My Her stunt, a repost

Please post under the upcoming Pink News hit piece

So I got a response back from Metro about their recent hit piece on me. Their attitude can be summarised as “Fuck you. Wikipedia says you’re a bigot so we’re saying it too.”

---

Dear Mr Linehan

We are in receipt of your complaint via IPSO about the above article published by Metro.co.uk and welcome the opportunity to respond to your concerns.

Turning firstly to your claim that the article is in breach of Clause 3: this clause is designed to prevent harassment of individuals by journalists, and regulates their conduct while making inquiries for the purposes of journalism. The clause is neither relevant nor engaged in this instance.

You also allege that the article is in breach of Clause 1, Accuracy, and that it misrepresented your reasons for joining a lesbian dating app. Further, you say it called you 'anti-trans' and said that you were 'harassing transwomen'. It is unclear whether, or why, you believe this to be inaccurate, but you later go on to claim that the 'mischaracterisation' of you as anti-trans is 'dishonest'.

The article focuses on the response issued by the dating app 'Her' following your repeated attempts to create profiles on the app which purported to be created by transgender women. You used images of yourself as profile pictures.

Your stated aim in this exercise, which is made plain by Metro in their article, was to draw a pointed comparison between your profile image, as a cisgender male, with other individuals signed up to the app, whom you referred to as 'men'. Some of these individuals identified as transgender in their profiles, others simply stated that they were lesbian. 

In the wake of this, and your subsequent posts on Substack about your activities (in which you posted the pictures of dozens of other users) the dating app to which you signed up issued the following statement on Twitter, referring to a 'dangerous act of transphobia':

‘Let’s make this clear: HER is an app for ALL WOMEN and queer folx. It is not our, nor anyone else’s place to question or invalidate another’s identity. We are here for ALL WOMEN, including the trans community ‘Please be assured this user will be found and removed from our platform. Additionally, we’re in contact with Substack to have this dangerous act of transphobia removed from our screens.’

This was also quoted in full by Metro.co.uk

Your allegation that Metro misrepresented your reasons' for joining the app is rejected. As noted above, your reasons were set out very clearly, in your own words, in the following quote from one of your Substack posts on the subject:

'I’m doing this to demonstrate that it’s impossible to tell the difference between men and self-identifying “transwomen”. I’m doing it to expose an ideology that is homophobic, misogynistic and puts women and girls in danger. ‘There is NO difference between me and the other men on this site. If I’m mistaken, I’m happy to educated as to why.'
Your actions are described by Metro as 'mocking' (note: not 'harassing', as you allege) transgender women, which is supported by the sentence you wrote immediately preceding the above explanation of your views: 
'I’m not JUST doing this for the laugh'.
Comedy is your metier, and while you say you set out to make a serious point, you also admit to carrying out the stunt for comedic purposes. We are satisfied that the article accurately documents your stated reasons for joining the app.
News websites are, however, not obliged simply to report on people's professed intentions, and your activities were the source of some controversy, as you will no doubt have been able to anticipate. Members of the LGBT community, and the owners of the app itself of course, were strongly critical of the stunt, and responses on social media were candid and forthright in their interpretation of your actions:
'Graham Linehan joined a lesbian dating app just to hunt for trans women to publicly humiliate.'
It is entirely legitimate to include such criticism; to examine your actions from an alternative perspective to your own, and to subject these activities to scrutiny. While you may dislike the epithet 'anti-trans', we note that it has been commonly used in the past to describe your activities and views(my emphasis—Graham) with respect to this demographic; your own wikipedia entry, for example, contains an entire section dedicated to 'Anti-transgender activism', including - inter alia - your comparison of the medical transition of children to Nazi experiments on children, and your suspension by Twitter for 'hateful conduct', following which you created a sockpuppet account posing as a trans man in order to call the executive director of Amnesty Ireland 'a traitor to women, gay people and yourself' for signing an open letter expressing support for the transgender community.
That being said, it is worth pointing out that the article did not refer to you as 'anti-trans' per se. The URL initially referred to an 'anti-trans stunt', which we would contend is a reasonable and defensible characterisation of your course of conduct as documented in your Substack posts. A previous version of the article also made reference to you being more known nowadays for your 'anti-trans rhetoric' than your comedy writing, which was amended with no admission of liability upon receipt of your official complaint and your request that this aspect of the article be changed. Having regard to the various incidents documented in your wikipedia entry, we are satisfied however that there is no inaccuracy in that statement; nonetheless, we were willing to remove it in order to assuage your concerns.
It is also worth noting that from the outset the article put on record your position that you deny being 'transphobic', and quotes you directly as follows:
'I do [believe in gender dysphoria] and it’s a very serious thing, but the current widening of the definition actually puts these people in danger. Real transexuals will not receive the help they need because they are being flooded by all sorts of different types.'

In summary, we are satisfied that neither the current nor the original versions of the article have breached the Editors' Code. Nevertheless, we appreciate you getting in touch and expressing your views, and trust that we have clearly set out our editorial position.

Yours sincerely 
Paul Hutchinson

Assistant Managing Editor, Metro

Jesse Singal wrote recently about how much effort it takes to respond to just one lie, so I won’t depress myself by going through the letter line by line, but a few things stood out that are typical corruptions of the truth.

I never ‘posed as a trans man’ in order to tell Colm O’Gorman off for his disgraceful behaviour towards the lesbians in the LGB Alliance. It was a line in my bio to try and fly under the radar of the people who report gender critical accounts. If I had been ‘posing’ as a trans man I would have tweeted more about going to the hospital.

As for the eugenics stuff, I’m not sure what else to call sterilising children who are gay and autistic. Perhaps the Metro style guide has a different take on the matter but I think it’s more likely they just ignored the story. In their defence, maybe there wasn’t much on Wikipedia about it.

On that point, I found it interesting that Metro staffers rely so much on Wikipedia. Here’s one reason that’s not such a great idea.

I wrote back to Paul and asked him whether these men on the dating app Her were lesbians. My original point, of course, was to show how homophobia, especially towards lesbians, was being normalised and celebrated in supposedly ‘queer’ spaces.

His response?

“It is unclear how this question relates to your complaint.”