I feel out of the loop... Which show writer just turned out to be a TERF?
Graham Linehan, writer of fun, snarky, quirky british comedies like The IT Crowd, Black Books and Father Ted.
It came to a head when the National Lottery, which often donates some of its profits to charity, designated a UK charity called Mermaids as its recipient. Mermaids is based around helping young kids who are trans or outside the gender binary, and their families. Linehan rallied Mumsnet, a parenting website, into a letter-writing campaign to make the Lottery reconsider. He considers speaking out about “transgenderism” as important as standing up to Nazis.
It’s almost worse than if he’d just turned out to be a shithead, because at this point I’m used to men turning out to be shitheads. It’s that he’s fallen in with TERFs and couching it all as being Woke About Women and Pro-Feminist. He constantly calls trans rights a front for men to invade women’s spaces. He talks about being silenced for talking about how much white trans women endanger black cis women. Every retweet is another TERF talking point. Mermaids especially is all what about the children????? hullaballo. It’s like - it’s like he’s trying to be woke, but he learned from the absolute worst group to learn social justice anything from, and anyone trying to get him to rethink it just cements his opinion more. It’s basically all his twitter is now.
It’s really depressing, especially considering how thoroughly my whole family enjoyed his shows. The Father Ted christmas special has been a Christmas staple for us for years. We reference Black Books and The IT Crowd memes all the time. So I’m glad that at least something good came of it, in the form of all the money this livestream raised.
