How Graham Linehan’s gender activism led to career armageddon

Graham Linehan says he nailed his ‘colours to the gender-critical mast’ in his tweets in 2018. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

It was as he was lying on a hospital trolley, after surgery to treat testicular cancer in 2018, that Graham Linehan picked up his phone and first definitively waded into the issue of trans rights.

According to his memoir, Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy, and subsequent media interviews, the Irish-born comedian could not remember quite what he wrote in those groggy early tweets but it nailed “my colours to the gender-critical mast”.