Three posts on X were enough for armed police to lock up Graham Linehan on arrival at Heathrow.
This piece was originally published in French on 3 September 2025.
Visitors to the UK might be wise to check their social media before boarding their flight to London. Last Monday, Graham Linehan – the Irish comedy writer – was detained by five armed police officers upon arrival at Heathrow Airport before being taken into custody. His alleged crimes? Three posts on X (formerly Twitter) where he appeared to be critical of transgender activists.
According to Linehan’s own account, police escorted him away from the other passengers and told him that he was under arrest for three tweets he had published back in April. No individual had been targeted, but someone, somewhere, had taken offence.
The first post captioned a photograph of what looks like a protest against the UK Supreme Court ruling that a woman is defined by her biology.
“A photo you can smell,” Linehan suggested. In a follow-up message, he added, “I hate them. Misogynists and homophobes. F*** them.”
The third message, posted the next day on 20 April, stated: “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.”
This was enough for Linehan to be locked in a police cell to await questioning the next time he arrived in the UK. In a voice recording of the arrest made by Linehan, a police officer interpreted those words as seeking “violence against trans people”. What nonsense. I am trans myself and I understand Linehan’s concern about men assuming a transgender identity to impose themselves in women’s spaces.
According to Linehan, the police on duty were professional and even kind, but most had absolutely no idea what any of this was about. Why should they? This arrest had been clearly carefully planned which would have involved decisions made by others, probably at a senior level. Airport police are employed to protect the public from criminals, including terrorists intent on causing death and destruction. Their work is potentially very dangerous. Yet here they were, demanding a comedy writer explain his tweeting.
Perhaps some of the language was juvenile – “you smell” is typical of the abuse traded between small children – but the criminal code does not prohibit adults from using the same language. So why was this ever a police matter?
Linehan offered one suggestion when he asked a police officer to clarify what they meant by the term trans people. “People who feel their gender is different than what was assigned at birth,” came the reply. Gender is not assigned at birth; rather, our sex is observed and recorded at birth. But that meaningful and objective truth has been supplanted by activist language, driven by lobby groups such as Stonewall in the UK through training programmes, and ultimately written into policy. The end game is a police service captured by ideology and eager to investigate “wrongthink”.
The impact on Linehan’s health was profound. His flight had departed the United States the previous day, and he had not managed to sleep on the plane. His arrest was unexpected and – to most reasonable people – inexplicable. He was then questioned about social media posts from four months earlier, knowing that everything he said was being recorded and could be used in evidence. When a nurse found that his blood pressure had risen above 200, his next destination was the hospital, where he spent the following eight hours under observation.
All because someone had complained about three posts he had written four months earlier. In previous generations, a wiser police service might well have dismissed the matter as trivial and advised the complainant to avoid reading statements that caused them distress. But these are strange times indeed. Linehan himself was blunt, claiming that,
“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.”
Graham Linehan
Certainly, the police now have questions to answer. Shock and outrage permeated the UK yesterday when the news became public. J.K. Rowling spoke for many when she asked, “What the f*** has the UK become? This is totalitarianism. Utterly deplorable.”
Prime Minister Keir Starmer was critical of the police action. On Tuesday afternoon, his spokesman suggested that the police should be concentrating on issues that “matter most to their communities,” in particular, tackling anti-social behaviour, shoplifting and street crime, as well as reducing serious violent crime such as knife crime and violence against women.
This is embarrassing for Starmer both internationally and domestically. Sat in the White House in February, Starmer told Donald Trump that he was “very proud” of free speech in the UK after Vice President J.D. Vance had claimed that Britain’s stance on freedom of speech was stifling American companies and citizens. US social media companies have launched legal action against British laws that limit what can be written on their platforms; Elon Musk has accused the UK of “censorship” and – in response to the Linehan case – a “police state.”
Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK, plans to raise the issue in the US, where he is set to meet Trump’s allies this week and give evidence before the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, which is looking at the impact of British and European online safety laws on freedom of speech.
Meanwhile, Linehan was released after questioning on the condition that he does not use X – a legal gagging order to shut him up. If that is the freedom of speech that Starmer was “very proud” to defend, then he needs to redefine his terms. Freedom of expression must include the freedom to offend, or it is nothing of the sort.
By Debbie Hayton
Debbie Hayton is a teacher and journalist.
Her book, Transsexual Apostate – My Journey Back to Reality is published by Forum
* This article was first published in French by Le Point on 3 September 2025: Polémique à Londres après l’arrestation d’un humoriste irlandais pour des tweets antitransgenres.
Debbie Hayton 
8 replies on “Graham Linehan arrested for tweets”
Debbie, thank you so much for writing this. I was gobsmacked when I read about it. I subscribe to Linehan’s Substack, so I know a little about him. I know how unfairly he has been treated. It astonishes me that you have a system in England where trouble-makers can get someone arrested for making strong statements on social media. Here in the U.S., that probably wouldn’t happen UNLESS the statements were so violent as to make the object of the statements feel genuinely threatened.
I would have handled things differently from the way Linehan handled them. I would have sat in the police station and said nothing. I would not have agreed to stop participating on X (stupid name — Musk should have kept “Twitter”). By not cooperating at all, it would have forced the police to compound their mistake by holding Linehan or initiating a prosecution. But having made an agreement with the police, the police can now say that they extracted a punishment from Linehan, allowing them to close the matter.
I don’t know much about Britain’s legal system, but I hope that Linehan is able to sue the police for false arrest. What I don’t understand is how a country as old and well established could go down such an undemocratic path. Britain is more than a thousand years older than the U.S. I just assumed that a country so old couldn’t be upended in such a way by bad ideas.
You know, trans activists are shooting themselves in the foot when they take aggressive action against critics. Their attempts to control the speech of everyone else is going to backfire on them big time.
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It’s total madness, what is going on. I suspect the police themselves think it is ridiculous.
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“I am trans myself”.
Yeah, a transvestite, not an actual trans woman, since you’re really a cisgender man who appropriates a trans identity so you can get all of your TERF friends to attack and dehumanise self-respecting trans people.
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You opened up a question that used to come up in the trans groups that I was part of when I was transitioning 12 to 15 years ago, “What is the difference between a transvestite and a transsexual?”
Someone suggested, “About five years”. 🙂
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David, you don’t think much about what you say, do you? You clearly believe there are trans people in the world, since you are probably one, and you mention “self-respecting trans people” at the end of your comment. Well, Debbie has had both top and bottom surgery. What can make her more trans than that?
What about you? Have you had top and bottom surgery? Since you call yourself David, I assume you are FTM. Bottom surgery for trans men is a complicated affair — did you get that surgery? If not, then Debbie is more trans than you are.
The TERFs are right on most issues. Trans women are invading women’s territories. Trans women are just men who feel like women, and real women have no obligation to accept them into their spaces as real women. The sex we are born with is the sex we will always be. That’s just reality.
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Hi Caleb. My ideas seem to have the capacity to raise strong emotions in those who disagree with me, and that can lead to personal attacks. I don’t hold that against David, or anyone else for that matter. I’m past caring what other people think about me, but I do appreciate kind words and support that you have shared with me.
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Well, Debbie, you are a real person. If I can’t like you as a trans person, then I am just prejudiced, and I don’t want to be prejudiced.
The other day I watched one of those fake court shows, you know, in which complainants come before an actor who was formerly a judge. (They usually hire a former judge because it gives the show legitimacy.) A trans woman was suing an all-woman health club because some of the women objected to having a biological man in their midst, so the health club came up with a new dress code that made clothes less revealing (no tight shorts that might reveal male anatomy). Presumably, it was also a problem that the trans woman was showing her anatomy when changing, but the show wasn’t explicit about that. The trans woman had long pink hair, and she had injected fat into her lips, which made them look ridiculous, and she definitely had an attitude of entitlement. Her stance was that she was a woman too, and since the new rules were directed at her, she was being treated differently from the other women. But of course, she wasn’t a woman.
I couldn’t stand her. An honest person like you, however, inspires admiration. You admit what you are, and you aren’t demanding things you shouldn’t. Most trans people live in a fantasy world of pretense, and there is nothing harder to admire than pretense. Why is it so hard to admit the truth? “I am a man who feels like a woman. It is not my intension to impinge on women or any other group, but just to live my life the way I want to. Please be respectful.”
I practice what I preach. I’m a gay man. When someone trots out the fact that the male body evolved to have sex with the female body, and for that reason homosexuality must be considered an aberration, my response is, “To a certain extent that makes sense. However, about 8% of the population is gay. When an aberration exists in such large numbers of people, there must be a biological/social/metaphysical reason for it, especially given that the aberration harms no one. We all have a right to exist.”
Having said all this, I still feel sorry for your wife.
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The problem here is not Linehan’s views on trans people, because he has the right to be as offensive as he likes, but the fact that he encouraged his followers to punch somebody (i.e. to commit assault) if they saw a trans person in a place that they thought they ought not to be. That goes beyond having an offensive opinion, because it is incitement to violence. If you see a trans person in a place where you don’t think they should be, then you can report it to the police, or to the owner of the premises, but you are not entitled to commit assault. You might, after all, find that you are wrong, or that the trans person is in fact a gender non-conforming woman. So (in law) Linehan can express his dislike of trans people in whatever way he likes but he is not allowed to recommend that his followers consider committing assault.
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