Submit Your Questions for Andrew Doyle
The creator of Titania McGrath and author of "The End of Woke" joins Beyond Gender
We’re interviewing Andrew Doyle (@andrewdoyle_com on X) this Tuesday. Andrew is a comedian, columnist, and playwright. He has a doctorate from Oxford in early Renaissance poetry and has written for Spiked, UnHerd, and The Spectator, and writes regularly on his Substack at andrewdoyle.org. He created and hosted Free Speech Nation on GB News from 2021 to 2024 and co-founded Comedy Unleashed.
In 2018 he created Titania McGrath, a satirical Twitter account parodying a “radical intersectionalist poet committed to feminism, social justice and armed peaceful protest.” The account has over 700,000 followers and has been suspended four times.
Andrew has written several books, including Free Speech and Why It Matters, The New Puritans, and The End of Woke. He is also the author, under the Titania McGrath persona, of the satirical books Woke: A Guide to Social Justice and My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism. He relocated to Arizona in 2024 to work with Rob Schneider’s production company No Apologies Media and is writing a sitcom with Graham Linehan.
He has argued that “those who advocate for gender identity ideology are fundamentally opposed to gay rights“ and has described so-called “gender-affirming care” as “the new gay conversion therapy.”
Andrew spoke at Genspect’s Bigger Picture 2024 conference in Lisbon and appeared in conversation with Stella:
What should we ask Andrew Doyle? Leave your questions in the comments.
I admire Andrew Doyle and his satire (Titania McGrath) and his book, The New Puritans, his championing of free speech and his robust critique of cancel culture by woke ideologists, especially gender ideologists.
That said, I question his free speech absolutism. In May 2021 I questioned Doyle on X about his statement on the Lucy Connolly case that “No one should be in prison for a tweet”. https://x.com/andrewdoyle_com/status/1925236044389081585
I have read the various arguments. Many of them are in the X thread at https://x.com/piersmorgan/status/1925826687679279491. There is the one about how “for all I care” means that Connolly didn’t intend to incite racial hatred, the one about how she deleted it within four hours, and expressed remorse, the one about how it was her lawyer’s fault that she pleaded guilty and the general question of over-reaction by the state in giving her a 31-month prison sentence.
Be that as it may, I would like to ask Doyle where he puts boundaries on free speech (beyond the usual “You can’t yell ‘Fire!’ in a dark and crowded cinema”). Consider the case of Joseph Goebbels, which I mentioned in my X post back to Doyle at the time (running the risk of invoking Godwin’s law).
On 9 November 1938, after the assassination of a German diplomat by a Jewish student in Paris, Goebbels called for "spontaneous demonstrations" against the Jews. When the pogrom, known as Kristallnacht, was over, rampaging mobs had killed 91 Jews, burned more than 900 synagogues, destroyed nearly 7,000 Jewish businesses, and caused 30,000 Jewish men to be deported to concentration camps. (Ref: www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/goebbels-biography)
Doyle was kind enough to reply to my post and wrote “No incitement in this case, so the analogy doesn’t work”. That was, again, the “for all I care” cop-out, a rather legalistic and hair-splitting distinction. If Connolly had said, “mass deportation now” and “set fire to all the... hotels [housing asylum seekers]”, would that have been good reason to send her to jail? Or, if not jail, a conviction and a fine? If Goebbels had called for "spontaneous demonstrations" against the Jews “for all I care”, would that have exonerated him?
Don’t get me wrong. I support free speech too. One of my favourite accounts in The New Puritans is Doyle’s defence of Mark Meechan who was fined for posting an online video of his girlfriend’s pugdog doing ‘Nazi salutes’. It was a ridiculous, comic gesture which had nothing to do with incitement to racial hatred: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-46959556. Furthermore, I’ve been subjected to cancel culture myself, having been expelled from the Green Party for speaking out about gender ideology in the party.
What I mean is that there are good boundaries to free speech and bad ones.
Judging by the Connolly case - and other instances, like his satirical comedy comparing ‘Jihad’ to a ‘yoga retreat’ - I fear that Doyle has become so entrenched in his opposition to Islam that he risks becoming an apologist for actual hatred of migrants.
Free speech is a complicated issue. I’ll finish with a case where the uncontained ‘free speech’ of a radical Islamic activist did spin out of control and resulted in the murder of a schoolteacher in Paris in October 2020. Samuel Paty was murdered by a Chechen-born radicalised Muslim, Abdoullakh Anzorov, after a lie by a 13-year-old schoolgirl was inflamed on social media and her father, Brahim Chnina, started an online campaign with the help of a radical Islamic activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui. They and others were convicted for their words and actions because what they did had the effect of incitement. www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgmk9ege84o
In light of Doyle’s statement that “No one should be in prison for a tweet”, what does he think of the French court putting eight people in prison for their hate campaign on social media in 2020?