In Britain, where Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently said “we’re very proud” to have “had free speech for a very, very long time,” it wasn’t enough to simply ruin the career of Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan for stating his views on transgender issues.
So on Tuesday, the co-creator of Father Ted, among numerous other critically acclaimed comedy programmes, was arrested by armed police for writing gender-critical posts on social media.
Linehan claims he was surrounded by five officers at Heathrow Airport after arriving from Arizona—where he announced he was heading last December because “freedom of speech is in bad shape at the moment” in the UK—and was detained over three tweets posted in April. One of them read:
If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.
The writer is facing trial in the UK on Thursday this week over two separate charges, one of harassing a transgender activist on social media and another of damaging their mobile phone.
Linehan has since been released and said he has been given a single bail condition—that he may not go on Twitter/X. He was also escorted to hospital after a blood pressure check found that the stress of the arrest had put him—in Linehan’s words—in “stroke territory.”
The episode has unsurprisingly prompted a large backlash on social media. Harry Potter author and fellow gender-critical writer J.K. Rowling asked:
What the f**k has the UK become? This is totalitarianism. Utterly deplorable.
Tory MP Neil O’Brien added that this case—among many others—made Britain “a total laughing stock.”
The Free Speech Union has also reported that it “will be backing [Linehan] all the way in his fight against these preposterous allegations and the disproportionate response from the police.”
Michael Curzon is a news writer for europeanconservative.com based in England’s Midlands. He is also Editor of Bournbrook Magazine, which he founded in 2019, and previously wrote for London’s Express Online. His Twitter handle is @MichaelCurzon_.
