By David Futrelle
So Graham Linehan — the fomer comedy writer turned humorless transphobe — is having some second thoughts about Gamergate, and he wants the world to know all about them.
Linehan recently went on a podcast called TRIGGERnometry (no, really) to explain, among other things, his new and “revised feelings” about the sadly not-completely-dormant cultural counterrevolution that liked to pretend it was a crusade for game journalism ethics.
Back in the day, he told the podcast’s two hosts, he, like most of those opposed to Gamergate, thought that the supposed “consumer movement”
was a hate campaign aimed at women in the gaming industry that was … employing hings like swatting … Because it was women being targeted my anger reflex had gone up … and I just jumped into it … .
But now the scales have lifted from his eyes and he now thinks that maybe some of Gamergate was actually a good thing.
“What it really was,” he continud,
was a confluence of millions of different things happening at the same time … and I now realize there were a lot of young men [in Gamergate] who were much closer to the truth of what was happening in colleges and stuff that I was, [and] who realized that there was this censorious liberal canceling kind of culture that was really dangerous you know …
But alas, these noble free-speech warriors
were all mixed up with with with the real right-wingers and people like [Milo] Yiannopoulos who who it seemed to me was very cynically cashing in and trying to try to recruit young men into the right.
It’s weird how all the Nazis lined up with what was otherwise a blameless crusade for free speech, huh? It’s not like the free speech stuff was just a disingenuous PR thing and the whole Gamergate enterprise was rotten to the core or anything.
Anyway, Linehan also regrets that some of the women he defended back in the Gamergate days turned out to be — the horror! — trans.
“I thought I was defending women,” he remarked, “and … I was defending blokes.”
Now, because of the whole “free speech” thing and also the “defending blokes” thing, Linehan says he thinks he “may have made a few mistakes in the Gamergate time.”
This interview isn’t the first time in which Linehan has made clear that he’s changed his tune on Gamergate. In a tweet last month, he declared that
I realise with some embarrassment that some of the people I supported during gamergate were the kind of people I thought we were fighting.
And last week he picked a fight with Gamergate bete noire ANita Sarkeesian, accusing her of “male pandering” because she supports trans rights.
In case you’re wondering exactly what he’s going on about, the “other group of men” he’s talking about are trans women.
If Linehan thinks he’s going to pick up a lot of new fans amongst the perma-Gamergaters who inhabit web forums like the Kotaku in Action subreddit, he’s going to be sadly disappointed. In a Kotaku in Action thread on his podcast appearance, the locals are mostly hostile.
“Don’t be fooled,” notes one commenter. “He ran out of friends on the SJW side of things over TERF drama and now he wants new ones.” After spelling out Linehan’s assorted crimes against Gamergate, the commenter concluded that “he made his bed and can go get fucked on it.”
In a followup comment, the same commenter suggested Linehan would only be welcomed into the Gamergate fold if he brought them dirt on other anti-Gemergaters.
Glinner can go get fucked unless he crawls on his ass over broken glass for us and leaks all the shit that he and his evil littermates were doing behind the scenes in ’14.
“Dig your own pit, Glinner,” wrote another. “This one doesn’t have room enough for your ego.”
Still another commenter offered a more detailed analysis:
It’s because he got cancelled by tr***ies when he dared agree with J K Rowling publicly. He is since basically out of the job. So now he is all about “freedom of speech” and anti-SJW when he is a SJW himself.
Same with the TERF, they were all about silencing “misogynistic gamers” until the bat shit crazies silenced them. Now they are forced to ask right wing think tanks to lend them some places to congregate and talk because nobody on the left wants to let them do talks in public places anymore.
Tough crowd, huh?
Political realignment is a bit more difficult than one might think.
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You know you’ve fucked all the way up when some gamergoober is the voice of reason when it comes to your behavior.
It’s continually astonishing to me how he’s just devoted himself to this role, 100%. There’s all these other things he could be doing with his life, a myriad of possibilities… and he’s chosen to stick with this.
Is this not something english people usually comment with something like “pot, kettle…” ? (We are more with “paille (straw)” and “poutre (beam)” here)
@Mish. Yes, it’s bizarre. I think that about some of the Gender Critical group as well. If you genuinely think that trans women are just deluded men, even mentally ill as they so often say, why devote a significant proportion of your waking hours to complaining about a relatively small group of unfortunate individuals. Especially when cis people with real power, mostly men, are engaged in full on onslaughts against women’s rights and the laws and institutions that protect them.
If they think men want to be women because they want to identify as oppressed and special too ( another argument I’ve seen on gender critical reddit) then just ignore them politely and keep on fighting against the forces of systemic oppression. Instead they are constantly outraged that trans women suck all the attention away from “real” women, and then focus on them much more intensely than anybody who simply accepts them as a real woman.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I really don’t understand this “giving women’s rights away to men” thing.
Even if you thought (wrongly!) that trans* women were men, and opposed giving them “women’s rights” (whatever that means in this context), wouldn’t that just be extending women’s rights to a subset of men? Or are rights something tangible that someone can have only if they’re taken from someone else to be passed on?
Graham’s wife also appears to have left him (she changed her name on her social media back to her maiden name and they don’t appear to have been in the same room for a long time), so he really has picked this as the hill to die on.
My favorite take on his response to Anita was this one from Rebecca Watson:
@Mish
I think there’s a sunk cost fallacy involved: he’s already destroyed his career, lost his family, and made himself one of the most reviled men on the Internet, so he thinks there’s nothing to do but keep going.
@Masse_mysteria
I think it’s a few things:
1. Since TERFs often don’t think trans* people are real, they think anyone claiming to be trans* is doing so in bad faith, so they don’t want to give them rights.
2. As I’ve mentioned, TERFs are overwhelmingly white and wealthy, so they might subscribe to the view a lot of conservatives do that giving rights to other people means less for them.
3. They don’t want to acknowledge that trans* people mostly just want to live our lives, so they construct a false narrative to justify their hatred.
I think there’s a sunk cost fallacy involved: he’s already destroyed his career, lost his family, and made himself one of the most reviled men on the Internet, so he thinks there’s nothing to do but keep going.
As they say, “sunk cost” isn’t just the insurance claim for HMS Titanic.
So his new line is “Nazis good, except the gay one”?
How much did he “support” Anita Sarkeesian, really? Because she’s never hidden her support for trans rights. In fact, if you watch Feminist Frequency videos, you’ll have seen her working with Carolyn Petit, managing editor at FF and a good presenter. If Linehan is only now discovering that Sarkeesian is no TERF, I don’t think his support for her can have been very deep.
@danielrigal
The “Nazis good” part isn’t really new to him, he’s been embracing fascists for some time now (as have other TERFs, like Posie Parker being openly white nationalist).
@Moggie
Any support he ever did was probably performative, seeing as Graham Linehan is the ultimate example of a NiceGuy™ who pretends to be a feminist to try to get brownie points and cover up his transphobia.
He also might just be mad that a woman has agency without his approval, seeing as the majority of his harassment is generally directed at cis women who dare to support trans* rights but his cover story is feminism.
On the TERFs are privileged white women front,
Their new thing is arguing that their housekeepers should be forced to come in to work because they couldn’t possibly clean up after themselves or get their teenagers to pitch in
https://twitter.com/destroyed4com4t/status/1260771997815992320?s=20
The man sure is dedicated
This is apparently his (soon to be ex?) wife’s account.
Source: https://twitter.com/mimmymum/status/1259276358901010434?s=19
@kupo
I saw that post a few days ago. Accurate description, though a bit unfair to cacti. The cacti don’t deserve to be compared to Graham.
I’m not sure if she is a TERF, she’s voiced agreement with him before but I know that abusers like Graham often coerce people into agreeing with them to avoid further abuse (there is no doubt in my mind that Graham is abusive to his family).
I fully expect Glinner to become an MRA any second now.
He’s in a no man’s land: too evil for decent people, not evil enough for the Gamergaters.
Does that guy NEVER have an avi that’s not smug city?
@Shadowplay
It’s worse than that. His current avatar is a zoomed in version of this commissioned art from TERF artist Nina Paley:
Yup, his avatar is literally of him as a white knight using women as a shield. It replaced his previous smug avatar because the artist who made his old one isn’t transphobic enough for Graham.
He briefly changed it a few weeks ago to an androgynous generated cartoon image to make fun of trans* people using cartoon avatars:
Then he changed it back when he got tired of the joke (around the same time he also added “announcing my gender soon” to his bio and apparently even TERFs thought it wasn’t funny).
A flaming sword? Did he learn that from V*x D*y?
If it wasn’t for the different art style, I would swear that knight picture was made by Ben Garrison. Well, maybe he wouldn’t put a pipe in the horse’s mouth, that’s not his usual style of goofiness, but everything else about that screams “it’s Ben”.
Thank you for the explanation.
That horse looks like it should belong to Dennis the Menace. (UK, version, not the annoying cloying US one)
The flaming sword is a pretty neat touch though – a flaming weapon for a flaming idiot.
I assumed he thought of himself as a comedian who also did some TERFing on the side. But if he commissioned that art, that suggests it’s now the other way around. That’s pretty odd. We need to identify who is grooming and radicalising these vulnerable oldish white men!
@Snowberry
It does have a very Ben Garrison look to it. The artist seems to unironically think Graham is a feminist ally. She had this to say about it:
Her blog also has lots of other assorted TERFiness (a word which she uses to describe herself), to the point where it overshadows pretty much any other art she’s done (she also seems a bit obsessed with goddess worship and gender essentialism, and it shows in her art).
@Moggie
Well, he’s mentioned that he can no longer get work as a comedian because of his bigotry, so he probably thinks this is all he has left.
Cishet theory courses?
In related material, there’s this somewhat more accurate parody of Graham’s avatar:
Grifters who send spam emails and direct mailers. At least that seems to be how my uncle was radicalized.
@WWTH
Facebook also seems like a popular source for older adult radicalization. My great-uncle was reposting Russian bot propaganda within a few weeks on there.