What accounts for the hold trans activists have on the police? Footage of Sir Mark Rowley gyrating in a thong stuffed with roubles? Photographs of senior constables sacrificing puppies to Baal? Whatever the kompromat is, it’s working.
On Monday, Graham Linehan — comedy writer and campaigner — was treated like a war criminal arriving at the Hague. As he stepped off a long-haul flight into Heathrow, five armed officers were waiting. A police van ferried him across the tarmac and his belongings were seized.
“They escorted me to a private area and told me I was under arrest for three tweets,” he wrote.
“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… (and no, I promise you, I am not making this up).”
Locked in a cell, his blood pressure spiked to stroke levels and he was taken to A&E. He has since been released on police bail.
Linehan had flown in from the US to attend a separate hearing arising from a complaint by trans activist Sophia Brooks, who alleges he harassed him online and damaged his phone. That case is listed for Thursday.
On Substack, the writer set out the three posts on X said to be at issue. The most contentious, sent on 20 April, reads: “If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.” In another, he captioned a picture of a trans march “a photo you can smell,” and, replying to a further post, wrote: “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. Fuck ’em.”
Trans activists duly crowed about his plight. Dr Helen Webberley — the internet’s best-known prescriber of cross-sex hormones — said, “Let this be a sage warning to all those who think it is OK to have views that are hateful towards trans people – your time is coming.” To emphasise the point, she added emojis of a clock, a police van and a coffin.
But one of the first to trumpet the arrest of what he called a “leading anti-transgender activist” was Stephanie Hayden — a man with a criminal record who is well known for prolific civil actions and complaints around online speech. Hayden has spent years pursuing gender-critical people through the courts.
Most memorably, when Kate Scottow referred to Hayden online as a “pig in a wig” she was arrested in front of her 10-year-old daughter and her 20-month-old son who was, at the time, still being breastfed. Scottow was taken to a police cell where she was held for seven hours before being put through an hour-long interview. She was convicted of improper use of a public communications network in February 2020 — though this was quashed in December the same year.
Meanwhile, Linehan suspects that trans activist Lynsay Watson — a former Leicestershire constable sacked for gross misconduct over abusive, pseudonymous tweeting — was responsible for mass reports of his posts.
A serial litigant, Watson has pursued actions against his former union and employers in cases dating back decades. In recent years he has begun to target gender critical people on social media. Watson took particular umbrage at the police scrutiny group Fair Cop, headed by Harry Miller. On X he sent around 1,200 messages to Miller, including some which accused him of being part of a “terrorist organisation,” a “right-wing bigot,” a “homophobic, transphobic bigot,” a “narcissist,” and an “evangelical wingnut.”
Courts have already warned forces off this terrain. In Miller’s own case, Humberside Police were found to have acted unlawfully in ways that chilled free expression. Yet here we are again: airport arrests over jokes, censorious bail conditions, and interviews about bollocks. The cultural capture is so deep that rank-and-file officers are clearly baffled by the politics, yet they keep turning the handle for the organ grinder.
A decade of Stonewall-style “training” has colonised public bodies so thoroughly that officers now repeat activist slogans as if they were law. When Linehan asked what “trans” meant, the police officer’s answer — “someone whose gender is different from what was assigned at birth” — could have been lifted straight from a trans lobby group’s website.
Once you train an organisation to believe dissent is “hate,” you create a system where one vexatious complaint can trigger a full-scale response. Better to send in five armed officers than to risk being called transphobic. In this climate, the law is no longer about justice, but about punishing dissent.
So parents in WhatsApp groups, lesbians who won’t sleep with men, and comedians who tell jokes are criminalised, while lobbyists demanding men in women’s prisons are feted as human-rights defenders.
Linehan’s arrest matters not because he’s famous, but because it shows how activists can direct the police like a private militia. And his bail condition, not to use X isn’t a quirk, it’s a gag.
Do the police serve the public — or the furious vendettas of angry activists? Until chiefs stop outsourcing judgment to lobby groups, we’ll keep seeing blue lights for online blasphemy while victims can’t rely on timely help when they’re stalked, mugged or assaulted. The fix is simple: police crime, not opinion. Treat complainants — even the loud, litigious ones — with even-handed scepticism. Apply the criminal threshold rigorously. And remember: in a free country, causing offence is not a criminal offence.
I would like to conclude by echoing Linehan’s words — women, if you see a man in the female loos don’t bother calling the cops, punch him in the balls. At least that way you can have some satisfaction before your inevitable arrest.
