Mick Hartley

Rhona Hotchkiss, a former governor of Cornton Vale prison – the women's prison where double rapist "Isla Bryson" was initially housed – writes in the Spectator about the transgender madness:

During the years leading up to my retirement in 2019, I became more outspoken about my concerns over transgender inmates; I feared that a situation like Bryson’s would arise – or, worse, that a trans-identified man would physically or sexually assault a vulnerable woman in one of our prisons. I had good reason to be concerned: I witnessed, repeatedly, the impact on women of the aggression, the sexualised behaviour, the extreme maleness of trans-identified men in their midst. Yet when I spoke to those senior to me about it, my concerns were met with a range of responses from indifference, through resigned helplessness, to agreement – but nothing that led to any useful action.

Bryson’s incarceration in a female prison, or something like it, was entirely foreseeable. It is the logical outcome of the ‘Transwomen are Women’ mantra and springs directly from the festival of misogyny and sophistry that accompanied the gender bill debates at Holyrood in the week leading up to Christmas.

Nicola Sturgeon, and all of those who voted this bill through, are now in the invidious position of having to admit that, sometimes, transwomen are not women. To some of us, none of them are women and never will be. 

Will Isla Bryson’s case lead to a shift in thinking? Perhaps for some. Will it lead to a change in attitude from gender ideologists to those who express concern? I doubt it. To those who see no issue with holding trans identified men in women’s prisons, I am still a ‘transphobe’ and a ‘bigot’ for sharing my fears.

I’m not expecting an apology from anyone who has upheld this pernicious, invidious ideology any time soon. It’s probably too much to hope that some of the opposing voices, who have bravely spoken out against the tide of gender ideology, will be included, and listened to, in any review of how this sad situation came about.

But if any good can come from this incident it is surely this: that at least a significant number of those who naively chanted the ‘be kind’ mantra have started to see that this is about much more than kindness to trans-identified people. It’s about reality versus fantasy and, above all, about recognising that sex is immutable and men are always men. Nowhere is that truth more clearly evidenced than when, whatever their motivation, they talk their way into women’s prisons.

The politicians, under the influence of trans ideologists such as Stonewall, made their minds up: go with the nice progressive-sounding fantasy and ignore what all the women have been saying about the dangers of self-ID. Along came Isla Bryson, and the reality finally caught up with them.