Dear Graham Linehan,
Failed comedian Alan Driscoll here. You may remember me from such comedy classics as 'Defend the Pedos' and various remixes of 'You Turned Off Replies'. Allow me to self-importantly insert myself into your life.
By now, it's well established that you are behind some of the more bad-tempered, and I dare I say even rude, accounts on The Twitter. We know, and you know we know, and we know that you we know, etc etc etc.
So let's not waste any more time on that. The era of convincingly presenting to be focused only on women's rights while simultaneously doing the "Who is this Graham you speak of?" act is over.
As the Stewart Lee malarkey of the past week has demonstrated more perfectly than either of you could have written, you've consistently failed to understand that anyone might have a problem with the way you conduct yourself without necessarily being a dick-pandering handmaiden determined to trample over women's rights in the name of that transgender ideology they have now.
You've been pushing the "David Paisley is scared of ribbons" narrative for a while, omitting the context around that particular photograph. And yet literally all Stewart Lee said was "Graham Linehan" is "in the pedal bin", from which you extrapolated the following:
"Maybe now you’ve joined the debate, Stewart, you can explain why left-wing feminist icons like Linda Bellos, Julie Bindel and Helen Steel deserve to be arrested and punched and have drinks poured over their heads."
It feels like it would be insulting to our collective intelligence to point out the lack of logic connecting those two dots, so instead just imagine it read aloud from a piece of paper in Stewart Lee's voice and tell me it's not funny.
Clearly, the problem people have with you is not your gender critical beliefs, but the way you have gone about expressing them.
One of the many great things about me is that I've never actually stated my pronouns or said any of the "trans women are women" mantras that the Politically Correct Woke Stasi Brigade would have us mindlessly reciting. My whole involvement in this debate, such as it is, has been that I've seen people behaving abusively, and others enabling them, while claiming that they're defending women even though that's not what they're actually doing.
It shouldn't even need to be said that posting photographs of strangers while comparing them to sexual predators, or contacting other strangers from anonymous accounts to call them "ball-cradling handmaidens", or relentlessly derailing any point you may have about safeguarding with vendettas against other men, is not standing up for women, and it is not helpful to anyone. It's you acting out of ego and anger, while refusing to consider that might be the case.
I've heard you say "I can't do therapy because I can't talk about myself", which is an IMAX-sized red flag that it's needed, and one which any qualified counsellor would tear down in minutes. At some point, there needs to be some self-reflection if you are to salvage anything of your life and career.
Apart from some random online hearsay, I have no idea if you've experienced significant childhood trauma. Similarly, I don't know how much you know about what the process of healing from it involves. Suffice to say, a lot of it is predictably touchy-feely stuff about learning to comfort and console the part of yourself that didn't receive such support when it was most needed.
It's hard enough for anyone to do. It's painful and upsetting and you feel stupid and self-indulgent. And I imagine it would be especially difficult for someone who's grown into a giant 6 foot 5 lummox cast in the role of a protector of women and children both in his personal life and public persona.
But it's necessary. You have to sort through your shit. Everyone does. Unless you can convincingly state that 100% of your behaviour and anger stems from post-2015 UK-based trans awareness, and you're not bringing any pre-existing pain to the table, then you need to talk through it with someone and work out which is which.
One of the great things about therapy is that you don't even have to tell anyone you're doing it. The whole point is that it's a private and personal space to explore things without judgement, or vent anger, or view things from various angles without worrying about later being held to account for it. Or sort through memories and figure out which ones might be fuelling what habits, and which of your values you want to hold on to or let go of.
Another great thing about therapy is that you don't even have to admit that you need it. You can literally just book an appointment, either in person or over Zoom, and say "Look, I don't really think I need to be here, but enough people have suggested it to me that I should probably do a session or two on the off chance that I'm wrong."
And then the therapist will say something like "Why do people say you should be in therapy?" and you'll explain about your involvement in the transgender debate, and they'll ask you to elaborate on your views and how you've gone about expressing them, and before you know it, you're having a nuanced, private discussion about the various ways your behaviour has been perceived, and whether you agree with any of them, and how it's made you feel, and so on. And at the very least, you'll gain some clarity and efficiency in the way you apply your values to the debate.
There's literally nothing to lose. Well, apart from the excruciating pain of confronting traumatic memories and realising the damage they've done to you and your life. Unfortunately, there's no way around that, and the pain will find a way to come out one way or another, and the best thing anyone can do for themselves and their loved ones is to confront it and find a way to channel it constructively.
(I'm in therapy too, for the record. As are probably most of the traumatised, angry people on one side of the debate, and most of the traumatised, dysphoric people on the other. There's no shame in it. It means you're taking responsibility.)
But just in case there is any associated shame-based hesitancy, a couple of things that might lessen it:
Firstly, you're famous. Anyone with a certain amount of fame will be able to retain at least a few hundred people saying that whatever they do is great, and it must be incredibly tempting to just assume that those people are right. Therapy should probably be a requirement for anyone above a certain level of fame, just as a kind of ego-maintenance thing, to make sure you're not having smoke blown up the proverbial.
Secondly, you obviously have an addiction to social media, and specifically Twitter. This is probably one of the most widespread and understandable of all modern addictions, given that there literally are giant nerd farms creating algorithms specifically devised to keep you addicted. And just like they say food can be one of the hardest addictions to manage because you don't have the option of going cold turkey, social media is probably comparably unavoidable, what with all these Myspaces and Friendsters that they have now.
I'm rambling on, so I'll conclude with a fascinating TV-based fable. I used to be a big fan of Shane Meadows. I don't know if you saw This Is England '86, but it was the worst piece of art, possibly the worst thing I've ever consumed or experienced. I actually spat at the screen. He took a great movie and for some fuck-knows reason decided to get the Skins writers on board and turn it into the worst sitcom you've ever seen, while also maintaining the grittiness quota with abhorrently flippant rape scenes. There was a literal rat in the kitchen at one point (get it? like the song!) and that was more nuanced and subtle than any of the scenes involving sexual abuse. I couldn't for the life of me understand what the fuck Shane Meadows was thinking. It even put me off Stephen Graham for a while.
Then a decade later, I saw this interview with him in which Shane discusses his experiences with EMDR (content warning for discussion of sexual violence). EMDR is an eye-movement based treatment for PTSD that helps people process and move on from repressed and traumatic memories. It's the same treatment I'm in the process of (or at least was, until the fucking pandemic), to deal with a violent assault that I couldn't remember until a decade later. Shane discusses the treatment as life-changing, and it suddenly made sense why This Is England '86 took such a boneheaded approach to the issue of sexual violence.
Not that this is necessarily what you need. That's between you and any therapist you may or may not decide to visit. But you get the idea. People need to sort through their shit.
I haven't seen The Virtues yet, but it's supposed to be a career-best masterpiece. I'm genuinely curious if you've got one in you too. What if angry Graham and silly Graham and the Graham who likes Bill Callahan and Succession all collaborated on taking control of your emotions and cultivating the discipline to write something unique and personal, rather than giving in to the quick dopamine fix of social media conflict and validation?
As I'm sure some part of you is aware, the whole point of my Lostprophets routine is that if we write off anyone as irredeemable and beyond even the possibility of forgiveness, there's no route back from the darkness. No way their experiences can be used to help prevent other bad people doing bad things. Just another outlet for the anger of people with unresolved trauma.
I'm going to turn off replies now (get it? like the song!) and I'm not going to tweet about you any more, because there's not really anything else I could possibly say if none of this gets through. I hope you'll finally allow yourself a little self-reflection. Go stare at a lake and listen to Bill Callahan's 'Dream River' album. Then re-read the thing you wrote about Helen Steel having drinks poured on her head in Stewart Lee's voice again. If it makes you laugh, then you know you've taken the first step back to the old Graham... or the new one?
With sincere best wishes,
Alan Driscoll
PS. Notice how nothing I just said had anything whatsoever to do with trans people?