Graham Linehan
Television writer and gender-critical campaigner
Graham Linehan wrote some of Britain's most beloved sitcoms — Father Ted, The IT Crowd, Black Books — before his public stance on gender medicine cost him his platform, his career and his marriage. In conversation with Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman, he talks about what it takes to say the thing and refuse to unsay it.
Graham Linehan is the BAFTA-winning television writer behind Father Ted, The IT Crowd and Black Books — three of the most celebrated British comedies of the past three decades. For years he was one of the most sought-after comic voices on British television. Then he began speaking publicly about what he saw as serious harm being done to children within gender medicine, and the costs arrived fast and kept accumulating.
Linehan was banned from Twitter, watched commissions disappear, and saw the career he had built collapse around a position he refused to abandon. His marriage ended. He has not framed this as martyrdom but as a reckoning: what happens when institutions — in entertainment, in medicine, in media — decide that certain things must not be said, and what it costs the people who say them anyway.
In Graham Linehan Lost Everything for Saying "They're Hurting Kids" (episode #34, 1 September 2025), he joins hosts Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman for a conversation that reaches well past the public record. Together they move through the personal price of dissent, the institutional failures that allowed harm to children to go unchallenged, and what it feels like to watch the broader culture begin — slowly, unevenly — to arrive at positions that cost him so much to hold first.
Beyond Gender gives Linehan something rare: a room where the human cost of speaking out is weighed alongside clinical and policy questions, without collapsing one into the other. It is an honest, unhurried exchange with someone who has spent years reckoning with what he gave up — and who remains clear that he would not take it back.
