The Scottish Prison Service (SPS) is abandoning First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s policy of allocating convicts according to their gender identity.
The move comes as transgenderism is a hot-button issue in Scottish politics, with the British central government, led by the Conservative (Tory) Party, making a rare use of its reserve powers to block an attempt by the Scottish Government, led by the left-separatist Scottish National Party (SNP) and Scottish Greens, to make it easier for people to “self-identify” as a gender not in alignment with their biological sex.
The law had been controversial before the Scottish Government attempted to pass it via Scotland’s devolved legislature — roughly equivalent to a State legislature in the U.S. — with figures including Harry Potter author JK Rowling warning it would grant dangerous “intact males” still in possession of their penises greater access to women-only spaces, including hospital wards, abuse shelters, and prisons.
These warnings appeared to be borne out as the furore around Westminster blocking the law was still raging, as a convicted double rapist going by “Isla Bryson” but a shaven-headed male named Adam Graham when their trial began was transferred to a women’s prison.
Even Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister and leader of the SNP, appeared to agree that this was a bridge too far, with Bryson/Graham being removed from the prison and a pause on the transfer of dangerous transgender convicts being announced — but the Scottish Prison Service has now gone further and discarded much more of her earlier policy, according to a Telegraph report.
While the Scottish Government only wanted to stop trans convicts “with any history of violence against women” being moved into women’s facilities, the SPS will “initially” place all such criminals, as well as suspects held on remand, “in an establishment commensurate with their birth gender” — although this may change following a risk assessment and government ministers may approve the transfer of even violent inmates in “exceptional circumstances”.
The Bryson/Graham case has not been the only incident which may have sharpened officials’ minds in recent months, with it emerging last year that a paedophile going by Katie Dolatowski who was convicted in Scotland managed to infiltrate a shelter for abused women and their children in England for months, and an older case involving a killer transwoman being supplied with a dummy (pacifier) by the SPS after identifying as a baby being revisited by the press and causing substantial embarrassment.
Scandals involving dangerous trans people are not unknown in Conservative-run England, however, with former prisons minister Rory Stewart having revealed that he was made aware of cases in which trans prisoners raped female staff during his time in office, and a National Health Service (NHS) England trust being criticised in Parliament for apparently covering up the rape of a patient by a trans person in what should have been a single-sex ward.