How the green-ink brigade is destroying the arts

I’m often asked why Channel 4 recently banned an episode of my show The IT Crowd because of ‘transphobia’. I blame spell check. Before the internet, people who sent in crazy, entitled, demanding complaints were known as the ‘green ink brigade’ because of their tendency to write letters in what they thought were attention-grabbing colours. These same lunatics are now taken seriously because spell check means they no longer confuse ‘there’, ‘they’re’, ‘their’ and ‘antelope’. It’s still the same crazies, but these days they’re on Twitter and jumpy executives carry out their every wish. A Sydney production of the musical Hedwig and The Angry Inch was cancelled because the lead actor is a bisexual man rather than the trans survivor of a botched cross-sex operation the part requires. Anne Hathaway had to apologise to people with ‘limb differences’ because of the new film of The Witches. Halle Berry had to say sorry just for considering a role as a trans person even though she didn’t take it. It would be funny if it were fictional. The arts have no chance if the mob influences the creative process. Any creative person is in the business of giving people what they do not know they want. Once you let the green ink brigade into the editing room, you’ll never get them out.

Simply to preserve my own mental health, I have become obsessed with proving that people are, at heart, essentially good and that more often than not they would prefer to do the right thing. To this end, I’ve made it my mission to explain to confused fence-sitters what’s actually going on in the gender identity debate. My hope is that once everyone sees how serious the situation is — a day that came a little closer this week thanks to Keira Bell’s victory over the Tavistock — they will eventually feel, as J.K.