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Today I am one of the most loathed figures on the internet. My speaking events have been cancelled. I have been sued. The police have visited my home and former friends have turned their backs on me.

Yet I’m the man who wrote the much-loved Father Ted! Why is it that I’ve become so suddenly unpopular? The thought crime for which I have been tried and found guilty is that I believe biological reality exists.

I believe women are females. I believe everyone should be able to present themselves as they wish but that women’s hard-won rights must not be compromised for the benefit of men suffering body dysphoria – which is to say men who feel they are stuck in the wrong body.

Most of all, I believe that gender ideology, in its currently fashionable form, is dangerous, incoherent nonsense.

I believe trans people –those unfortunate enough to suffer body dysphoria – are having their condition exploited and trivialised by abusive, controlling and authoritarian trans rights activists. And I think women and children are suffering because of it.

Worst of all, I say so, loudly. This makes me Public Enemy No 1.

I make my arguments forcefully because I’m concerned, sometimes with humour because I’m a comedy writer and often while cursing, because I’m Irish. It’s the humour they hate most. It’s kryptonite to these activists.

I’m 51 and I’ve never seen anything like the authoritarianism on display, the desperate desire to shut down the conversation. No genuine civil-rights movement advances in secret but this one has as one of its mantras ‘NO DEBATE’.

So, while we are in a world where male sexual offenders in bad wigs assault female prisoners, where rape crisis centres are defunded because they won’t admit men and where a bloke in a full beard tells schoolchildren that he’s a lesbian, we’re informed with venomous aggression that we may not talk about any of it.

No debate? Oh, there’s going to be a debate all right.

The popular opinion among my detractors is that I’m cherry-picking negative stories to mask a hatred of trans people. In fact, I first came to this debate because I saw women being bullied, losing their jobs and suffering the most intense online harassment I’d ever seen, and I wanted to stand beside them.

Also, as a writer, I couldn’t watch as one of the most important words in the English language, the word ‘woman’, was being changed against the will of those whom it defined.

Suddenly, everywhere you looked, women were being erased, insulted or endangered. Amnesty referring to pregnant women as ‘pregnant people’. Productions of The Vagina Monologues closing because they excluded ‘women who don’t have vaginas’. Women’s toilets disappearing from public life – even though they were introduced to ensure that women could have a public life.

Worst of all, I saw the lack of compassion or empathy for the vulnerable women who are often at the sharp end of the new Gender Theocracy.

The four women attacked in prison by a male sex offender in 2018 (who everyone had to call ‘Karen’ or they were committing a hate crime) are four women too many.

Women in prison often have a history of abuse at the hands of men. Whatever they’ve done, they are entitled to safety from the type of men who helped put them there.

Rational people – and that includes rational trans people – are dismayed by those who have now taken over trans activism.

Body dysphoria is no longer seen as central or even necessary for those who decide to adopt a so-called trans identity.

To see just how elastic and meaningless the word ‘trans’ has become, one only has to look at the definition adopted by the Stonewall lobby group: ‘Trans people may describe themselves using one or more of a wide variety of terms, including (but not limited to) transgender, transsexual, gender-queer (GQ), gender-fluid, non-binary, gender-variant, crossdresser, genderless, agender, nongender, third gender, bi-gender, trans man, trans woman, trans masculine, trans feminine and neutrois.’

Neutrois, I discovered, literally just means ‘androgynous’. So androgynous people are trans. That’ll be news to Bake Off presenter Noel Fielding.

Under Stonewall’s definition, everyone is trans, and no one is. A cross-dresser such as banker Philip Bunce, who adopts the female persona ‘Pippa’ for only a few days every week, nevertheless receives the honour of being named by the Financial Times as one of its top 100 women in business.

This was seen as progress, a step forward for women. In fact, it is an insult to women and to those suffering from body dysphoria.

In order to maintain the fantasy that our sex is unconnected to our bodies, the truth must be bent and beaten in the fire of academic language. That is why trans activists talk about sex being ‘assigned at birth’ – an abuse of language, if ever I heard one.

Is the sex of a newborn ‘assigned’ by a capricious midwife? Of course not. Rather it is observed and recorded as a matter of fact.

‘Assigned’ is one of the more successful hijackings of English achieved by gender ideologues, yet you will hear it parroted across many organisations from the NHS to the BBC – the sort of institution where you really would expect people to know better.

Before I knew how toxic trans rights activism was, I wrote an episode of my Channel 4 sitcom The IT Crowd with a trans character. The response was more venomous than I was used to, but as bad as it was, at least I was allowed to write it. That was in 2013.

In 2020, such an episode would never air. And that is because the first generation who didn’t go out to play have grown up to become clones of Mary Whitehouse. The new puritans.

I am not new to outrage. There was fury on the part of some when we first released Father Ted but the executives we had were made of strong stuff and ignored the attacks. The same goes for The IT Crowd, Brass Eye, Black Books, and I guess a few comedies I haven’t worked on.

I’m worried we’re entering an era of pre-chewed, prissy art that offends no one. But it’s not comedy writers who are the victims of all this: it is women who are the real casualties.

Gender ideology is a disaster for women. They are expected to make room for men in their changing rooms and their safe spaces.

They are being robbed of the language to describe their reality by unintelligible academic ‘gender experts’, by teenagers encouraging each other online, by parents who are profoundly mistaken, and by well-meaning people who, confused by the ever-changing terminology, still believe they are defending what used to be called transsexuals.

All these forces working together are, whether they know it or not, providing a smokescreen for fetishists, conmen and misogynists to pursue their own agenda.

In years to come, we will look back at this scandal, at the ruined bodies, the confused crime statistics, the weakening of safeguarding and the rollback of women’s rights and wonder how it was left to go on for so long.

This legislation may be the most ominous attack on "free speech" and Christianity since the founding of our nation. The silence of the mainstream media multiplies that concern. It suggests that many of our most powerful leaders want these bills passed behind closed doors, freed from any public accountability. Even so, the public is awakening to the facts.

On April 25, 2007, a House of Representatives committee approved a measure to add homosexuality to the list of groups "protected" by hate crimes laws. The Senate has prepared a twin bill, S. 1105. Except for the addition of the name Matthew Shepard, its title is the same.

Matthew Shepard? Few Americans could miss the shocking details of this young homosexual's horrible death in 1998. The media published that story 3007 times -- 45 times in the New York Times alone. It made Matthew a martyr for the cause of gay rights, hate-crimes legislation, and anti-Christian sentiment.

Did you read about Jesse Dirkhising's torture and murder at the hands of two homosexual lovers eleven months later? Probably not. The thirteen-year-old boy was drugged, strapped down, sodomized, tortured, and killed by two adults living in an apartment that 'reeked of excrement and was littered with drug paraphernalia. Like Matthew's murder, it was a horrible crime -- almost unfit to print. But that's not why most newspapers across the country refused to tell the story. The real reason? It didn't fit their agenda! It wasn't politically correct!

Nor is the Bible. Its unchanging standards can't be adapted to the new global guidelines for holistic spirituality and politically correct tolerance. So when eleven Christians shared the gospel as well as warning about homosexuality during Philadelphia's 2004 homosexual 'OutFest', they were promptly arrested and temporarily "charged under [Pennsylvania's] hate crimes legislation."

Christians aren't the only ones vulnerable. On April 11, a Maine Middle School student did something really foolish on a dare: He put some ham -- considered "unclean" by Muslims -- on a cafeteria table occupied by Muslim students. As punishment, the school suspended him. School principal, Maureen Lachapelle, sent a report of this incident to the Attorney General's office and to the County District Attorney because the ham incident was perceived as a hate/bias crime.

A crime? Does this line up with the fast-track Hate Crimes Bill in Congress? And if so, why? A quick review of HR 1592 might, at first, suggest a negative answer. Section 7(2), like the corresponding Senate Bill, defines "Hate crime acts" as:

(A) In general. Whoever, whether or not acting under color of law, in any circumstance described in subparagraph (B), willfully causes bodily injury to any person or, through the use of fire, a firearm, or an explosive or incendiary device, attempts to cause bodily injury to any person, because of the actual or perceived religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability of any person"

But, you might argue, the boy neither caused nor intended "bodily injury."

True! But consider another key word, one that's part of the title in both bills. That all-important word is "prevention!" We're looking at the "Hate Crimes Prevention Act," not simply a law against "hate crimes." And the concept of prevention (or pre-emption) is open-ended. Its wide range of interpretations could be used in almost any situation to silence offending voices and to intimidate critics of useful "protected" groups such as homosexuals and Muslims -- long before any signs of actual violence.

For example, a Canadian pastor was concerned about the overt promotion of Islam at a local high school. It not only distributed copies of the Quran, it also offered Muslim students a room for prayer during school hours. Of course, Christian and Jewish students had no such "freedom." But when Pastor Mark Harding began handing out leaflets protesting this strange favoritism, he was charged with having "willfully promoted hatred." Having violated a new Canadian hate-crimes law, he was sentenced to 340 hours of "community service" at the Islamic Society of North America.

Pastor Harding claimed to be motivated by love for Muslim students, not hate. According to worldnetdaily.com, he expressed that love in a recorded phone call. Yet his own phone was swamped with more than three thousand real hate calls, including many death threats. When his trial began, the police protected him from the crowds of Muslims chanting "Infidels, you will burn in hell."

What is going on? Who is behind this unequal and borderless "protection" system?

THE UN "CULTURE OF PREVENTION"

The UN has established a massive, worldwide, inter-agency program of "prevention." Through the coordinated efforts of UNESCO, The World Health Organization, The World Bank and countless other UN agencies, its agenda is transforming not only beliefs and values everywhere, but also schools, churches, communities and nations. Words like "war" and "genocide" have been used for more than fifty years to persuade the world to participate in "peace-building" ventures that would create a climate of prevention everywhere. This cultural atmosphere is defined by UN declarations such as UNESCO's Declaration on Tolerance and Declaration of Principles on Religion in a Culture of Peace.

The UN policy of prevention requires "lifelong learning," re-learning, group-learning and service-learning. Continual progress must be measured through unceasing assessments that monitor compliance with new global standards for human resource development. What counts is progress toward the envisioned solidarity -- a global community where no one takes a stand contrary to UN ideology -- and where everyone is willing to compromise their beliefs, seek common ground, and flow with the group consensus.

While Biblical Christianity hinders such universal solidarity, the war against "hate" supports it. After all, it provides the incentive needed to intimidate and persuade the masses that they must change and conform.

In 1999, the United Nations published a pamphlet by Secretary-General Kofi Annan titled, "Facing the Humanitarian Challenge: Towards a Culture of Prevention." In it, Mr. Annan states: "...the common thread running through almost all conflict prevention policies is the need to pursue what we in the United Nations refer to as good governance. In practice, good governance involves promoting the rule of law, tolerance of minority and opposition groups.... Above all, good governance means respect for human rights...
[See Whose Rights?]

"Long-term prevention strategies, in addressing the root causes of conflict, seek to prevent destructive conflicts from arising in the first place. They embrace the same holistic approach to prevention that characterizes post-conflict peace-building...."

Do you wonder what he means by a holistic approach? It has to do with the vision of unity, wholism, solidarity, interconnectedness, or -- as the new global management puts it -- a systems approach based on "General Systems Theory." It tolerates no Christian "separatist" views.
As Al Gore said at a 1992 Communitarian Conference, "Seeing ourselves as separate is the central problem in our political thinking."

But "peace-building" implies more specific action than simply a holistic approach. An UNESCO publication I picked up in Istanbul during the 1996 UN Conference on Human Settlements (See Habitat II) clarifies a broader issue. Ponder the following excerpts from Our Creative Diversity: Report on the World Commission on Culture and Development.The first paragraph was written by former UN Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar: "An ounce of prevention is better than a ton of punishment.... Imagination, innovation, vision and creativity are required.... It means an open mind, and open heart and a readiness to seek fresh definitions, reconcile old opposites, and help draw new mental maps."

"Universalism is the fundamental principle of a global ethics."

"Religion... has affected and sometimes poisoned the relations between majorities and minorities.... Extreme doctrinaire views[Biblical Christianity?] look to an imagined past, seen as both simpler and more stable, thus preparing the ground not only for a variety of overtly violent acts but also for the intimidation of individuals and indeed entire communities in matters of thought, behavior and belief, coercing them into accepting a single 'orthodox' point of view.... The challenge today, as in the past is to... distinguish between the beliefs and activities of the peaceful majority... and a minority of extremists...."

"PREVENTION" AS A PLOY TO SILENCE CHRISTIANS

Some of the same warnings were sounded by the respective founding directors of both UNESCO (Julian Huxley) and the World Health Organization (Dr. Brock Chisholm). Both were determined to wipe out the "poisonous certainties" of Biblical Christianity in their quest for UN solidarity. Notice Dr. Chisholm's emphasis on prevention back in 1946:

"We must... find and take sure steps to prevent wars in the future.... The re-interpretation and eventually eradication of the concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child training... these are the belated objectives of practically all effective psychotherapy.... The pretense is made [by uncompromising Christians who cling to old standards] that to do away with right and wrong would produce uncivilized people, immorality, lawlessness and social chaos....

"When [infectious diseases] were attacked at the preventative level, some martyrs had to be sacrificed to the cause of humanity, because reactionary forces fought back.... The problem is no longer the germ of diphtheria, but rather the attitudes of parents who are incapable of accepting and using proven knowledge for the protection of their children. Surely the training of children in home and schools should be of at least as great public concern as their vaccination.... [See Homosexuals brainwashing our children in elementary schools]

"For the very survival of large parts of the human race, world understanding, tolerance, and forbearance have become absolutely essential.... If it cannot be done gently, it may have to be done roughly or even violently."

Today, more than half a century later, the world is rapidly conforming to this UN agenda touted by Chisholm and Huxley in the 1940s. The global network of "lifelong learning" aims to prevent anything that would hinder "positive" collective thinking. Few notice how effectively its tentacles now reach into community [mental] health programs in over 130 nations around the world.