Irish comedy writer and activist, Graham Linehan, has told a US Congressional committee that “gender ideology and free speech cannot co-exist” and called for pressure to be put on the Irish government to open a debate on the 2015 Gender Recognition Act.
Linehan was speaking before the judiciary committee of the US House of Representatives who are looking at “Europe’s threat to American speech and innovation”. The Committee released a report this week saying that Regulators with Coimisiún na Meán worked with the EU and ‘biased fact-checkers’ in the period before Ireland’s 2024 and 2025 general election and presidential election, in order to disadvantage conservative or populist political parties
The Fr Ted writer, who has long been outspoken on controversies around transgender ideology, said that Irish women and girls were suffering the consequences of the provisions of the Gender Recognition Act. The legislation allows any person to change their sex by swearing a statement that they wish to live in a new “preferred gender”. No psychological assessments or medical interventions are required.
Linehan said that the Act had been “quietly passed while Irish people were celebrating their vote for marriage equality” and that there had been no public consultation or any referendum about the legislation.
Polling commissioned by campaign group The Countess in 2021 found that “fewer than one in five (17%) respondents agreed with the law as it currently stands that a person should be allowed to change their birth certificate as soon as they self-identify as the opposite sex” – while “34% thought it should be permitted once a person has partially or fully transitioned through hormone treatment and/or genital surgery.”
Linehan told the Congress that he had spent thirty years writing comedy for British television. “It was a career I loved. That career ended when I began noticing that women were losing their livelihoods, their social circles and even their freedom for defending rights won over a hundred years ago by the Suffragette movement,” he said.
“I looked into what these women were saying and could find nothing wrong with any of it. They believed, as I do, that single-sex spaces are essential for women’s privacy, dignity and safety. They believed that children should not undergo experimental medical treatment that ravages their health and shortens their lives. They believed that women have a right to fair sport. These were not extreme positions.”
He pointed to other artists who had lost careers and been investigated for saying they believed biological sex was immutable and defending single-sex spaces – and accused the British police of harassing him “for expressing views that the majority of the public share.
Warning against the UK police recording “non-crime hate incidents” against citizens who have broken no law, he said “these records appear on background checks. They affect employment. They create a chilling effect without a single prosecution.”
“But the state has also learned to let others do its work. When employers fire workers for protected speech, when banks close accounts, when publishers drop authors, when platforms suspend users – the government’s hands stay clean. The censorship happens. The state didn’t do it.”
“I want you to understand that gender ideology and free speech cannot coexist. You can hear the lie in the very language: trans woman meaning man. Trans man meaning woman. Trans healthcare meaning the opposite of healthcare. Trans rights meaning men’s demands. An ideology that tells lesbians they are bigoted for not accepting male partners is not progressive. It is homophobic,” he said, urging the Committee to “use every diplomatic lever you have to pressure the British government to implement its own Supreme Court ruling. ”
“Women just won a landmark case confirming that sex means biological sex. The guidance to enforce it has been written. And the Minister for Women and Equalities has blocked it for months – calling it ‘trans-exclusive’,” he said.
He also urged the Congressional panel to “put pressure on the Irish government to reopen the conversation it never had.”
“In 2015, while Irish people were celebrating their vote for marriage equality, the Gender Recognition Act was quietly passed – no public consultation, no referendum, no women’s rights organisations consulted,” he said.
“The public did not know what they were signing up for. They do now. The consequences are visible across Irish life: men in women’s prisons, men in women’s sport, children taught lies in their schools. Ireland is my country. Its women and girls deserve the debate they were denied,” Linehan said.
Also appearing before the Congressional Committee, Irish barrister Lorcán Price who is legal counsel with the Alliance Defending Freedom International, said that the EU had imposed “egregious fines” on X for alleged breaches of the Digital Services Act, fines he said were “imposed a little over two years after the legislation came into force” and “represent the first wave of enforcement actions in what will be a sustained attack on any company that chooses to uphold free speech on its platform.”
“The most shocking aspect of the EU’s censorship regime is the sheer extent of European hate speech laws, which censor legitimate political speech and quash dissent. Countries such as France, Germany, and the United Kingdom are engaged in a legal crackdown on speech in Europe, and U.S. companies have been dragooned into this campaign of suppression by legal fiat and regulatory pressure. Article 16 of the DSA prohibits “illegal content” online, thus what is illegal speech in one European Union member state becomes de facto illegal everywhere under the DSA,” he added.
Price said that “the EU wants to transform successful American companies into a free speech Stasi, making those businesses the censorship enforcers for the ruling elite of Europe—a group increasingly afraid of their own people speaking their minds.”
Dr. Päivi Räsänen, a member of the Finnish Parliament for the Christian Democrat Party since 1995, told the Committee that she had been investigated by police after she posted a tweet in 2019 expressing her “Christian beliefs about marriage and sexuality” which questioned her church leadership’s decision to participate in a Pride event.
“For this exercise of my free speech, I was investigated by the police and interrogated for more than thirteen hours,” she said.
“On 29 April 2021, the Finnish Prosecutor General, Raija Toiviainen, formally charged me with three counts of “agitation against a minority group” for publicly voicing my opinion on marriage and human sexuality in a 2004 pamphlet, for comments I made on a 2019 radio show, and for the tweet. Lutheran Bishop Juhana Pohjola was charged alongside me for publishing my pamphlet for the church. The crime of “agitation against a minority group” falls under the “war crimes and crimes against humanity” section in the Finnish criminal code and can carry up to two years of prison time. I did not insult or call for harm against anyone. I was being criminally charged for simply expressing convictions rooted in my faith and conscience,” she said.
Räsänen was acquitted but the case has been twice appealed by the prosecution and is now before the Supreme Court. “Even when courts ultimately acquit, our story shows how the process itself becomes the punishment. We have faced years of investigation, public scrutiny, and legal uncertainty. This creates a chilling effect, not just for Christians, but for everyone who holds views outside a narrow, state-approved consensus,” she said.