The vile bigotry of Graham Linehan

Yesterday (12th September 2021), feminist journalist Laurie Penny posted a Twitter thread alleging that alleged comedy writer Graham Linehan had threatened legal action against them for referring to him as a “vile bigot”

Linehan, for his part, responded with a somewhat huffy Substack post, in which he confirms his threats of defamation action and censors the words “vile bigot” in his screenshots of Penny’s posts.

Very quickly, the hashtag #GlinnerIsVile emerged, beginning with a Tweet by Irish feminist Izzy Kamikaze, with Twitter users posting their view that “vile bigot” is indeed an accurate description of Linehan.

For my part, from having seen Linehan’s public behaviour, in my opinion, he is a vile bigot, and I am quite happy to explain why. First let’s define our terms, using the definitions returned by Google for those two words:

So, when I say that, in my opinion, Graham Linehan is a vile bigot, I mean that his behaviour is extremely unpleasant and that he is obstinately attached to his prejudiced views of a particular group, specifically trans people (but particularly trans women). In this article I’ll outline a few examples of why I hold this opinion.

In this incident, a woman, Naomi, has made a civil contribution to a discussion about the topic of trans “self ID”, which is to say, legal reforms which allow transgender people to change the gender markers on their identification and official records without submitting medical evidence. “Gender critical” (GC) campaigners like Linehan have frequently claimed that such reforms, if legislated for in the UK, would lead to greater risk of sexual assault of women in public toilets and other gendered public spaces. Naomi asks for evidence that such an increase occurred after these reforms were made in Ireland in 2015. Linehan responds with verbal abuse. Not only is telling somebody to shut up and fuck off pretty damn unpleasant, but it also reveals a hostility on Linehan’s part to information or arguments from women that contradict his strongly held belief that legal reforms in transgender recognition would harm women. This is a pretty common throughline in Linehan’s online behaviour.

Here, not only does Linehan refer to people who disagree with him about his transphobic belief that trans women are not women using a number of insulting terms (“liars”, “frauds”, “traitors”), but he openly states to a cisgender woman disagreeing with him that he doesn’t have any respect for women who disagree with him. Once again, unpleasant and obstinate in some quite obvious ways, with an undertone of misogyny.

Linehan’s quixotic quest to campaign against minor administrative reforms and healthcare for transgender people has even reached the point where it has, by his own account, wreaked havok on his finances and damaged his marriage irreparably. It’s hard to see this as anything but completely unreasonable dedication to his anti-trans beliefs. Linehan is verbally abusive and cruel to those who challenge him. Graham Linehan is a vile bigot.