Mick Hartley

Janice Turner in the Times – Feminists have long warned of the dangers of male-bodied rapists in women’s jails and Scotland proves them right:

Mark it in your diary: the bicentenary of the Gaols Act 1823. The work of the social reformer Elizabeth Fry, this landmark law mandated sex-segregated prisons with female inmates guarded by female wardens. When women were incarcerated among men, Fry observed, they were exploited, terrified and raped. She established a principle which became enshrined in international law, from UN protocols to the Geneva conventions. How, then, was history rewound, 200 years of evidence memory-holed, so that this week the double rapist Adam Graham was remanded in Cornton Vale women’s prison? How could a “robust” risk assessment by the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) conclude he was safe?

Exposed under the stark lights of the Scottish parliament was a decade of prison policy made covertly with zero regard for women. We learnt that a rapist could “transition” (in this case, merely wear a blonde wig) after being charged, call himself “Isla Bryson”, have his lawyer argue he’s a “vulnerable woman”, compel his female victims to call him “she” and journalists to write about “her penis”, then be locked up with vulnerable women like those he raped. Adam Graham is the reductio ad absurdum of the idea that a man is a woman solely on his say-so.

Nicola Sturgeon has always dismissed feminist concerns about gender identity overwriting biological sex as “not valid”. But after a public outcry she was forced to send Graham to a men’s prison. The first minister has also argued that predatory men would never exploit the self-ID law she rammed through last month. In fact, Graham showed they don’t need to. Already in Scottish women’s jails are Katie Dolatowski, a male paedophile, and Sophie Eastwood (formerly Daniel), who strangled a cellmate with shoelaces. Scotland dispensed with Elizabeth Fry’s first principle years ago.

Indeed, trans activists strategically targeted prison policy. James Morton, head of the Scottish Trans Alliance, formulated the SPS’s rules. By enabling the service “to include trans women as women on a self-declaration basis within very challenging circumstances”, he wrote, “we would be able to ensure all other public services do likewise”. In other words, if horrible things happen to female prisoners, no one will find out (or even care), so we can “prove” to the NHS or schools that self-ID is risk-free.

In England and Wales, a 2015 government review of trans prisoner management consulted the trans lobby group Gendered Intelligence. Neither here nor in Scotland was evidence taken from female inmates, charities such as Women in Prison or female warders who’d have to search much stronger, male-bodied prisoners. Nor was thought given to privacy in sleeping arrangements or showers. (In a 2021 judicial review, the High Court noted women “suffer fear and acute anxiety” sharing space with fully intact male prisoners.)

Female inmates, who make up just 4 per cent of the prison population, are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. They’re inside for shoplifting, drug offences or unpaid fines yet 80 per cent have experienced sexual or physical abuse from men. Most serve short sentences which pointlessly devastate families, putting children in care. Those most alarmed by women being housed with male-bodied offenders are campaigners against incarceration such as Frances Crook, former head of the Howard League for Penal Reform.

The shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, who has long swerved gender questions, ventured this week that women prisoners are protected under the single-sex exemptions of the Equality Act. But she’s mistaken: these don’t, unbelievably, apply to prisons. In 2015, when rules were relaxed to allow genitally intact and legally male felons into women’s prisons, Dr James Barrett, president of the British Association of Gender Identity Specialists, warned parliament’s women and equalities committee this was ripe for exploitation. He described “a tide of referrals of patients in prison serving long or indeterminate sentences for serious sexual offences”. He said the reasons were obvious: women’s prisons are nicer, inmates believe a female persona would play well with parole boards, but mainly there was “a plethora of prison intelligence” that the driving force “was a desire to make subsequent sexual offending very much easier”. The chairwoman, Maria Miller, ignored him.

After Karen White, a convicted male sex offender, assaulted two women in New Hall prison in 2018, rules were tightened. And this week Dominic Raab, the justice secretary, said in future no one with male genitals or who has committed a sex offence will be housed in a women’s jail. Whether this will include trans women holding gender recognition certificates (GRC), which mean they are assessed as female, is unclear.

An easy political win for the Tories. But women and trans people deserve prison policy which respects their dignity and human rights. Currently a trans woman in the female estate may sometimes socialise only under extreme supervision, while a trans woman with a GRC in a men’s prison is legally female, so cannot freely use facilities. Both cases mean isolation and exclusion. One proposed solution, given the rising number of trans prisoners — 230 (160 trans women) in 2022, up from 197 a year earlier — is a specialist trans facility. This might mean trans prisoners housed a great distance from home and family. A better plan may be to improve vulnerable-prisoner units in the male estate. Trans women are at risk among men but so are gay, “effeminate”, physically small and very young prisoners. All would be safer in women’s prisons. But why should vulnerable female inmates be used as human shields?

Because that's the way it's always been done. But, thanks to the furore caused by this particular case, the whole charade of allowing men to become women by waving a piece of paper is beginning to be exposed as the absurdity it is. Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP are revealed as either idiots taken in by gender ideology or chancers trying to prove their progressive credentials in opposition to Westminster – or, possibly, both.