No debate? Oh, there’s going to be a debate all right.
Be careful what you wish for, Glinny-boy.
The popular opinion among my detractors is that I’m cherry-picking negative stories to mask a hatred of trans people. In fact, I first came to this debate because I saw women being bullied, losing their jobs and suffering the most intense online harassment I’d ever seen, and I wanted to stand beside them.
Nobody forced you to white-knight for TERFs.
Also, as a writer, I couldn’t watch as one of the most important words in the English language, the word ‘woman’, was being changed against the will of those whom it defined.
Oh really? Why are you presuming to know what all women want?
Suddenly, everywhere you looked, women were being erased, insulted or endangered. Amnesty referring to pregnant women as ‘pregnant people’. Productions of The Vagina Monologues closing because they excluded ‘women who don’t have vaginas’. Women’s toilets disappearing from public life – even though they were introduced to ensure that women could have a public life.
What does that last part even mean?
Worst of all, I saw the lack of compassion or empathy for the vulnerable women who are often at the sharp end of the new Gender Theocracy.
The four women attacked in prison by a male sex offender in 2018 (who everyone had to call ‘Karen’ or they were committing a hate crime) are four women too many.
We don't live in a perfect world, and we'll probably never be able to eradicate sex crime entirely. Never heard of that case, so I don't really know enough to comment on what happened. Maybe there was something that could have been done to prevent that assault, but what Karen did doesn't justify calling her a man.
Women in prison often have a history of abuse at the hands of men. Whatever they’ve done, they are entitled to safety from the type of men who helped put them there.
Looks like the transphobia wasn't enough, so he decided to throw in some gratuitous sexism. This is sexist against both women and men: against women because it implies that female criminals lack agency; and against men because it implies that only they commit acts of violence against women.
Rational people – and that includes rational trans people – are dismayed by those who have now taken over trans activism.
Body dysphoria is no longer seen as central or even necessary for those who decide to adopt a so-called trans identity.
To see just how elastic and meaningless the word ‘trans’ has become, one only has to look at the definition adopted by the Stonewall lobby group: ‘Trans people may describe themselves using one or more of a wide variety of terms, including (but not limited to) transgender, transsexual, gender-queer (GQ), gender-fluid, non-binary, gender-variant, crossdresser, genderless, agender, nongender, third gender, bi-gender, trans man, trans woman, trans masculine, trans feminine and neutrois.’
Neutrois, I discovered, literally just means ‘androgynous’. So androgynous people are trans. That’ll be news to Bake Off presenter Noel Fielding.
Under Stonewall’s definition, everyone is trans, and no one is. A cross-dresser such as banker Philip Bunce, who adopts the female persona ‘Pippa’ for only a few days every week, nevertheless receives the honour of being named by the Financial Times as one of its top 100 women in business.
Maybe you have a point here, I've seen a lot of debate about exactly what belongs under the trans umbrella, but coming from a guy who doesn't think any form of transgenderism is valid...
This was seen as progress, a step forward for women. In fact, it is an insult to women and to those suffering from body dysphoria.
Says the guy who calls people with dysphoria mentally ill men. Take that log out of your eye.
In order to maintain the fantasy that our sex is unconnected to our bodies, the truth must be bent and beaten in the fire of academic language. That is why trans activists talk about sex being ‘assigned at birth’ – an abuse of language, if ever I heard one.
Is the sex of a newborn ‘assigned’ by a capricious midwife? Of course not. Rather it is observed and recorded as a matter of fact.
‘Assigned’ is one of the more successful hijackings of English achieved by gender ideologues, yet you will hear it parroted across many organisations from the NHS to the BBC – the sort of institution where you really would expect people to know better.
Why should I listen to you over medical professionals? You're no different from Jenny McCarthy expecting her mouth diarrhea about vaccines and autism to be taken seriously.
Before I knew how toxic trans rights activism was, I wrote an episode of my Channel 4 sitcom The IT Crowd with a trans character. The response was more venomous than I was used to, but as bad as it was, at least I was allowed to write it. That was in 2013.
In 2020, such an episode would never air. And that is because the first generation who didn’t go out to play have grown up to become clones of Mary Whitehouse. The new puritans.
I haven't seen that episode, but judging by your opinions, I'm guessing it's offensive in a very mean-spirited, unpleasant way. Politically incorrect humor can be funny, but when someone's prejudices bleed into it...
I am not new to outrage. There was fury on the part of some when we first released Father Ted but the executives we had were made of strong stuff and ignored the attacks. The same goes for The IT Crowd, Brass Eye, Black Books, and I guess a few comedies I haven’t worked on.
I’m worried we’re entering an era of pre-chewed, prissy art that offends no one.
Where was this free speech advocacy when Count Dankula was facing legal action over a stupid pet trick? You're not taking any kind of principled stand, you just don't like the monster coming for you.
But it’s not comedy writers who are the victims of all this: it is women who are the real casualties.
Gender ideology is a disaster for women. They are expected to make room for men in their changing rooms and their safe spaces.
They are being robbed of the language to describe their reality by unintelligible academic ‘gender experts’, by teenagers encouraging each other online, by parents who are profoundly mistaken, and by well-meaning people who, confused by the ever-changing terminology, still believe they are defending what used to be called transsexuals.
All these forces working together are, whether they know it or not, providing a smokescreen for fetishists, conmen and misogynists to pursue their own agenda.
You're a patronizing, paranoid, bigoted nitwit.
In years to come, we will look back at this scandal, at the ruined bodies, the confused crime statistics, the weakening of safeguarding and the rollback of women’s rights and wonder how it was left to go on for so long.
Why am I not surprised that the guy with a martyr complex thinks history will vindicate him?