Any regrets?
Graham Linehan talks to Julie Bindel:
When I ask if he has any regrets about any of it, he says: “People often ask me this, and to be honest, not really. Some of my tweets are angry, and invective.
“But I genuinely do hate this evil, misogynistic, homophobic movement. And I want to destroy it.”
When people criticise his conduct or tone, he thinks, “Well, they nailed dead rats to the doors of rape crisis centres”.
And if, one day, the trans rights movement ends and it has anything to do with this “big stubborn Irishman”, he will feel “as much satisfaction as from having written Father Ted. It’s a noble endeavour that I’m involved in. I’m like a half-buried rock in the road that they can’t get rid of”.
For that matter we don’t really have to wait for a total end of the movement: Glinner has already had anything to do with a lot of people changing their minds and/or feeling defiant enough to say what they’ve thought all along. We all have, in our own ways, and both Julie and Glinner have done a lot.
But as events finally start to prove him right, he says: “It’s not as sweet as it should be because it has destroyed my faith in society. If someone can be so stupid as to allow men into women’s spaces, what else might they do?
“We always expect people in positions of power to be somewhat competent. And now we know that they can be subject to the most extraordinarily stupid ideas.”
True. Bitterly, frustratingly true.
Once it is uprooted, transgenderism will be remembered alongside Lysenkoism and compared unfavourably to it. Both featured lives ruined, careers destroyed, and progress overturned and hobbled. But transactivism had a much wider scope of influence, taking hold in scores of countries that were nominally democracies, rather than imposed by a dictator in one country only. Multiple governments, their departments and ministries (including police, judiciary, and corrections branches), companies, media, NGOs, sporting authorities, etc. willingly joined in promoting and enforcing dangerous, pernicious bullshit. Like Lysenkoism, it was very much a top down movement, but one that operated on multiple fronts in far too many countries. It gained power and influence in backroom deals that allowed this movement’s ideology to skirt the usual norms of scrutiny and accountability. The women who knew what would happen were silenced, ignored, and even punished.
This is just the beginning of the end; genderism still has too much power, and it will not give it up without a fight, and not without inflicting more pain and misery on those who resist it. It will continue to play the victim, and cry out at their “loss of rights”, and paint the restoration of women’s rights, and society’s political recovery from their extra-legal intrusion and usurpation, as “persecution” and “discrimination.” But it’s not a “rollback” of “rights”, it’s the expulsion of a hostile, occupying power, one invited in and aided by our own governments.
It will take far longer than it should for progressive and left-leaning parties to extricate themselves from this mess, and their collaboration with and adoption of this delusional agenda will be used against them for years*. Quiet abandonment will not do the job. I think complete political disinfection would require a public repudiation and apology that I fear will not be forthcoming. I think women deserve at least that much. Truth and Reconciliation anyone?
*Who knows how much the Democratic Party’s embrace of transgender “rights” aided Trump’s victory? How many people decided not to vote because of the spouting of obvious untruths? And what of media complicity? In three years’ time will there even be a Democratic Party, or free press able to indulge in the luxury of retrospecitive debate on the wisdom of this self-defeating, destructive daliance?
I have an answer for you, no, there won’t, because the Center didn’t hold. But there’s more to life than the TERF wars and the GCs and the TRAs all had their (relatively small) part to play in destroying the post-war liberal democratic order.
The fascists are gonna win this round but hey, at least they got the trans out of the military.
BKiSA
I share your antipathy towards MAGA-endorsing GC-types, but only because of the “MAGA-endorsing” part, not the “GC” part. Just like the problem with Soviet-style communists wasn’t too little belief in gods, the problem with MAGA-types isn’t too little belief in gendered souls. The problem with both communists and the MAGA crowd are the stupid and evil ideas they embrace, not the stupid and evil ideas they reject. To the extent that there is a causal pathway from “GC” to “MAGA”, it’s making people like Linehan so angry about the excesses of gender ideology that they no longer care who their bedfellows are, or who pays the price, as long as the TRAs also get screwed.
I would argue that MAGA, for the most part, are not gender critical. They may reject the notion that a person can change gender, but they still want to enforce gender norms. Just look at the trad wife movement, or the effort to get women out of combat roles, or the homophobia, or the leering predation of the likes of Trump. None of that falls under the umbrella of GC. And being right for all the wrong reasons isn’t much better than being wrong.
You’re right. I don’t believe MAGA, Reform UK, Tommy Robinson, Fidesz, etc. , are genuinely GC. They *do* believe in a strict hierarchical order of things, (Jane Clare Jones calls it “Gender conservatism”) * and see trans-identified people as a threat to this order.
Of course, there then ends up being a feedback loop where the more the identitarian “left” push gender woo, the more the hard right will attack it, and the already small space for progressive people with GC ideas shrinks.
*
https://culturewarblues.substack.com/p/on-the-natural-order-of-things
WaM #4, MC #5
I agree, but I was specifically talking about people like Linehan who seemingly started out GC for the right reasons only to turn MAGA for the wrong reasons. As I keep saying, the “any enemy of my enemy is my friend” trope ranks very high on my list of the worst ideas ever.
Bjarte,
My own theory about Graham Linehan is that he over-estimated people’s rationality. He thought that when he began to speak out about the trans issue in 2018, that a majority of people with secular, rationalist, progressive views, would publicly side with him.
This did not happen.
And given his combative personality, Linehan continued to criticize the trans activists, in an aggressive manner. And all the time Linehan saw his old friends in the entertainment industry distance themselves from him, and his job opportunities dry up.
Had J. K. Rowling and UK politicians rallied around Linehan in 2019 instead of 2025, maybe he wouldn’t have gone right-wing.
I do have some sympathy for Linehan – he’s lost his wife, many of his friends, and his career. He’s also become a public hate figure, and suffered health issues with depression and blood pressure. But he still had a choice – he didn’t have to end up on the side of MAGA.
As an aside, I believe the pro-TRAs in the entertainment industry *deliberately* set out to make a public example of Graham Linehan, to warn everyone else working there not to stray from the Mermaids/Stonewall path.
Heck, they tried the same technique on J. K. Rowling, and now they’re doing the same thing with the singer Róisín Murphy.
As I said, after everything that’s happened it wouldn’t occur to me to judge Linehan for being vehemently against the woke left. But it still takes more to be a friend than being the enemy of my enemy. There are no brownie points for saying no to gender ideology if you say yes to MAGA, nor is there a medal for trading one evil for another.
In his defence one the MAGA operatives got their hands on him he didn’t stand a chance. The woke operatives tried to break him and failed but still they left him broken. It was an accidental good cop/bad cop scenario but no less effective. It’s psychologically easy to resist the bad cop, at least for those with a contrary disposition. To resist the good cop requires training. Plus, we all know the power of being “kind”.
That’s an interesting point. Bedfellows is a lovely, poetic word for compatriots. I think there’s a deep-down, evolved need in most of us to situate ourselves within a tribe — within a safe, comfortable, familiar community of like-minded individuals, who have each others’ backs when we’re feeling besieged by a common enemy. In fact, that feels close to perhaps the biggest insight I’ve ever felt in my whole life: my whopping Eureka! moment. After several years working, writing, podcasting, grinding, ruminating — FULMINATING! — against genderwoo, trying to make sense of something so mystifying, I feel like I’m circling towards a kind of Grand Theory of Everyting That’s Wrong With the World, or an answer to the universal question, Why Does Irrationality Persist All the Time Within our Big Dumb Species? And it involves tribalism and that feeling of comfort that some people crave so much more deeply than others…
I mean, you could very well argue I was scratching at this itch long before gender became the focus of my attention: it was a fascination with religiosity in a broad, philosophical sense that initially captivated me and hooked me on critical-thinking blogs like B&W. I’m sure that’s the same with many other B&W regulars: we came here before gender; we came here because critical thinking.
Given the Jesus-based homophobia and misogyny faced by me and my single-parent feminist mother in my formative years, there’s no mystery where my interests in atheism, rationalism, and women’s rights came from. And that eventually led to a Centre For Inquiry membership, and then a particular fascination with the bizarre little demimonde of Scientology (as an observer, not a member, of course!). The Scientologists are so extreme, and so uniform in their extremity — and some of them seem otherwise so rational when you get them talking about subjects other than the cult… it’s like a perfect little petri dish for testing ideas about cult-think. They’re little rats in a maze, and the poor fools don’t even know it.
The disparate strands of my various fascinations only started really coming together and converging on the trans phenomenon after I divorced my ex and took a job at a gay bar in middle age. Before that stabilizing relationship, I was a ragamuffin gay-village street kid. It was afterwards, coming back to the subculture I’d grown up in, and seeing how culty it had become while I was away for a decade — while I spent a decade as a couch-bound, middle-class, 9-to-5 normie — that I started making shocking connections between the Southern Baptist evangelical family that had left me behind, the kooky Scientologists I prodded at online, and my immediate, real-world circle of friends and colleagues.
Up until then, I genuinely thought that us hip, sophisticated, arty (!), cosmopolitan folk were above such tribal irrationality.
But it turns out the Big City and its urbane ways is just another tribe, just another cultural comfort blanket, with rules, rituals, a pecking order, and everything else that tribal membership entails. The big-city tribe’s ideas and core values are generally more cerebral — I mean that literally, as in they’re ideas that rely on the processing fuctions that the prefrontal cerebral cortex handles, which is to say, they’re thinky and refined, compared to Red State-world’s aggressively unthinky and gut-level, knee-jerk values.
But the problem with humans is that more cerebral doesn’t mean more true. Sometimes knee-jerk feelings aren’t dumb: sometimes they point us to tried-and-true common sense. And sometimes deep thoughts aren’t smart: sometimes they lead us to overthinking: we see mirages because of overanalysis and neurosis. (Doesn’t trans fit that description so well?)
Humans occupy the material world — as real as rocks, as concrete as concrete; rawly physical — as well as the abstract, brainy web of ideas shared between us, in that invisible mesh network that connects our cerebral cortexes together into shared cultural domains. These virtual domains of shared experience and values — these tribal frameworks for our collective existence — feel just as real as the actual material world to people. It takes tremendous amounts of critical self-evaluation to parse the difference between the actual material world and the abstract, intellectual one.
But they’re both still real in the sense that they’re equally influential to the core of the human experience. We live simultaneously in both worlds, and our core instincts don’t distinguish between them, no matter how hard our highfalutin grey matter tries to say otherwise.
And frankly, both worlds are “demon-haunted”, to borrow Carl Sagan’s phrase — and to mildly rebut it. Both worlds are candles in each others’ darks. That’s the mess of the trans movement: it’s an atypical example of the demons haunting the sophisticated grey matter instead of the primitive amygdala. It’s an example of gut instinct being right and so-called “higher thought” being wrong: sex IS deeply ingrained, instinctually understood, readily observed, and it fucking matters to everyone, and we’re not demons for not trying to “think our way out of” the existence of sex.
But I digress. Back to Graham and the path from GC to MAGA, or MAGA-adjacent. Bedfellows.
This is all humans trying to make sense of our lives, and to find stability and comfort. It’s that all the way down. We need tribes to feel safe. Some of us more than others. When the heat gets hot, people’s deep, low-down, instinctual priorities change. It’s not a great mystery to me why it happens anymore. Just like it’s not a great mystery to me anymore why people become Scientologists. I marvelled and scratched at that question for years, but now I kinda get it. It’s my Eureka, that I mentioned earlier. I can finally see — and grasp — what’s up.
Graham and I have no doubt diverged in our political affiliations and worldviews, but that doesn’t even a little bit change my respect and admiration for Graham.
I see my friend as someone who’s looked at his personal need for tribal affinity and safety and taken actions that make him feel safest in that regard — away from the “progressives” who’ve ruthlessly attacked him. In fact, I can see how I must look utterly bizarre to some of my GC colleagues: the fact that I still identify as a liberal even though virtually all lefties have thoroughly rejected me, cancelled me, attacked me, and all but left me for dead! Am I some kind of self-hating masochist to still associate with lefties/progressives/liberals (whatever you want to call them)? That’s not an unreasonable question, at all. There are two kinds of people who emerge when faced with such a dilemma: my kind and Graham’s kind. We’re still two of a kind — erstwhile or ostensible liberals in crisis — but we’re different kinds, and this is how: Most people subconsciously associate their political positions with finding the best way to meet their personal needs and to feed their personal instincts. That’s Graham’s life path — and it’s perfectly human. Other people (such as me) associate our political positions with external ideas, and we separate ourselves and our needs from them completely. One path says, if this political worldview isn’t working for me, I should change paths. These people internalize the problem. Other people (my kind) externalize the problem: it can’t be me; it must be the system malfunctioning.
The irony is, both these worldviews have their merits. In fact, in a stable, normal world, in Graham’s worldview, it starts out with humility: the kernel of it says that *he himself* must have got something wrong, and it builds from there. That’s respectable!
This is all just a roundabout, elaborate way of showing you that if you break down the lefty position, right down to its framework, you can build it right back up to a sympathetic framework that has opposite conclusions.
MAGA and TWAW really are tremendously alike. And that’s a valuable thing to understand: it offers the possibility of hope and reconciliation.
xoxoxo
There is no difference in terms of sheer absurdity between believing that people can change sex than believing a Savior can be born of a virgin and then rise from the dead. Both. Defy. The Laws. Of Nature.
Arty, I don’t know about you, but I relate my remaining on the GC side while remaining liberal to two things. One is that there have always been things on the liberal side that have annoyed me and put me at odds with the liberal establishment. There are a number of issues where they don’t do nuance any better than the right.
The other, I think, is the most important. I seem to not have a need for that tribal association. I am an introvert and a bit (maybe more than a bit) of a loner. Being around people, even ones who are ‘affirming’ my beliefs, is exhausting, and I can’t handle it for very long. When COVID lock downs happened, it was almost my perfect world. If it hadn’t been for the virus that was killing so many, and the evil man in the White House allowing that to happen, it might have been my perfect world.
I’ve always suspected these traits, coupled with the fact that I am both contrarian and misanthropic, have sheltered me from a lot of the crazier ideas. Finding this blog helped. I can find a ‘tribe’ that I don’t have to interact with unless I want to.
Thanks, Arty for your thoughtful (as always!) response. I understand that this is a touchy subject to you, and it’s not my intention to make your situation any more difficult than it already is.
Re tribalism, my personal favorite play by Ibsen, Enemy of the People, ends with the punchline (by the protagonist) “The strongest man alive is the one who stands most alone”, which seems perplexing at first. Haven’t we always told that people are always stronger together? I’m not sure what what the intended meaning was, but here’s what it means to me: Real strength is the ability to realize your own goals. When you are part of a mob, the mob may be better able to realize it’s goals than any of us are as individuals, but they’re not your goals. You don’t have your own goals, only those of the mob. The highlight of the play is one of the most epic, glorious rants (on the part of the protagonist) against the mob in all of world literature.
iknklast, your comment speaks to me. But then I am pretty sure I have an avoidant personality (“disorder”).
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/01/the-invisible-personality-disorder.html
The treatment of Graham Linehan over his opposition to Transgender and his reaction to that by moving toward ‘rightwing’ politics is rather similar to the treatment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali over her opposition to Islam & her similar reaction.
In both cases the ‘leftwing’ adopted ideas that are actually inconsistent with the actually beneficial parts of ‘leftwing’ ideas and started ostracising people who didn’t agree with the tribe.
Recently this blog got many of us telling how we have been rather solitary. I guess that is why we have had reservations about any religion, especially Islam, and the cult of Trans. So we find this blog congenial.
I *think* the regulars here can live with others disagreeing on some points, eg: at least some here would disagree with me on my position that nuclear is the best energy source to keep high tech civilization going without trashing the climate. No ostracism needed.
I would include myself among the solitary ones if it didn’t seem too much like joining something. ;)
Excellent, Arty — as usual.
I prefer to keep my intellectual commitments to Classic Liberalism and call it “moving to the middle.” I didn’t move; the Left did, and in a way I did not expect.
The more I think about it, the more I see parallels between rejecting religion and rejecting transgenderism in that one of the most compelling arguments for each is that it makes people feel better in a difficult world. I discover that I don’t give a damn if it’s not true. And, also being an introvert, I don’t particularly care if others think that makes me mean. Argumentum ad Misercordiam still doesn’t move me.
[…] a comment by Artymorty on Any […]
The GC position, as far as I’m concerned, is simply not a conservative one. That doesn’t mean people can’t espouse it while also having conservative views towards other subjects, but [the view that a) gender oughn’t matter, b) gender needn’t matter since it’s a social construct, and c) this has no bearing on whether sex exists] is quite clearly progressive.
Now, I could understand GC people backing right-wing parties if said parties took a gender-critical stance. But this isn’t really what has been happening. Trump, who I’m told knows what a woman is, isn’t remotely close to being GC. MAGA-types do believe in gendered souls; they just think the souls match people’s sex 100% of the time, whereas TRAs think it’s only 99% of the time.
I would propose that the GC movement’s MAGA-isation has mostly been caused by a bunch of gender conservatives suddenly calling themselves gender-critical and polluting the social media ecosystem. Regardless of whether this is too simplistic (and it probably is), the point is that the meaning of “gender-critical” has completely changed. To some extent, this includes people who formerly opposed gender making a face-heel turn and not even realizing it. This is rather reminescent of feminism’s embrace of gender identity; it seems patriarchal BS always finds a way back in.
@Bjarte
That’s quite the endorsement of Ibsen’s play, Enemy of the People. I must read it now! Or better yet: see it!
I suspect you will like it. :)
It’s more closely analogous to climate change denial than gender ideology, but it has cancel culture, captured media, political intimidation and everything.