Irish Comedian Graham Linehan urged Congress to use “every diplomatic lever” available to force the United Kingdom to enforce a court ruling on the legal definition of a woman and warned about the dangers of censorship as he testified before the House on Wednesday morning.
Speaking during a House Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday, Linehan, whose arrest in London last year over social media posts regarding transgender people sparked a debate over free speech, also pushed for protections to prevent institutional retaliation as a way of protecting the First Amendment.
“People from all walks of life are being silenced by the institutions that license and employ them,” Linehan said in the hearing. “We need new whistleblower protections for the digital age. If the government will not defend dissenters from institutional retaliation and mob rule, then what is the First Amendment for? That’s not an abstract question.”
Speaking about an April 2025 ruling from the U.K. Supreme Court, Linehan urged Congress to use its diplomatic power to get the U.K. government to enforce the ruling on biological sex.
“Women just won a landmark case confirming that sex means biological sex,” he said. “The guidance to enforce it has been written. And the Minister for Women and Equalities has blocked it for months — calling it ‘trans-exclusive.’”
Linehan, the writer of sitcoms Father Ted and The IT Crowd, was arrested in September 2025 by five police officers at London’s Heathrow Airport after returning on a flight from Arizona. The former comedian wrote in his Substack post that the officers claimed he was arrested over three X posts containing anti-transgender rhetoric.
The U.K. has granted freedom of speech as a qualified right, instead of an absolute right, meaning it can be subject to restrictions.
In his testimony, Linehan explained to the committee that he has lost his job and marriage for sharing his anti-trans activism prior to his arrest and was forced to move away from his home country due to “harassment campaigns.”
Linehan’s testimony on Capitol Hill comes after Vice President JD Vance spoke out against European democracies last year, saying the greatest threat they face is from “within” over the stifling of free speech and migration. Vance argued threats were within “basic liberties of religious Britons, in particular.”
“In Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat,” Vance said at the Munich Security Conference.
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Democrats on the committee took an aggressive approach, pushing back during the hearing, bringing American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota Executive Director Deepinder Mayell as a witness to outline his experience of what Democrats deem as a violation of the First Amendment in Minnesota over the protests against ICE.
“We’re having another hearing about the imaginary threat to the transphobic material of Irish comedians against the European Union and we can’t seem to have a hearing about ICE agents shooting Americans in the face for exercising their First Amendment rights,” ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said in the hearing.