Linehan Can’t Decide How Hormones Work
Cross-sex hormones! Do they make trans people unbeatable, elite athletes, or boneless jellyfish squishing around on the ground? Graham Linehan just can’t decide.
Humor by Alyssa Steinsiek
We’ve been forced to write a frustrating amount of words about JK Rowling of late, haven’t we? Between her anti-trans crusade bizarrely targeting a cis woman, concerns over a potential black mold infestation in her home and a two week period of social media silence that I swear to you she broke almost the moment I pointed it out, it’s starting to feel like we can’t get away from the posting queen… and I may have promised to shut up about her about five Rowling-centric articles ago. My bad.
So it is with a strong desire to speak less about Rowling that we turn now towards another rabid transphobe with a funny accent: Graham Linehan!
That’s right, the Irish comedy writer who helped create The IT Crowd and Father Ted, unemployed Graham Linehan (who refused to stop tweeting about trans people, even when his wife left him over it), has said something transphobic! Or wait, no, it’s actually ableism this time… though it’s couched in transphobia, so that’s good enough for me to point and laugh at. Or possibly sneer derisively. Maybe I can manage both at the same time.
Some specificity: On the 27th of August, Linehan retweeted pictures of a Belfast protest over a puberty blockers ban that had taken place that evening. The specific pictures, as you’ll see below, show a great big group of pro-LGBTQ+ protesters assembled together… and one of them is carrying a walking cane.
The shock! The horror!
Linehan describes this person as a woman twice, though I couldn’t tell you what their pronouns are or how they identify themselves. I’ve tried zooming in on their vest to check out their patches, but I can’t make out anything useful there. So, formal potential apology to our cane-wielding protestors wherever you may be if you don’t use they/them pronouns. But that’s sort of the point, right? That could be a transgender man, or a transgender woman, or a nonbinary person. Maybe they prefer she/her, he/him, they/them, it/its, or one of infinite possible neopronouns.
Graham, however, believes they are a woman… who is somehow remiss for using a cane to walk? A lot of trans people, and even some not so trans people, have expressed deep confusion in response to this tweet. My personal favorite Q&A in the comments is between a fairly prolific social media transphobe, EJ Rosetta, and another transphobic woman, Kathryn Pope.
EJ expresses that she’s “missing a joke” because she’s “new here.” She’s not, by the way; back in 2020 EJ was publicly supportive of trans people, but early last year she began deriding her nonbinary twin and spending all of her time on Twitter arguing with trans people, despite claiming to have spent a year identifying as nonbinary. Pope (and others) happily explain that “wrong-sex hormones” do damage to “women’s bodies,” and “destroy bones.”
Linehan confirms that this was his point by, in a reply to his first tweet, linking to an interview he conducted two years ago with Elaine Miller, a woman who seems to be famous primarily for insisting that women do pelvic floor exercises. It’s a noble goal, of course, educating people about their bodies… but, unfortunately, Miller expresses in the interview that she became a transphobe after trans patients were referred to her and she had no idea how to work with them.
Which is weird, since everybody has a pelvic floor and can do kegels, regardless of their anatomical sex and gender identity. She also claims that vaginoplasty in transgender women has a “30% failure rate,” which she must then clarify means some measure of incontinence. Unfortunately for the statistic she made up on the spot, I suppose, there is a very credible study that states “there is a low prevalence of urinary complications following PIV,” or penile inversion vaginoplasty. The study also recorded a post-operative patient satisfaction rate of 80-100%, so I think “30% failure rate” by any definition is unsubstantiated.
What I find most amusing about Graham’s weird targeting of a stranger with unknown ambulatory issues is the rank hypocrisy. He’s no stranger to tweeting about trans athletes, to everybody’s absolute shock. So which is it, Graham? Am I, because of the synthetic estrogen I blast into my abdomen on a biweekly basis, a freakish superhuman capable of besting any elite cis woman athletes? Or are my bones fragile and crumbling to dust because of the evil “wrong-sex hormones” I’m taking? I’m gonna need you all to get your stories straight if I’m gonna take you seriously.
Oh, who am I kidding? I’ll never take you guys seriously!
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer who spends too much time playing video games!
