Someone gave me this text version, and cant claim it is 100% accurate but posted in good faith:
Hello. My name is Graham Linehan. I 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.
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. But for holding them, I became the target of a series of harassment campaigns that cost me my career, my marriage, and eventually drove me from my home. I am not alone.
Let me tell you about Rosie Kay. She founded one of Britain's most acclaimed dance companies in 2004. It bore her name. In August 2021, she invited her dancers to a dinner party at her home. The conversation turned to sex and gender. She said she believed biological sex was immutable and defended single-sex spaces. Four dancers complained to her board. Four months of investigations followed. Her managers discussed sending her for "re-education" by activist groups. In December, she resigned from her own company. Seventeen years of work. Gone for stating a biological fact at her own dinner table.
For a decade, the British police have harassed me for expressing views that the majority of the public share. In ten years, not one person - not the police who arrested me, not the colleagues who condemned me, not the friends who turned away - has told any of us what we did wrong. Our accusers do not deal in arguments. No-one is able to point to the flaws in our analysis. We have simply been punished for objecting to fashionable yet incoherent orthodoxies.
When I could no longer make a living writing comedy, I returned to journalism, which was my first profession. I began telling the stories the BBC would not touch. I interviewed women on my YouTube channel, giving them voices and faces. On my Substack, my colleague published a weekly roundup of outrages. We called it "The War on Women." We were never at a loss for stories.
This committee is here to discuss threats to free speech in Europe. But I want to warn you: the Atlantic is not as wide as you think.
The First Amendment protects you from government censorship. It does not protect you from what the British government has learned to outsource. In the UK, police record "non-crime hate incidents" against citizens who have broken no law. 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.
In Britain, we have discovered that you can have formal free speech and no free speech at all. 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.
And I want to bring this home to Washington. Right now, a man named Hobby Bingham - who calls himself Princess Zoe Andromeda Love - is a registered sex offender in this country. He raped a twelve-year-old girl. He was transferred to the Washington Corrections Center for Women, where he raped a developmentally disabled female inmate. This is not happening in Britain. This is happening here. These are the policies we are being asked to accept. And just as in the United Kingdom, those who refuse pay with their livelihoods, their reputations, their peace of mind. I am asking this committee to do three things.
First: 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'. If the British government can ignore its own Supreme Court to appease gender activists, so can yours. Make clear that America is watching.
Second: 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. 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.
Third: recognise that free speech is not preserved simply by declining to arrest people. People from all walks of life are being silenced by the institutions that license and employ them. We need new whistleblower protections for the digital age. If government will not defend dissenters from institutional retaliation and mob rule, then what is the First Amendment for?
That's not an abstract question. The women who lost their careers, the children who lost their health, the athletes who lost fair competition - they did not have a voice in the decisions that failed them. I am asking you to give them one.
Thank you.