Graham Linehan, creator of sitcoms and casualty of trans activism, has finally arrived Down Under. He almost didn’t make it. When he arrived at Heathrow Airport in London to catch his flight to Perth, he was told that the Australian government had not approved his visa, so he flew to New Zealand instead.

A visitor’s visa to Australia should take around 24 hours to process. In Linehan’s case, it took several weeks. Could it be that the Department of Home Affairs was just really busy? That’s possible, given the record number of migrants arriving in Australia. But it is also possible that there was some political footwork by a Labor government that will bend over backwards to appease Woke activists. Within hours after Linehan appeared on Sky News Australia’s Bolt Report discussing the mysterious delay in his visa, it was issued. Weird.

What’s important is that he is finally here. His trip was organised by the Free Speech Union of Australia and will include a number of speaking events across all major cities, now starting in Melbourne. He will be delivering comedy masterclasses and publicising his new book, Tough Crowd. The first event held was a smashing success.

Linehan started his career as a music journalist in his native Ireland before moving to London and trying his hand at comedy writing. Throughout his career he has written and directed beloved sitcoms including Father Ted, Black Books, and The IT Crowd, among others. His style of comedy can aptly be described as sardonic.

One episode of The IT Crowd featured a scene in which a male character breaks up with his girlfriend after discovering that she used to be a he. The two get into an epic and bloody fight, with the trans woman proving to be … shall we say … unusually resilient. Like clockwork, Woke activists subsequently labelled the scene ‘transphobic’ and unleashed a Hellstorm upon him.

Graham took a principled stance to defend women and women’s spaces, the effects of which are catastrophically described in Tough Crowd. At every opportunity, he spoke up against the erasure of women and medicalised gender transitioning in children. He lost his marriage in part because, ostensibly, it would seem that wives are not too thrilled about police showing up at the doorstep to investigate their husbands for ‘hate speech’, nor of becoming targets of trans activists. He also lost his career, yet another factor that contributed to the breakdown of his marriage. Many of his so-called ‘friends’ in show business ran for cover when he had become a pariah. It was the perfect storm: work dried up, Covid hit, his marriage failed, and he was viciously bullied by trans rights activists.

There is more than one irony in Graham’s story, but one really stands out.

Woke activists are constantly railing against ‘toxic’ masculinity, which is taken to refer to the callous aggression that men direct toward women. When Graham then decided to literally sacrifice everything that matters to his life in order to protect women and children – the very antithesis of toxicity – he was brutally attacked.

Someday, and that day may already be here, Graham will be vindicated. The WPATH files, a recently leaked trove of documents from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, demonstrate unambiguously that children with gender dysphoria are being injured by medicalised ‘treatments’ that are ideologically being driven by trans rights activists. The tide is turning, and this is in no small part attributable to the bravery of people like Graham.

The situation in Australia is dire and we desperately need people like Graham with common sense. Last week, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner sent a removal notice to a Canadian citizen whose Twitter post suggested that a trans-male activist was a woman. If Twitter fails to remove the post, it will cop an almost $800,000 fine. One might wonder on what basis Australia’s eSafety Commissioner can censor the speech of a Canadian…

And so, Mr Linehan, on behalf of the people of Australia, I welcome you to our country. In the wake of mass lockdowns, a divisive referendum, and a crumbling economy, we could use a good laugh.