Multi-BAFTA-winning writer Graham Linehan can barely hold himself together. He tells me he hardly slept last night.
There are times he has ‘howled in pain’ and times he has ‘raged’.
Mostly, though, the genius behind the comedy series Father Ted and The IT Crowd is, he says, ‘befuddled’.
For Graham, a vocal defender of women’s rights, has lost everything he holds dear in life because he dared to challenge a ‘subculture’ of trans activists over the ‘insane’ (his word) belief that a person with a penis can be a woman.
He began to share his views with his 800,000 Twitter followers five years ago and the fury of the Left rained down on him.
Today his marriage is over, his once glittering career has been laid low and he is, as he says, ‘thoroughly cancelled’.
Graham is giving his first interview about what he has endured in the same week a brave group of women’s rights campaigners launched what they call ‘the most significant female movement since the Suffragettes’.
In mobilising voters to quiz politicians about their stance on women’s rights with the slogan ‘Respect My Sex if you want my X’, they are determined to put a simple and very direct question to our elected representatives: ‘Can a woman have a penis?’
Indeed, such is the toxic nature of this febrile transgender debate, few want to be drawn into it, including Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who this week refused to say if a woman can have a penis as he floundered during a trans rights debate on LBC radio.
‘It’s mad,’ says Graham. ‘Politicians can’t answer simple questions because these people [trans activists] have persuaded them it’s complicated and difficult. It’s not. All you have to do is stick to the principles we all know: the birds and the bees.
‘People are terrified of getting into the debate, terrified of saying something wrong. If you disagree with them — if you say it denies biology or that it [the right to self-identify] is a gift to sex offenders and conmen who are able to completely erase any mention of who they previously were — they will try to destroy you.
‘I’m not talking about trans people. I’m talking about trans rights activists. They tried to destroy me. They have taken everything from me.
‘They took my family, my ability to earn a living. I haven’t considered suicide but that’s what I believe they want me to do.
