Mick Hartley

The Scottish government once again beclowns itself. From the Times:

A female prisoner has told how biologically male inmates allowed inside a women’s wing made her life a “living hell”, in sworn testimony to the Court of Session.

The woman, who is being kept anonymous, said biologically male prisoners who identified as female were allowed to intimidate their peers with impunity even after one physically “battered” another inmate.

SNP ministers attempted to prevent the harrowing testimony from the woman, originally sent to a young offender institution as a 17-year-old and returned to prison again in 2022, from being allowed in the case.

However, Lady Ross overruled their objection that her evidence was “irrelevant” to the legal challenge being brought by For Women Scotland to Scottish prisons policy, which allows some men to serve sentences in the female estate if they identify as transgender.

Irrelevant? The contempt for women could not be more clear.

The woman, referred to in court documents as AA, described unwanted sexual attention from one male prisoner, referred to as MP1, who had “one hell of a big build” and started “transitioning” in jail, wearing “a tight top and jeans and high healed [sic] trainers”.

She said: “MP1 fancied me. I was scared. He saw that. He threatened and intimidated me. He fancied me the way a man fancies a girl. He would expose his body parts, and wear skin tight leggings, so that everyone could see the shape of his penis. That’s sexual assault or indecency.

“I felt unsafe with these men around me. MP1 did threaten me with sexual abuse.”

One one occasion, the woman said MP1, a “lifer”, “battered a lassie when I was there”. “I seen [sic] it with my own eyes,” she said. “So did the officers.”

However, the female victim was moved to another prison, with worse conditions, as “punishment”, according to the account. “MP1 stayed, he was not punished,” the testimony states.

This is Iranian/Taliban level misogyny. Women are guilty of arousing the men’s violence: they must be punished. Never the men.

The witness described a second male prisoner, referred to as MP2, who thrived on “power and control and intimidation”. She said the behaviour reminded her of a past toxic and violent relationship, in which she had been tied to a radiator naked. “A million per cent this was a bloke behaving like a bad bloke,” the woman said. “I felt totally unsafe.

“I felt I had no privacy from these men. Of course, I felt unsafe. My space was eroded. There was no way I could avoid them. Women have to put up with this. Put up. And say nothing. Och aye, our space was eroded — 100 per cent.”

In its legal arguments, the Scottish government has compared the presence of biological men in female prisons to a mother taking their young son into a female changing room. Neither, the devolved government claims, would necessarily threaten the dignity of women.…

Rhona Hotchkiss, a former governor of now-closed HMP Cornton Vale women’s prison, also provided a sworn affidavit to the court. She recalled multiple examples of prisoners confiding in her about their “feelings of anxiety, distress and fear that resulted from having males accommodated next to them”.

Hotchkiss said she had previously been supportive of trans rights in jails, only to have changed her mind completely as a result of her personal experience.

She said: “In my experience … it is simply not possible to negate the risk to women’s mental and/or physical wellbeing that this practice [housing men in women’s jails] poses, and in my view, implementation of this elevates concern for males over the wellbeing of women.”

Of course it does.

Added: from the Telegraph:

Biological sex is an “artificial parameter” for deciding where prisoners should be held, Scottish National Party (SNP) ministers have told a court.

Gerry Moynihan KC, acting for the Scottish Government, argued that there should be flexibility to allow transgender women, who are biological men, to serve their sentences in female jails.

He told the Court of Session in Edinburgh that defining “a man as a man and a woman as a woman, without exceptions” was “artificial”.

Mr Moynihan argued that classifying a trans woman inmate as a man was “a fundamental denial of their choice of gender and it’s a fundamental denial driven only by semantics”.

Completely mad. It’s precisely the other way round. Biology is the reality: transgender is the “fundamental denial driven only by semantics”.