Graham Linehan is Ruining My Dating Life
Transgender rights are being eroded left and right, both here in the United States and around the world. This Pride Month, we’ve decided to raise up the voices of the trans community with a whole week of blog posts by trans creators, starting off with novelist, games writer, and developer Alison Cybe.
My last date cancelled. She sent me a screenshot. I looked at the photo. It was an image of a Twitter timeline, showing a post made by Graham Linehan. In it, Graham included a photograph of the girl I was due to go on a date with, plucked from her profile on a dating app. She was too emotionally exhausted, too humiliated to be seen.
She looked amazing. Cute, smiling, full of life. Radiant. Trans girls often do. But that’s not what Graham wanted to show. “Look at this man!” he cried on his tweet, “This is what women have to find on dating apps!” What Graham was doing searching for women, particularly trans women, on dating apps was entirely irrelevant. Some might suggest that he was searching for a new girlfriend, given that he had managed to drive his wife away from him. But the truth was, he had no interest in using a dating app to fill that hole in his life. He’d already filled that with his attempt to stoke fire onto a witch hunt.
A Small Fish in a Filthy Pond
Graham, though, is small potatoes. He attempts to be bigger, more of a controversial figure, but too much of his credibility has been burned out on embarrassing stunts which left him looking sad and pitiable rather than insightful or charming to his followers. He is no Rowling. He lacks Rowling’s wit with the words, her ability to incite meaning with brevity, her audience of fans who’ve grown past their childhood and into a scary, isolating adulthood. And more importantly, her political sway.
Yet despite that, both are hewn from the same rock, carved by the same weathering. Both became victims of their followers. Neither cared about transgender folks at the turn of the century. They carried none of the vitriol that they now profit from. Instead, that was instilled into them. Both were groomed, in the truest sense of the word; a word now wielded as a cudgel against us. Over weeks and months, those who wanted to use the victimization of transgender people as a means to divide the working class and prevent class consciousness from forming in America bombarded them with love. Those who want queer folks – all queer folks – to be pushed back out of society and believe wholeheartedly that transgender individuals are the weakest link in the chain to break have made their move.
Radical Mindsets
In the early 2010s, word spoke about online radicalisation. This became a buzz-word for those who, through online exposure to rhetoric and propaganda, came to sympathise with extremist mindsets. In an office I worked in during 2015, I spoke with a mother whose teenage son had experienced the same. He perished during a paramilitary attack, fighting alongside ISIS insurgents. At the time, the term was used primarily to explain why middle-class white kids came to sympathise with radical religious attitudes.
But in the years since, online radicalisation as a term has fallen out of fashion. But it hasn’t fallen out of practice. People subjected to such grooming techniques experience heavy bombardments of love.
They’re told that they’re right; that they’re brave, that it’s noble and that they’re strong. It’s positive reinforcement, especially in the face of the criticism people receive from everybody else. Humanity is, by our deepest impulses, drawn towards positive feelings; praise, love, acceptance. While it’s easy to point at a group and label them as a target to hate, it’s even easier to do it if there’s people who’ll stand by and applaud you for doing so.
There has been no governmental research into how to countermand the effects of online radicalisation. There are no home office groups set up to investigate it, no divisions under the national medical secretary to help people undergo de-radicalisation and reacclimatise. Even after a radicalised sect attempted a coup in the United States capitol, there has been no societal push to examine the cause. We simply call it ‘bipartisanship’, when perhaps we should call it what it is.
In It For the Attention
At the end of the day, Rowling and Lineham don’t have any true hatred towards trans people; their bigotry is performative. It exists so that their remaining fans will continue to heap love and affection on them. They’ve been trained to perform on demand, and if there is any true loathing in their hearts it is only because they’ve been able to churn up enough of their own bile to place it there themselves. Instead, the threat we face comes from those who’ve carved them into the statues they are today. People who want leaders for their movement, because their true leaders are already known as individuals who are so heavily extremist that they’d never be able to stand in the spotlight without being called out for who and what they truly are; people who want to have a pretty public face for their movement because a swastika is just too recognisably ugly.
Yet despite that, folks like Rowling and Lineham exist for a purpose. The love they receive is conditional and transient; it’s given only as long as they serve their function. That function is, of course, simple; sell the idea. Make trans folks an acceptable target. Push the wedge wider. Help move the gap open. With each passing day, the need for figures like them grows less and less relevant. Here in the UK we look at the legislation introduced in Florida, across the United States, and know that it will happen here. It will. That’s a certainty; a grim, terrible certainty.
On the plus side, it signifies that with each passing days, the useful fools who act as figureheads for the movement are one day closer to being cast aside. For all the harm she’s done, it won’t be too long until Rowling’s new fans consider her ‘no longer useful’. Personally, I count the days until then, knowing that when these ghoulish figureheads are no longer of any use and are cast to the wayside, they might finally stop interfering in my dating life. Hopefully.
Looking for great Pride-related merchandise? Everything in our store is 15% off with the code “PRIDE” at checkout! Want to hear even more of what Alison has to say? Listen to our special LGBTQ+ Horror Podcast episode featuring them and many other esteemed guests right here!