The Glinner

Since I simply HATE sport, and Twitter insists on giving me sports headlines, I’ve set my Twitter location to New York, because at least that way I get notifications on sports I know nothing about and which don’t automatically annoy me.

I woke up this afternoon and found Graham Linehan trending, and knew it wasn’t going to be for anything good.

Graham Linehan has been banned from Twitter. He’s the one who actually got me onto WordPress and then Twitter, but we’ve only had one brief exchange in recent years. I was kind of concerned about his mental health, since the once-brilliant comedy writer who used to offer links to amusing things found online, was now obsessively monotopical, only able to talk about trans rights issues from the point of view that trans rights are bad.

I asked him why this subject devoured all of his entire attention and he replied in all caps that it was because nobody else was talking about it. I gently pressed him on this, and he admitted it was a slight exaggeration. I do try to maintain a civil tone online. It occasionally helps.

The Glinner’s pronouncements on trans rights varied from reasonable-sounding to frothingly insane. Reasonable people, I think, could respectfully disagree about whether trans women should compete in female sporting events or whether some kids are being rushed into gender reassignment procedures before they’re ready. I’m not trans, I’m not a parent, I’m not a child, I’m not a woman, I prefer not to force my way into these arguments, but for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, Linehan was certain this was his fight, his hill to die on.

He wrote an article about how he couldn’t write comedy in a world where expressions like “female penis” were taken seriously. Which is a weird thing to fixate on. My impression is that some trans people enjoy the apparent incongruity of the phrase, find it sort of humorous as well as useful, and anyway, so what? Words are always changing their roles (like people).

In a much earlier conversation, Linehan had talked about getting into production (I hoped I might get a job out of him one day) because he didn’t expect his creativity to last into late middle age — I’m not sure why he thought this, but it’s at least better than blaming a decline in comedy ideas on trans people. Any conspiracy theory that suggests that The I.T. Crowd is not as brilliant as Father Ted or that Count Arthur Strong, despite its wonderful central character, is not nearly as good as either, because of continuing advances in LGBTQ rights, seems to be operating (poorly) on a false basis, to say the least.

There was also the fact that Linehan’s entry into the debate followed a trans-based subplot on The I.T. Crowd, which seemed like the product of lazy, out-of-date thinking more than a coherent, retrograde or political stance. Linehan was criticised for it, and I believe admitted it was a mistake. (A character embarks on a relationship with a trans woman, having misheard her revelation that she used to be a man. When he finds out, he throws her out a window. It sounds worse on paper, actually, but it’s… not great.)

What made Linehan’s Twitter rants dangerous is that he could seem quite reasonable on the surface, at times, before plunging into transphobic vileness. A sincere, I presume, belief that women were being put in danger, could be used to justify anything — distorting what people said, for instance. When a teacher said that their grad students could bring up subjects in seminars that they couldn’t discuss with their parents, Linehan quote-tweeted this with the single word comment “Grooming.” Does Linehan know that grad students are adults or does this not matter to him? Likewise, how is it grooming if the students are the ones raising the subject? Why was Linehan following this person anyway?

At some point my attempt to believe Linehan was a well-meaning person who had different beliefs from me disintegrated completely. There seemed to be a toxic, Twitter-fuelled admixture of politics, ego, neurosis, anger — did the man’s surviving testicular cancer feed into this in some bizarre way? Or is it just the way the internet can turn everything into a war? The word “transphobia” certainly seems well-designed, because fear lies under the hatred, pretty clearly.

Twitter allows people to communicate together in an apparently consequence-free way, people who would not normally seek out each others’ company. It’s a bit like granting a populace the power of invisibility. Hi-jinks ensue. Then there are pile-ons and public shamings and these don’t typically transform the offenders into better people. Prejudices are fed.

Linehan would slide from sounding concerned about women’s rights being infringed, to making snide and nasty comments about specific trans people, reserving the right to deadname anyone he didn’t like, to sounding like a “harmless” fuddy-duddy who didn’t like the way society was changing… I imagine some were drawn in by the concern or “concern,” and ultimately seduced by the hatred. In a way, perhaps he was too. Twitter was slow to act.

There might be real places where trans rights and women’s rights are partially at odds, where some creative thinking might be required, where the natural tendency of people of all genders and sexes and persuasions to get excited about issues which deeply affect them might be stopping them getting together and building something positive that’s for the common good. I strongly suspect the solutions will not be devised on Twitter.

Linehan was always nice to me. I want to think that he’s redeemable. A man having a very protracted, public nervous breakdown rather than an evil bigot. This might be wishful thinking. But getting off Twitter might be good for him.