Isla Bryson, formerly Adam Graham, has been found guilty of raping two women prior to claiming to be a transgender woman once the trial began at the Glasgow High Court in 2020.
This week, 31-year-old Isla Bryson was found guilty of two rapes in 2016 and 2019 while known as Adam Graham. Though Bryson initially appeared in court in July of 2019 as a male, at the start of the trial the convicted rapist claimed to be a transgender woman and reported to be taking body altering hormones and seeking a gender reassignment surgery.
During the trial, the sex offender told the court that: “I obviously want all the surgery that the NHS can provide”.
Bryson’s lawyer, KC Edward Targowski even attempted to use the transition process to acquit the charges against his client, who denied wrongdoing, telling the court: “If you accept that evidence, that she is transitioning, that she is aiming to continue on that path to becoming female gender, that goes a long way to acquitting her of these charges.”
The defendant went on to tell jurors that Adam Graham was now “her dead name,” explaining that it is the name “a transgender person was given at birth and no longer uses upon transitioning,” the Daily Mail reported.
Bryson claimed to have been suffering from gender issues since the age of four, however, only began transitioning after the criminal case was put forward. There was also no evidence put forward that Bryson had obtained a legal gender recognition certificate.
Nevertheless, the convicted rapist will reportedly continued to be held at the Cornton Vale women’s prison in a segregation unit used to protect the safety of certain inmates or to protect other prisoners from them. Should a risk assessment find that the convicted rapist does not pose a threat to the women in the prison, a move into the general population is possible.
Commenting on the decision to keep Bryson in a female prison, Tory MP Miriam Cates said: “It is almost impossible to believe that in a civilised society a man convicted of raping two women can be remanded in a women’s prison.”
The case overall was also criticised by Scottish Conservative shadow community safety minister Russell Findlay, who said: “This rapist decided that he was no longer a man only after appearing in court on a rape charge.
“We now have the utterly perverse situation where a Scottish court refers to someone who says he identifies as female using “her penis” to rape two vulnerable women.
“We warned of the inevitability of this happening if the SNP’s gender self-ID law passed, but for it to have become reality is deeply worrying and an affront to the victims.”
Last week, the attempt by the locally governing far-left separatist Scottish National Party (SNP) of Nicola Sturgeon had its Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill blocked by the government in Westminster. The bill would have allowed anyone over the age of 16-years-old to change their gender. Aside from child safeguarding issues, others have warned that a system of self-identification could wreak havoc on the prison system, which currently assesses inmates on a case-by-case basis.
Indeed, in 2015, the Parliament was warned by then-President of the British Association of Gender Identity Specialists Dr James Barrett that there is a “plethora of prison intelligence suggesting” that a “driving force” behind male sexual offenders identifying as female was in order to “make subsequent sexual offending very much easier”.
In a notable example, Karen White, a convicted rapist previously known as Stephen Wood, was convicted of sexually assaulting several female inmates after being transferred to a women’s prison after identifying as female.
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
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