This Is How Badly the Free Speech Absolutists Fucked Up the Graham Linehan Case Back in April
pretty badly. pretty badly!
Syllabus check!Â
By the time you have read this, you should be able to tell the difference between:
â  a libel!
â a defamation!
â Â an opinion!
â Â a fact!
â Â an error of fact that is neither defamatory nor opinion!
And, knowing these things as you will, I heartily encourage you to start a podcast explaining our current crisis of free speech, âcancel culture,â something something âwokeâ. Not just because itâs a good grift and several people have become extremely rich from it, but because you will know more on the topic than the two most popular grifters currently working that particular beat, Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog. These two bozos have somehow extracted a living from a whole lot of people concerned that you canât say anything these days and perhaps even that it is turning into nineteen eighty four, without doing even the most rudimentary reading on the topic. Hats off!Â
On March 28th, Singal and Herzog dedicated a podcast to Graham Linehan, an anti-transgender campaigner and oddball former comedy writer, exploring Linehanâs history of transphobic remarks, and his gradual transformation into the shambling bigot weâve all come to know and hate. I got the thing transcribedââand yes, please do rest assured that I didnât have to give either of them a cent of my hard-hustled money in order to do so.
(By the way, I hope youâre keeping track of all these insults! Theyâre part of the point: Singal and Herzog are âgriftersâ and âbozosâ; Linehan is âan anti-transgender campaigner,â an âoddball,â and a âshambling bigot.â Libel? Defamation? Opinion? Fact? Find out soon!)
Singal and Herzogâs report gives Linehan a supervillain origin story (âGraham was viciously bullied as a childâ) and, drawing on a story in The Telegraph in which he is rather fawningly named as âthe most hated person on the internetâ (such a badass), to suggest that Linehan became radicalized after being âdog-piledâ for the mere crime of having written an episode of The IT Crowd in which our heroes tranny-bash a trans woman named April once she reveals her true, dastardly nature.Â
That episode, âThe Speech,â might in fact constitute evidence of prior radicalizationââsince, as far as I know, no other middling-but-popular Channel Four sitcoms were celebrating the violent assault of queer people back in 2008. But itâs no great matter: the only real downside was that the episode rather spoils oneâs enjoyment of the otherwise-excellent stealth trans actor Matt Berry, who plays the poor sap dating the arm-wrestling brick.Â
(Wait, is Matt Berry really a stealth trans man? Isnât that a libel? What was that fifth category again?)
Singal and Herzog also talk about my beef with Linehan, which I detail here. Here they are:Â
We have two theories of the case here: Herzog thinks Linehanâs claim was libelous because it improperly accused me of child molestation; Singal thinks it was libelous because it improperly accused me of misconduct towards adults. But notwithstanding those differences, they both correctly identify the two components that are necessary for a claim of libel to land.Â
LIBEL ELEMENT ONE: a libelous claim is false.
LIBEL ELEMENT TWO: a libelous claim is defamatory, that is, likely to prove injurious to the reputation of the claimant.Â
Linehanâs claim was definitely false, and definitely defamatory. Libel!
Letâs go back to our pals:Grace is totally fine with libeling other people? Say it ainât so!
I wracked my brain trying to figure out what they were talking about. I have lost more friends than I care to note by my attempts to bend over backwards to defend people I disagree with, including saying in the piece about Linehan linked above that I havenât seen evidence that Singal sexually harasses trans women, and I think that claim circulates thoughtlessly. But I havenât, and I think itâs important to say.Â
So what did they mean?Â
I thought it was possible that Herzog had meant something like âGrace doesnât mind if third parties are libeled by other peopleâââthat it wasnât a direct accusation of being a libeler like Linehan. So I took a leaf from Singalâs own book, and I sent him a wee message to ask for details:
Singal came back with a genuinely stunning response [which for some reason didnât upload when I first posted thisââupdate 3.50pm]:Singal names two occasions on which I have referred to him in unflattering terms as âstraightforwardly libel.âThe first is that I claimed that Singal argued that my Foreign Policy essay (that he has tried to maul to death by a thousand paper cuts but has not, to my knowledge, actually engaged with substantially) should be taken down.  I did indeed claim that, on the strength of a tweet in which Singal said that it should never have been published. Rather embarrassingly, I canât find that tweet now, but Singal doesnât deny having written it:Is saying that something should be taken down the same as saying it should not have been published? Tricky. They are both expressions of a wish for the pieceâs non-existence, so to that extent they are interchangeable. But Jesse also has a point suggesting that theyâre not exactly the same, and I could have been more careful there. Hereâs the rub, though. My claim wasnât defamatory. Being thought of as having claimed of an argument âthis should be taken downâ wouldnât noticeably harm Singalâs reputation any more than being thought of as having claimed âthis should never have been published.â They both show him as a pompous, bloviating ditto, whose aversive responses to being described in terms he doesnât like is simply to fantasize a world in which everyone agrees with him. So: maybe false (though I maintain it isnât), but definitely not defamatory. Not libel!
Letâs look at the other claim. âYou said I called trans people a âcontagion.â I never called trans people a âcontagion.ââThis one is potentially more damaging, since the rhetoric is, indeed, âHitlerian,â as Singal rightly identifies. So to be thought of as someone who thinks of trans people as plague-carriers, passing on our unhealthy attachments to each other.Letâs look at the record, shall we?Singal first came to public attention as, preposterously, an authority on trans issues after the publication of his article When Children Say Theyâre Trans (queue up the sinister strings section) in The Atlantic in 2018. Iâve already dealt with the vicious and stupid rhetorical techniques that Singal began to craft in that essayââquickly: whatever happens, the lesson is always that trans people are unreasonableââso I wonât do so again here. But letâs go ahead and do that cmd+f for âcontagion.â Lo and behold:
Couple of things to notice here. First, that this phrase appears in inverted commas, and therefore cannot be taken as Singalâs own. And second, that these words are spoken by âparents,â and notââthis is important because of a dumb defense of Singal some people tried to mount on Twitterââby professional sociologists. The context in which this phrase is being spoken is parents who feel, at best, ambivalent about their kidsâ professed transness, and, at worst, hostile. Singalâs word is âworried.â So we can assume that the term is supposed to carry a certain kind of shock valueââand indeed, Iâd guess thatâs why Singal thought to put it in scare quotes in the first place.Â
We continue:
Now, some of these dear little snowflakes are, for some reason, moved to find this rhetoric (which Singal has himself, remember, called âHitlerianâ) âoffensive.â The poor dears. But we still donât have Singal himself endorsing this position, do we?Â
Wait:
Weird, the word âcontagionâ has been dropped. Why? Perhaps to spare the blushes of those dear old tr*nnies who find it âsilly or even offensive.â But perhaps, rather, to substitute out a âHitlerianâ claimââthat trans people are infecting children with their crazy ideas about genderââwith a perfectly banal, indeed entirely uncontroversial one, that âsocial forces can play a role in a young personâs gender questioning.âÂ
Find me a person who denies that sentence as written. I would be surprised if there were any. So why has begun the sentence with âBut,â as though it were contradicting the paragraph about the antsy tr*nnies, and italicized that word âcanâ as though the argument were belabored? Itâs a neat little trick, but very obvious once youâve seen it: Singal has managed to endorse a âHitlerianâ idea without using the word itself, while making trans people look like theyâre opposed to a self-evident truth. Crass, manipulative and, yes, transphobic.
So, definitely defamatory, and definitely not false. Not libel!
Now, letâs just have a quick word about âtransphobic.â This is a word that Singal, Herzog, and their cohort of courageous woke-skeptics really donât like having applied to them. Weâre not afraid of you, we just donât like you!, they cry, not unreasonably. So letâs acknowledge that it is possibly to be implacably opposed to every single major issue in which trans civil rights are entailed without being, in the strict sense, phobic: you can oppose trans people being allowed access to healthcare, social care, legal and bureaucratic gender confirmation, etc., not out of fear, but out of hate. I think transmisic would be a better formula for Singal and Herzog: they really arenât afraid of usââthey despise us. But I also think thatâs what most people mean by âtransphobic,â and I think that Herzog and Singalâs pettifogging campaign of confusion on this issue is designed to split hairs in order to prove their general case that trans people are oversensitive.
Which, you know, weâre actually not!
But, hereâs something thatâs very important. A general principle of libel is that there should be strong protections for expressing political opinions. An opinion can be a difficult thing to determine. Is it a claim of fact that Jesse Singal is transphobic, or transmisic? One could imagine a situation where it could beââif, for example, someone claimed that Jesse Singal acted towards trans people with hostility in his personal life. But to claim that his public conduct itself constitutes transphobia, or transmisia, is more a matter of opinion: in my view, a man who spends his life arguing against the civil rights of trans people is transphobic, however he conducts himself in his private life. In other words, Iâm not interested in the character of Singalâs soul: Iâm interested in the damage that he does every day he goes to work, prosecuting his campaign of misinformation and carefully-choreographed exasperation against trans people online.
Katie Herzog has claimed, publicly, that this view of mineââwhich Iâve argued in, for example, the Linehan essay linked aboveââconstitutes a libel of Singal. It doesnât, because there is no claim of fact entailed. Itâs an opinion.
So, not false, and maybe a bit defamatory. Not libel!
But more damningly and bizarrely than that, Herzog seems to think that my calling Singal âtransphobicâ is a transgression on a par with calling someone a pedophile without any evidence. One would think that was a pretty high bar, especially since Iâve defended Singal against claims of sexual misconduct of far less seriousness!
But here we are [also didnât upload at first, for whatever reason]:Â
To give you some sense of how flexible the âopinionâ exemption is, Iâve been trying to express the above argument as a statement of fact so that, if it were false, it would be libel. My first attempt:
Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal do not understand the first principles of âfree speech,â and are not qualified to write or broadcast on this topic.
But this doesnât work, because âdo not understandâ and âare not qualifiedâ are clearly judgments, which are a type of opinion. Oh I donât know. I just think theyâre stupid, belligerent, dishonest grifters, and I think itâs time their fifteen minutes was over.
Syllabus check!Â
Letâs see if we understand the differences!
1.     Â
grifters:Â opinion
2.     Â
bozos: opinion
3.     Â
anti-transgender campaigner: opinion
4.     Â
oddball: opinion
5.     Â
stealth trans man: non-defamatory error of fact
6.     Â
grooming: libel
Youâre welcome!!