To fully understand the arrest, you should know something of the background of transgender as it is recognised in the UK.
In April this year the Supreme Court ruled that the legal definition of a woman is determined by biological sex.
The court was asked to rule on this after the Scottish Government ruled that a person could reassign their gender and obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate after living as the opposite sex for three months. Previously a person had to live as the opposite sex for two years.
The laws of the Scottish Government are made under devolved powers, meaning they are subject to the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom.
‘For Women Scotland’, is a campaign group that opposed reforms in Scotland that would allow individuals to change their recorded sex in legal documents by self-declaration.
They argued that sex-based protections should only apply to people born female, and so the matter came before the Supreme Court in London.
The judges of the Supreme Court were asked to rule on the correct interpretation of “sex” and “woman” in the main piece of legislation setting out sex-based legal protections.
And they ruled that the definition of sex as used in the Equality Act 2010 is “binary” and decided by biology – a person who was not born as a biological female cannot obtain the legal protections the Act affords to women by changing their gender with a Gender Recognition Certificate.
That was a big upset for those who had argued that changing gender in the mind entitled a person to be regards as being of the opposite sex.
Commentators said that the tide had turned against what they thought was the blind woke culture.
Now to Graham Linehan’s arrest for a tweet.
Linehan was arrested On Monday 1st September under the Public Order Act on suspicion of inciting violence in a tweet he posted about trans people on X. This is the tweet:
“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.”
People complained that the charge was a heavy-handed use of a law that was never meant to be used against the kind of tweet Lineham had posted, which they said was clearly not a real threat.
The real threat, they said, came from men who claimed to identify as women but on being allowed under the law to enter women-only spaces, had attacked women.
And recognise the context, they said, Linehan is a comedian. He was not being serious with his ‘punch him in the balls’ comment.
And Linehan is not just any comedian. He is the writer of Father Ted, a hugely successful comedy series on TV, and of other TV series.
He is also a successful author. His memoir, Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy, reached number ten on the Sunday Times bestseller list. In it he talks about his fight against what he thinks is a warped ideology, and how that led to him becoming an anti-transgender activist.
So his tweet wasn’t a casual comment by someone with other things on his mind. It is part of who Linehan is.
So, supporters said, his tweet was meant to be taken seriously, but was never a real threat of physical violence.
In his blog, The Glinner Update, he described his arrest as follows:
Something odd happened before I even boarded the flight in Arizona. When I handed over my passport at the gate, the official told me I didn’t have a seat and had to be re-ticketed. At the time, I thought it was just the sort of innocent snafu that makes air travel such a joy. But in hindsight, it was clear I’d been flagged. Someone, somewhere, probably wearing unconvincing make-up and his sister/wife’s/mum’s underwear, had made a phone call.
The moment I stepped off the plane at Heathrow, five armed police officers were waiting. Not one, not two–five. 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 for this tweet (and no, I promise you, I am not making this up.
When I first saw the cops, I actually laughed. 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.
“Kind” because the officers saw how upset I was–when they began reading me my rights, the red mist descended and I came close to becoming one of those police body-cam videos where you can’t believe the perp isn’t just doing what he’s told–and they treated me gently after that. They even arranged for a van to meet me on the tarmac so I didn’t have to be perp-walked through the airport like a terrorist. Small mercies.
At Heathrow police station, my belt, bag, and devices were confiscated. Then I was shown into a small green-tiled cell with a bunk, a silver toilet in the corner and a message from Crimestoppers on the ceiling next to a concave mirror that was presumably there to make you reflect on your life choices.
By some miracle–probably because I hadn’t slept on the flight–I managed to doze off. After the premier economy seat in which I’d just spent ten hours, it was actually a relief to stretch out. That passed the time, though I kept waking up wondering if it was all actually happening.
Later, during the interview itself, the tone shifted. The officer conducting it asked about each of the terrible tweets in turn, with the sort of earnest intensity usually reserved for discussing something serious like… oh, I dunno–crime? I explained that the ‘punch’ tweet was a serious point made with a joke. Men who enter women’s spaces ARE abusers and they need to be challenged every time. The ‘punch in the bollocks’ bit was about the height difference between men and women, the bollocks being closer to punch level for a woman defending her rights and certainly not a call to violence. (Not one of my best as one of the female officers said “We’re not THAT small”).
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.
The doctors suggested the high blood pressure was stress-related, combined with long-haul travel and lack of movement. I feel it may also have been a contributing factor that I have now spent eight years being targeted by trans activists working in tandem with police in a dedicated, perseistent harassment campaign because I refuse to believe that lesbians have cocks.
The police themselves, for the most part, were consistently decent throughout this farce. Some were even Father Ted fans. Thank God the Catholic Church never had with the police the special relationship granted to trans activists. The male officers were mostly polite but clearly nonplussed by the politics of it all–just doing their jobs, however insane those jobs had become. The female officers seemed more tuned in to what was actually happening. One mentioned the Sandie Peggie case in a certain way, and I realised I was among friends, even if they couldn’t admit it.
I looked at the single bail condition: I am not to go on Twitter. That’s it. No threats, no speeches about the seriousness of my crimes–just a legal gag order designed to shut me up while I’m the UK, and a demand I face a further interview in October.
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.
Following the complaints about the heavy-handed use of the law, a Metropolitan Police Spokesman said, “The man in his 50s was arrested on suspicion of inciting violence. This is in relation to posts on X. After being taken to police custody, officers became concerned for his health and he was taken to hospital.
“His condition is neither life-threatening nor life-changing. He has now been bailed pending further investigation. The arrest was made by officers from the MPS Aviation Unit.
“It is routine for officers policing airports to carry firearms. These were not drawn or used at any point during the arrest.”
Then the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, weighed in and said the decision to arrest Linehan “was made within existing legislation – which dictates that a threat to punch someone from a protected group could be an offence”.
Sir Mark said his officers “had reasonable grounds to believe an offence had been committed,” but that police more broadly had “been left between a rock and a hard place” when investigating online speech.
He continued: “I don’t believe we should be policing toxic culture wars debates and officers are currently in an impossible position.”
Sir Mark said police will have to “make similar decisions in future unless the law and guidance is changed or clarified”.
He said he hopes this happens “without delay”, but said the Met would be taking immediate action to update how it decides which cases warrant a police investigation.
Sir Mark said: “As an immediate way of protecting our officers from the situation we find ourselves in today, we will be putting in place a more stringent triaging process to make sure only the most serious cases are taken forward in future — where there is a clear risk of harm or disorder.”
The clarification he asked for came sooner than he thought, with a letter from Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne, member of the House of Lords, to Sir Mark.
Here is her letter:
4th September 2025
Sir Mark Rowley
Commissioner
Metropolitan PoliceI have read your thoughtful and illuminating statement on the arrest of comedy writer, Graham Linehan, by five armed officers on the grounds that his tweets might incite violence.
I abhor the attempt to scapegoat Parliament for the witless actions of your officers. I fear no amount of legislation could compensate for their apparent inability to exercise intelligent judgment. You say officers have “no choice but to record such incidents as crimes when they’re reported. Then they are obliged to follow all lines of enquiry and take action as appropriate.” Regrettably, Sir Mark, that is poppycock!
One of the cited tweets ended with “Punch them in the balls.” Another ended with “Fuck em.” Are they both to be taken literally as incitements to violence? Do you or your officers sincerely contend that “Fuck em” might be meant to cause anyone to engage in sexual intercourse (whether or not consensually)?
Do your colleagues require Parliament to legislate on the meaning of “Fuck em” and whether or not it should be taken literally? In the meantime, must all reported incidents be recorded as a crime before anyone engages their adult brain?
I would hope your answer is “Obviously not,” but I cannot be confident. If your officers can identify one phrase as not meant literally, surely they ought to be able to do that with the other and dismiss the complaint.
On this occasion the incidents were reported by former police constable Lynsay Watson; a transgender male dismissed for gross misconduct by Leicestershire Police as he waged a campaign of harassment against people with the legally protected belief that human beings cannot change sex.
Your colleagues have allowed themselves to be exploited as tools in that continuing and orchestrated campaign.
Watson has form. He has taken legal action against three police forces, the British Transport Police Federation, the Police Appeals Tribunal, the Ministry of Defence and sundry individuals who do not comply with his demands. Were your colleagues wary of being added to the list? Were they simply ignorant?Or are they, as you assert, mere automatons impelled to act unthinkingly once their buttons are pushed? Whatever the case, no depth of detail in a Policing with Common Sense Bill will solve the problem.
Instead of blaming Parliament for the inability of your officers to think for themselves intelligently, perhaps you might firmly tell them, please, to stop being stupid.
Yours sincerely,
Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne
Linehan is next due on court on 29 October 2025, and I wonder whether the Prosecution will simply abandon the case before then.
And if it does go to trial, what judge would rule against Linehan, given the letter from Baroness Nicholson?
The world is relative, and what is unimportant to one might be very important to another. But the law has spoken and no amount of wishing will now make a person who changes gender be entitled to be treated as the opposite sex to the disadvantage of those born that sex.
Somehow, a lot of column inches have been devoted to gender. It has been like a runaway train that changed the minds of whole swathes of people. And those people who didn’t agree that the mind ruled biology were seen by some as backward thinking throwbacks to a more narrow minded time.
The Supreme Court justices were like engine drivers who put on the brakes against the tide. And suddenly a lot of people were glad the grown-ups spoke and they could go back to how it was before.
Still, you have to ask what needs are not being met? What needs should and what needs should not be recognised in this post-modern world where each person’s conscience is said to be the ultimate authority?
In a post-modern world no one can appeal to a higher authority without risk of being labeled repressive.
The other side of the coin is that individual self-defined authority can be a mask for selfishness masquerading as freedom.
And in this divide are those who believe that if they stamp their feet hard enough, the world will bend to their wishes.
Lucy Connolly’s Tweet
And then there is Lucy Connolly who tweeted:
“Mass deportation now. Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care. While you’re at it, take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it.”
She tweeted it after hearing that an immigrant had murdered three little girls and wounded eight others.
Three and a half hours later, she removed the tweet.
It turned out that the murderer wasn’t an illegal immigrant but born in the UK, the son of immigrants.
She was arrested for “publishing written material which was threatening, abusive or insulting intending thereby to stir up racial hatred or having regard to all the circumstances, whereby racial hatred was likely to be stirred up” and was convicted of inciting racial hatred under s19(1) Public Order Act 1986 and sentenced to 31 months in prison.
If Lineham’s tweet wasn’t meant to be taken literally, was Lucy Connolly’s tweet meant to be taken literally? Was her suggestion that illegal immigrants and the government and the politicians should be set on fire, a serious suggestion?
It fell foul of the law because there is a racial hatred element but did not fall foul of the law for the “government and “treacherous government and politicians” because there is no racial element for that part of the tweet.
How Did We Get Here and Who Are ‘We’?
The laws on racial abuse are a reflection of two things. One is the change from when Britain’s population was homogenous and almost everyone identified as a Christian.
The other is the need that was felt in Europe after the Second World War to make a binding statement on what is and what is not proper behaviour.
Britain drafted a lot of the documentation and in 1950 was a signatory to the European Convention On Human Rights.
Today all European countries are members of the ECHR except for Belarus, which was refused entry because of its human rights record, and Russia, which was kicked out in 2022 when it invaded The Ukraine.
Now fast forward to the 1960s, when the populations of former colonies came to Britain, and to France.
Portugal, Belgium, and the Netherlands took in nationals of former colonies, but none in the numbers that Britain and France took in.
The assumption was that people coming in would integrate. But for some groups it didn’t happen and hasn’t happened. And in the background was and is the changing perception of Islam in the world.
The British Government is talking about Britain leaving the ECHR unless it can be reformed, because when the Government wants to deport immigrants who have committed crimes, they find that the European Court rules against them for what the Government says are poor reasons.
That may be part of the reason why for years the authorities turned a blind eye to Moslem grooming gangs raping underage girls.
It took whistleblowers – Margaret Oliver, a Greater Manchester detective and Nazir Afzal, assistant Chief Crown Prosecutor – to expose what was going on.
There’s more. Former South Yorkshire Police officers have been arrested for blackmailing underage girls into sex with a threat of turning them over to the gangs if they did not comply.
Now, over 1,000 Pakistani men are under investigation in Greater Manchester and a similar number in a separate UK-wide investigation into rape by Moslem gangs with underage girls.
So it is not a surprise that some people have doubts about the equal application of the law to all, or the heavy-handed use of the law on easy targets while serious crimes go unchecked.
There are around four million Muslims, making up about 6% of the total UK population. So the numbers being investigated are just one in two thousand of that population.
But the nature of the crimes have set off something.
And on the other side, right-wing groups see their own opportunity to claim that they are simply being patriotic to oppose immigrants of all kinds.
Now with Gaza in the news, we see slogans and chants that have clearly breached the rules on hate speech, but the police have stood by passively.
The feeling is that the police have stood by because they are afraid of setting off riots when the offended claim they are the victim of racial abuse.
Then what are the police to do? Do they act, do they arrest? Do they risk riots?
And if they do arrest then it all has to be hammered out in court, with the fear that the cost would be enormous and the whole thing would drag on forever, and the it would foment more protests.
When Baroness Louise Casey issued her report commissioned by the Government on Moslem grooming gangs, she said that says the authorities avoided documenting the ethnicity of those involved.
She recommended that ethnicity should be recorded, and minority groups have already said this recommendation is in breach of the law and racial abuse.
So now, I think that what Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, is saying to the Government that they should draw a line in the sand that everyone can understand, and that means being more open about the root cause of problems.
The Government may already be giving new direction to the police.
The group Palestine Action was proscribed by the Government after its members broke into a military base and damaged equipment.
The group won the right to challenge the proscription and have its case heard in court.
The Government then won the right to argue that the group’s application should be blocked.
Until that is heard in court, the group is proscribed.
Now a couple of days ago, protestors marched in support of Palestine Action, and 890 people were arrested.
To muddy the waters and give another rallying cry, Banksy painted a mural on the wall of the Royal Courts of Justice in London showing a judge using his gavel to hammer a protester lying on the ground holding up an empty placard, insinuating that judges are agents of repression.
Not so. Judges are why Banksy can actually do what he does without a secret police uncovering his identity and spiriting him away to be executed extra-judicially, as might happen in some countries.