There’s an episode of The IT Crowd – which is one of the top three sit-coms of all time (the others being Fawlty Towers and Frasier obviously) – in which one of the characters, Jen, gets involved in a social media furore. Before long, she is branded a bigot and hateful and a Hitler and goes on social media to try to explain herself. Big mistake. In the words of her colleague Roy: “Twitter is the perfect place to explain a complex situation!” (he was being sarcastic obviously).

Written by Graham Linehan (who also created Father Ted), that episode of The IT Crowd about social media is now about ten years old, which suggests that even then Graham could see what the internet was doing to public discourse but couldn’t yet see what the internet would do to him. As you probably know, he expressed strong opinions on self-identification for trans people and the anger online consumed pretty much everything. The Father Ted musical he was working on was cancelled, his marriage broke down, his mental health suffered and, like his character Jen, he was branded a bigot and hateful and a Hitler.

Interestingly though, not only did Graham become a figure of hate because of his opinions, he also became something of a heroic figure for campaigners against self-ID, which explains why, when I told people I was going to be speaking to Graham, there were two reactions: “Graham Linehan, we love him!” and “Graham Linehan, we hate him!” Like everything else, the trans issue has been reduced to two sides throwing excrement at each other, which rather proves Graham’s point about Twitter in particular being unable to cope with a complex situation.

As for my own personal thoughts on Graham, they're tricky I suppose, mainly because I started out supportive of self-ID (with all the unpleasant certainty I’ve criticised others for having) but have increasingly had doubts the more I’ve spoken to people on both sides. Also, because I’m a bit of a woose who always says please and thankyou, I sometimes think the unapologetic, some might say aggressive, way Graham expresses himself online could be counter-productive. He is, in his own words, a big, stubborn, straight white man, and the opinions of big, stubborn, straight white men have rather gone out of fashion recently.

To be fair to Graham, when I asked him about the in-your-face way he talks online, he admitted to some doubts. For example, he said he probably shouldn’t have called David Tennant a “groomer” for wearing a T-shirt saying “leave trans kids along you freaks”, although he did also ask why Tennant is allowed to use the word “freaks” and he isn’t allowed to argue against children being, in his view, medically mutilated and I see his point. However, he also told me he couldn’t pretend that his personality had nothing to do with his situation. In other words, it’s a complex picture, the kind that Twitter can’t deal with.

Assessing exactly where we are in the debate is also complex, particularly when seen through a Scottish lens. The Scottish Government was an early adopter and supporter of self-ID, but the case of Scottish prisoner Isla Bryson helped bring an end to the self-ID bill and Linehan thinks it could continue to have a critical influence. That notorious picture of Bryson in a blonde wig and tight leggings was “unequivocal”, he says, and a reminder that most men with a trans identity have not had surgery. He says it’s a reminder too that many people still believe that, once he leaves prison, Bryson should be able to go into any female space.

There’s part of me here that thinks some kind of compromise can still be found, although gender-critical feminists tell me talk of compromise is pathetic because men who identify as trans can either come into female spaces or they can’t and a wishy-washy compromise that lets some of them in some of the time is not acceptable. This is the position campaigners like Linehan hold and that’s fair enough, although I think they’re still quite a long way off from convincing the political class that they’re right and worth supporting.

But what is heartening, and Linehan has seen this for himself, is that – slowly, one by one, but possibly now gathering momentum – people who’ve occupied the middle ground are starting to question the attacks on people like Linehan. He says folk come up to him more and more and shake his hand or buy him a beer; he told me about two Edinburgh hipsters for example who gave him a friendly nod in the street recently, something he says hasn’t regularly happened since the days of Father Ted. We talked about it maybe being a sign that Scotland is changing. Maybe Scotland is calming down a bit and starting to look at the issue in a more careful and nuanced way.

I say maybe because there’s obviously still a lot of fire to burn out in the debate, and I can’t yet see a route to the compromise I crave (if it exists) or any other obvious solution. And while Linehan says there are signs gender identity has started to unravel, such as the imminent closure of the Tavistock clinic, he wishes more people would publicly express their doubts. The writer John Boyne, who laid into Linehan on the trans issue, apologised saying “you were right and I was wrong” and the more that happens, the more the middle will expand and the behaviour of the extremes will be challenged.

Which leads us back to the behaviour Linehan was highlighting in that old episode of The IT Crowd: the tendency of activists to accuse their opponents of bigotry, hatred and being a Hitler. Linehan told me that the reason pro-trans activism is attractive is that it issues its supporters with a series of talking points that sound intelligent but which are actually "self-germinating cliches": trans women are women, trans people have always been with us, and so on. And the problem as Linehan sees it is that you can’t break through those cliches because once they start to break down as a debating tool, the activists rush to the charge of bigotry. It’s an impossible conversation, he says.

However, it’s an impossible conversation we must have, because the more that reasonable, intelligent people express their doubts, the harder it’s going to be to throw words like “bigot” and “hate” around. Linehan told me he believes the vast majority of people do not accept the tenets of trans activism but that nice people nodded along in the early stages because it seemed like the right thing to do. He may be right.

I think he may be right as well that change is in the air. I can certainly feel my own views shifting and my concerns growing, for example, that a little boy who likes dolls and might grow up gay is now more likely to find himself guided down the trans route. It is not unreasonable, or bigoted, or hateful, to express such a concern, and hopefully, bit by bit, and thanks in large part to campaigners like Linehan, more and more of us are starting to accept that.