An evening in Austin with Graham Linehan and Meghan Murphy

It’s a telling commentary on our times that an Irish man and a Canadian woman have to go to Texas in order to honestly express themselves in public. But that’s how it played out on Thursday night at a suburban Austin “salon” that Cockburn attended. Cockburn, who also frequently travels to Texas to talk out his heterodox opinions, appreciated the hospitality of hostess Trish Morrison and her husband, who’s a catering paella chef, so the food is always good over there.  

The Irishman was Graham Linehan, creator of the sitcoms Father Ted and The IT Crowd, among others, and more recently an embattled participant in the transgender wars. Standing up for feminist ideals and losing all his friends in the process, Linehan said, was like “being a spider having his legs pulled off bit by bit.”  

Also in attendance was Canadian writer and journalist Meghan Murphy, founder of Feminist Current, and currently living as a kind of ideological refugee in Mexico. She discussed her “villain origin story” when, as a self-proclaimed socialist living in Vancouver, she stood up for an abused women’s shelter that refused to admit trans clients, which led to a shunning by her community and a five-year ban from Twitter. “I think women are the worst,” she said, sardonically. “The people who canceled me and libeled me, and the friends who said I can’t hang around you anymore, those were women.”  

Though both Linehan and Murphy have a reputation for humor, their lives have been very serious in recent years. Our evening’s laughs came mostly from Austin comic Arielle Issac Norman, who said, “I’m going to do some standup because it’s fun to have a bunch of TERFs in the same room.”  

“I believe there are just two genders,” Norman said. “Dog people and cat people. There are people who are into ferrets and snakes. But are they a different gender, or are they just autistic?” Another good zinger was “You know how trans women are women? Because they’re always attempting suicide.”  

Linehan described the transgender movement as a “middle-class revolution. I don’t think it’ll last because it’s unsustainable,” bemoaning the quality of modern music to appeal to young people and adding, “completely unintelligible academics and philosophers are the new rock stars.” Murphy said that trans mania, which may be on the wane, is “so unfortunate and so strange. How grotesque and irresponsible to tell your children that they’re in the wrong body. It’s like we’re Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, that we can stick body parts on each other and be whoever you want.”  

Also in attendance was Austin podcaster, comedian and Spectator columnist Bridget Phetasy, who said that comedy is impossible these days because “we all got on the bus to crazy town. There’s no straight man.” Bridget’s worry has “moved off the trans thing,” and she said that she thinks World War Three is possibly imminent and “all the based people are going to die in a rice paddy.”  

The striking thing about the salon was how little Linehan and Murphy talked. It was an encounter group for people who’ve deviated from the acceptable path. The two dozen or so attendees offered their own perspectives on matters, worried about the rise of “omnicause” progressives. Republicans, Democrats, libertarians and undecideds and undisclosed all fretted about the state of the world while vying for a bit of Papa Paella’s socarrat.   

Norman closed the evening with one of the best dirty jokes Cockburn has heard in a while. Discussing the latest advancements in bottom surgery, she said that now surgeons are deploy transplanted pieces of colon to allow lubrication in the vaginas of trans people. “You trade in your balls and your dick and get a wet ass pussy.”  

With that, everyone, Cockburn included, went home amused, stimulated and full.  

“I’ve never done a salon before,” Linehan said. “Maybe this is the way forward. Here I am, in an Austin living room.”