The transgender totalitarians still run the United Kingdom.
On September 1, Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan was arrested at Heathrow Airport in London by five police officers. According to Linehan, the police cited three X posts critical of transgender ideology as the reason for his arrest.
According to Linehan’s account, posted to his Substack on September 2, he noticed that something was amiss when he attempted to board his flight home in Arizona; he was told he had no seat, and had to be reticketed.
“The moment I stepped off the plane at Heathrow, five armed police officers were waiting,” he wrote. “They escorted me to a private area and told me I was under arrest for three tweets. In a country where paedophiles escape sentencing, where knife crime is out of control, where women are assaulted and harassed every time they gather to speak, the state had mobilised five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer…”
The three X posts that triggered his arrest included one on April 20, in which Linehan wrote that if a “trans-identified man is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act” and made a joke about punching the offender in the crotch; another from April 19, featuring a photo of a transgender rally with the caption “a photo you can smell”; and a third on the same day in which Linehan stated that he hates “misogynists and homophobes.”
“When I first saw the cops, I actually laughed,” Linehan recounted. “I couldn’t help myself. ‘Don’t tell me! You’ve been sent by trans activists.’ The officers gave no reaction and this was the theme throughout most of the day. Among the rank-and-file, there was a sort of polite bafflement. Entirely professional and even kind, but most had absolutely no idea what any of this was about.”
The police read the comedian his rights without irony and then walked him to a van parked on the tarmac to collect him. At the Heathrow police station, his belt, bag, and devices were taken, and he was put in a “small green-tiled cell with a bunk [and] a silver toilet in the corner.” He was then interrogated about each of the three X posts “with the sort of earnest intensity usually reserved for discussing something serious like…oh, I dunno, a crime?” Linehan writes:
He mentioned “trans people”. I asked him what he meant by the phrase. “People who feel their gender is different than what was assigned at birth.” I said “Assigned at birth? Our sex isn’t assigned.” He called it semantics, I told him he was using activist language. The damage Stonewall has done to the UK police force will take years to mend.
Eventually, a nurse came to check on me and found my blood pressure was over 200—stroke territory. The stress of being arrested for jokes was literally threatening my life! So I was escorted to A&E, where I write this now after spending about eight hours under observation.
Linehan was given a single bail condition: that he could not go on X. He was also informed that he faced a follow-up interview in October. As he summarized his experience:
The civility of individual officers doesn’t alter the fundamental reality of what happened. I was arrested at an airport like a terrorist, locked in a cell like a criminal, taken to hospital because the stress nearly killed me, and banned from speaking online—all because I made jokes that upset some psychotic crossdressers. To me, this proves one thing beyond doubt: the UK has become a country that is hostile to freedom of speech, hostile to women, and far too accommodating to the demands of violent, entitled, abusive men who have turned the police into their personal goon squad.
It is difficult to fathom the strategic insanity of arresting a popular comedian at the airport with five police officers over three anodyne X posts—especially considering the unrest currently roiling the UK. As professor of international relations Yua Yi Zhu put it: “Whoever authorised his arrest should be arrested, as he’s clearly some sick accelerationist who is trying to undermine any leftover trust in the police.” Or as J.K. Rowling noted: “What the [expletive] has the UK become? This is totalitarianism. Utterly deplorable.”
Just last month, Prime Minister Keir Starmer—who has faced criticism from the Trump administration over crackdowns on freedom of speech in the United Kingdom—stated: “I am strongly in favour of free speech; we’ve had free speech in this country for a very long time and we protect it fiercely.” But as Conservative MP Neil O’Brien noted in the wake of Linehan’s arrest: “Britain is now a total laughing stock — a country where we arrest the authors of light comedies and interrogate them about their tweets. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious.”
The outcry has been nearly unanimous and is more evidence that trans activists desperately clinging to the institutional power they have accrued over the past decade have, yet again, wildly overplayed their hand. The transgender movement has already cost the Western institutions that embraced its agenda an enormous amount of credibility, and it appears that even as they face setback after setback, they want to permanently destroy any residual trust in the regime on their way out.
