Graham Linehan at the 2014 BAFTAs. (Eamonn McCormack/WireImage)
Graham Linehan is seriously unhappy that Ruth Hunt has been appointed to the House of Lords.
The Irish comedy writer, who rose to public consciousness in the 90s for being a co-writer on Father Ted, is now more well-known for his self-appointed role at the forefront of the “gender-critical feminism” movement.
Linehan, who has more than 650,000 followers on Twitter, tweeted: “Is Ruth Hunt the first MRA peer?”
The Men’s Rights Activist (MRA) movement is anti-feminist. Elliot Rogers, one of the most infamous MRAs, killed six people and injured 14 others in 2014 before killing himself, after ranting on YouTube about the “injustice” of women not being attracted to him. Rogers also had links to violently misogynistic groups.
Hunt, the ex-CEO of LGBT+ charity Stonewall, was given a peerage in Theresa May’s honours list yesterday, 10 September, and will sit in the Lords as a cross-bench peer.
She is a vocal transgender ally, having brought trans rights into Stonewall’s mandate – following a six-month consultation – in 2015.
Linehan – who in 2018 was given a verbal warning by police for harassing a trans person on Twitter – also said: “Ruth Hunt is why lesbian pride marches are being booed on the streets of the UK in 2019.”
This was a reference to a Lesbian Strength March held in Leeds last weekend, which explicitly banned trans women. As a result, trans-inclusive lesbians went to the march – in their hundreds – to show their support for the trans community.
Linehan, a 51-year-old Gemini, became embroiled in “gender-critical feminism” – the term preferred by people with “gender critical” views, though others call those holding “gender critical” views ‘tans-exclusionary’ to distinguish them from radical feminists who are inclusive of transgender people – when a Father Ted episode featured a character dating a trans woman.
In 2018, he compared the trans-rights movement to “something terrible like Nazism” in a radio interview.
Linehan appears be unaware of the irony of a straight white man calling a lesbian campaigner a “men’s rights activist”.
He is also one of only a few men who attend meetings of A Woman’s Place, one of the “gender-critical feminist” groups, according to a journalist present who said that Linehan is a “Twitter warrior on the subject”
Graham Linehan responded to PinkNews comment request for this article via Twitter.
“First of all, I’m not sure what you means by ‘transgender women’. Do they mean transexuals? Or just any male who ‘identifies’ as a woman?
“Ruth Hunt has betrayed lesbians by stating that fully intact men are, in fact, women. I think she has done immeasurable harm not only to lesbians but also to trans people. I think she has set LGBT rights back by years.
“No, I am anti MRAs. I believe that gender ideology mostly benefits men, who are currently destroying women’s sports, closing rape crisis centres and assaulting vulnerable women in prison.”
Aside from tweets comparing prominent lesbians to Men’s Rights Activists, and his support, with his wife, for the Repeal the Eighth movement in Ireland, it is unclear what Linehan’s contributions to feminism have been.