TWIBS: Graham Linehan, Divorced Guy, Becomes Arrested Guy
After a series of X posts inciting violence against trans women, Graham Linehan was arrested at Heathrow.
Graham Linehan telling the sad, sad truth. Get your own blank version here, make something funny and share it with us on Bluesky!
Humor by Aly Gibbs
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s longest running column! Every Friday, Aly Gibbs digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Today we’re going to talk about a very sad, strange man who’s featured in a few Assigned stories before: Graham Linehan, creator of precisely two amusing pieces of fiction (Father Ted and The IT Crowd) and second most divorced man on the planet, who found himself at odds with Johnny Law on Tuesday.
Linehan has long been a pathetic figure in the anti-trans activism community. He got his start in internet fame by speaking out in support of the victims of GamerGate, a hate campaign waged by boring losers who despise minorities, then at some point went insane and completely disavowed that work. There are a few theories about what drove Linehan to devote his entire life to anti-trans activism, even when it cost him his family; one theory suggests that harsh critique of a transphobic episode of The IT Crowd is the cause, while another posits that being rejected by trans women may have soured him on our civil liberties and right to exist. Sadly, neither theory can be proven, so I choose to believe he contracted some sort of neurodegenerative illness that liquified his brain, thus leaving him ripe for indoctrination into the cult of transphobia.
Sort of like RFK’s brain worm but sadder, and more divorced.
This column has it’s own minor history with Linehan, as it so happens. Early last month, after I wrote an update about transphobic nurse Sandie Peggy’s workplace tribunal, Linehan shared our work on X and suggested we should be sued for… well, I don’t know. He never said. Perhaps libel, even though that article, like all TWIBSES, simply repeats other people’s news stories while making jokes about them. The end result, unsurprisingly, was a lot of conspiracy theories that Assigned is funded by dark money (based entirely on the damning use of a DNS lookup to determine that we’re currently hosted on Squarespace servers, information that we would simply tell you for free), a screengrab of my completely public LinkedIn profile being posted so that everybody could have a hearty transmisogynistic chuckle about my ugly mug, and a bunch of pointless transphobic comments on our articles that we just… didn’t approve. Because it’s our website, dummies.
Now Linehan may have found just the thing to revive his thoroughly dead career: Getting arrested for encouraging people to carry out violence against trans women! After making three posts on X back in April, one of which explicitly suggested doing physical harm to trans women, Linehan was arrested at Heathrow on Tuesday and questioned by police.
The most egregious post of the three reads: “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.”
I’m not a lawyer, but I’d say there’s a pretty clear pattern of incitement happening on Linehan’s X account. And it’s not like this is the only inflammatory crap he posts; a quick search of his X account shows that he likes to excite himself by regularly accusing any queer person he can find of being a pedophile. Not much of an ally, if you ask me!
I will say I’m surprised that those posts got him arrested. I think it’s fair to say that much more horrific things are posted to X daily and English authority figures aren’t particularly well known for taking trans people’s safety seriously. In fact, multiple English authority figures leaped to Linehan’s defense as quickly as possible, assuring the public that threatening trans people is perfectly allowable and suggesting that some laws should be changed, maybe, to encourage it.
Shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick said Linehan’s arrest was “ridiculous and a complete waste of police time,” while his fellow shadow cabinet minister Claire Coutinho construed the incident as “the police … arresting people for making jokes.” Labour MP Jonathan Hinder said the arrest showed the necessity of a “serious reset to get the priorities right.”
Health Secretary Wes Streeting, long an enemy of the trans community, has suggested some legislating may need to be done over the situation. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s spokesperson said that police should get their priorities straight when it comes to policing, and the head of Metropolitan Police, Sir Mark Rowley, said that his officers were “between a rock and a hard place,” and advised the existing laws should be revised to prevent this from happening again.
Suffice it to say, the UK government simply does not support trans people in anything, ever.
Linehan apparently decided to audio record the interaction beforehand, which he uploaded along with some very useless AI transcription. The audio quality is very bad and often difficult to understand, but the police explain that Linehan has been flagged by an automated system as a person of interest over investigations being made into his posts on X, and he goes into a rage because the reason he’s just flown back into the UK from Arizona is to attend a hearing for a trial where he is accused of relentlessly harassing a young trans woman and destroying her phone.
On Linehan’s own blog, he describes having to be taken to the emergency room because his blood pressure was in “stroke territory,” and reveals what is to my mind the absolute funniest part of this ordeal: He was released from police custody pending further investigation, with the stipulation that he cannot legally post on X for the time being. He promptly violated the terms of his bail on Thursday night.
Linehan spent today and yesterday in court over a different case of harassment, arriving in a pathetic sandwich board getup you can see above (the original version said something much less funny, so I gave it a little humor tune up), and now he has to return to the UK in October over this investigation. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t overjoyed at just how much he’s being pummeled for his own stupidity.
There is, however, one silver lining for Linehan: After spending years ignored by Her Majesty, Queen of Bigotry J.K. Rowling (which he has long lamented), he’s finally been acknowledged by his superior, who has posted about his arrest no less than eight times as of the publication of this article.
Congratulations, Graham! Big win!
Aly Gibbs (She/They), formerly Alyssa Steinsiek, is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
