The group had deliberately targeted prisons
When Isla Bryson was found guilty of two counts of rape, the warrant issued by the High Court in Glasgow recommended that the defendant be sent to HMP Barlinnie, a notorious male-only jail.
Instead, Bryson – who until 2020 was known as Adam Graham – was taken to an isolation unit at HMP Cornton Vale, the country’s only women’s jail, sparking a backlash that has engulfed Nicola Sturgeon.
Let’s review. What’s his crime? Rape. Rape of women. Where should he be locked up? Away from women. Where was he locked up? In a women’s prison. If he’d been convicted of torturing children would Scotland have put him on work-release as a janitor in a primary school?
Sturgeon meanwhile insists it was nothing to do with her.
Jack McConnell, a former Labour first minister, said on Thursday night: “Let us be absolutely clear. There are no circumstances where this rapist would have been sent to Cornton Vale without ministers knowing.”
Scotland’s prisons have quietly been a testbed for radical gender policies for years, following lobbying from the same trans rights activists who pushed Ms Sturgeon to introduce a controversial gender self-identification system, it has emerged.
“Radical” here meaning “hostile to women’s rights.” It doesn’t mean left-wing or progressive or humanitarian, it means ruthlessly brutally misogynist.
The SPS overhauled its policies in 2014 to state that a prisoner’s accommodation “should reflect the gender in which the person in custody is currently living”.
Imagine being the SPS and writing that sentence and not noticing the glaringly obvious problem.
Or, rather, pretending not to notice it. It’s not really possible that they literally didn’t notice it, because they knew why prisons were sex-segregated in the first place. It’s too basic for them to have failed to notice it.
The shift was heavily influenced by the Scottish Trans Alliance, a vocal cheerleader of the SNP self-identification law and an offshoot of the Equality Network charity that is almost entirely reliant on Ms Sturgeon’s Government for funding.
They’ve had £100,000 of government money to smash up women’s rights this way.
James Morton, then the director of the trans group, admitted in an essay for Trans Britain, a 2018 book, that the group had deliberately targeted prisons as a means of persuading other public bodies to follow its agenda.
“We strategised that by working intensively with the Scottish Prison Service to support them to include trans women as women on a self-declaration basis within very challenging circumstances, we would be able to ensure that all other public services should be able to do likewise,” he wrote.
Ahhhhhhhhhhhh that’s nice. That’s lovely. What does he mean by “very challenging circumstances”? He means the obvious and horrific danger to women in prison. He wanted to leverage the danger to women to create more danger for women elsewhere. What a wonderful humane liberating movement this is.
At Holyrood last month, the First Minister ordered her MSPs to vote against proposals that would have blocked convicted sex offenders, or those facing rape charges, from taking advantage of the self-identification system.
Pause to savor that. Nicola Sturgeon ordered her MSPs to put women in danger.
At a women’s event in November, she was heckled by a protester who told her women had been “actually raped by males who have self-ID’d as women”.
She responded by saying it was “men who commit violence against women”, adding: “Most men who commit violence against women don’t feel the need to change gender to do that. Those who do, my argument is that we should focus on them because they are men abusing a system to attack women. What we shouldn’t do is further stigmatise a group of women who are already too stigmatised.”
But they’re not women. They’re not “a group of women.” That’s the whole point. They’re men who call themselves women. They’re absolutely not a group of women who are more “stigmatised” than actual women are. They’re a group of men who want to steal everything women have and be free to rape and assault women whenever they’re in the mood.
I have some experience with the prison system (from the outside, as a volunteer). There are lots of gray areas and sad cases in prison. There are lots of “stigmatized” (and worse) groups in prison, and the system can’t make special accommodation for all of them. In fact the system, at least the one I know in the United States, barely makes any effort to accommodate any of them — not the elderly, the disabled, the insane, the ones who committed murder at age 17 or 18 or 19 and are now in their 80s and dying in the prison hospice (because “life without parole” means “death penalty”, only it’s a slow death). Not even the ones who only happened to be driving the car when someone else committed murder — under the law here in Iowa, at least, it’s the same crime. The overriding concern of the prison administration is “the orderly functioning of the institution”. Nothing else really matters. And that makes a certain amount of sense — just keeping people from killing each other is hard enough.
I really don’t see how the self-trans-identified-males have it so much worse than anyone else that they need to make the whole system revolve around them.
My question is: is there a logical, reasoned argument for why the best way to handle newly self-trans-identified-male rapists is to send them to women’s prisons? I’m honestly curious what the “steelman” case is for that. Anyone?
I have pondered this and agonised over it for what must be the best part of five minutes, and have come to the most reluctant conclusion that Sturgeon herself/theirself, or her/their speechwriter, is likely trans. No other explanation fits the facts of this case nearly so convincingly.
One becomes like an explorer in the time of Livingstone and Stanley, hacking a way through some jungle in Darkest Africa. (“Will those drums never stop.?”)
Peter – I don’t think there are any reasoned arguments for any of it. Where there should be reasoned arguments there are instead emo-words – vulnerable, oppressed, community, marginalized, minority, and above all “women” – only they mean the male kind.
Identify as a youth, get sent to Juvenile detention ;)
What I’m saying. That’s not how that works so why is it how ANYthing works?
I don’t think the person involved has carefully thought out the consequences of their actions very well.
It’s not like it won’t be known what they are and what they did to get there.
Prisons are full of hard people.