How Graham Linehan’s gender activism led to comedian’s career and personal armageddon

What began as a nasty Twitter spat seven years ago has led to a peculiar metamorphosis for award-winning writer

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”.