SNP MSPs join trans prisoner protest outside Holyrood

Another one of Nicola Sturgeon's backbenchers, Michelle Thomson, addressed the crowd, telling them "this is not okay."

"And if you had any understanding as a woman you would shout out this is not okay. It will never be okay." 

READ MORE: Isla Bryson: Nicola Sturgeon under pressure over trans prisoner report

The rally was organised For Women Scotland and Keep Prisons Safe in the wake of the Isla Bryson scandal which saw a double rapist locked up in Cornton Vale, the country's one female-only prison.

The 31-year-old - previously known as Adam Graham - only began identifying as a woman after being charged and has not legally changed gender, although they are taking hormones and requesting surgery.

Scottish Tory MSP Rachael Hamilton said the case had exposed “major flaws in the current policy."

“Whilst this Government has tried to wash their hands of responsibility, I want to make it clear that whatever they say, it is undeniably clear that this Government has ministerial oversight of the Scottish Prison Service.

“It is absurd and offensive that a double rapist was sent to Cornton Vale. It is because of a flawed policy.”

For Women Scotland co-director Susan Smith accused the Scottish Government of “abdicating responsibility.”

She said: “I think Nicola Sturgeon intervened in the case of Isla Bryson out of pure embarrassment because it exposed the idiocy, frankly, of these kinds of policies

“But it’s not helping women who are still locked up today, with some really violent offenders.

“I would say to Nicola Sturgeon that she needs to get her head out of the clouds and she needs to deal with reality.

“She needs to sort out her priorities and women need to be a priority in Scotland.”

Ms Thomson said she could not understand how a policy that took "no cognisance of trauma in women prisoners" be developed.

She also drew a link between the prison row and the Gender Recognition Reform Bill passed by the parliament just before Christmas

"Now one point I would make is that people are saying, and correctly so, that the recent debate we had didn't result in the situation. Just about the GRR and that's correct, but it's much bigger than that. How as a society did we slip into the idea that this was okay? 

"This is not okay. And if you had any understanding as a woman you would shout out this is not okay. It will never be okay. 

“Women's privacy, dignity, safety must be at the forefront of how we form policy in this matter."

Lucy Hunter Blackburn from the Murray Hunter Blackburn policy analysis group questioned if the risk assessment used by the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) was as "robust" as the government claimed. 

She told the crowd the risk assessment template used was “opaque and incoherent.”

“It talks about social gender and gender identity and declared gender. At no point does it refer to sex. Nor does it mention women: the one group most likely to be impacted.

“It asks, for instance, if the prisoner’s index offence involved ‘violence against a particular gender’. And whether the offender ‘would feel safe housed in the estate matching their declared gender’.

“It does not consider how those housed in that estate might feel.

Ms Hunter Blackburn told the crowd that men housed in the female estate had been convicted of murder, torture voyeurism, and sexually assaulting a ten-year-old girl. 

She said: “In 2019 SPS published its ‘New Model of Custody for Women’. It said that women who had suffered physical or emotional trauma were ‘often hyper-aware of possible danger’ and ‘survivors of trauma may find it difficult to trust others’.

“At the same time, officials continued to put violent men in the women’s estate, shored up by a risk-assessment tool that bore only a passing relationship to reality.  

“The First Minister has said that Adam Graham should be in the male estate specifically because he was convicted of rape. As we see, however, this consideration does not appear to extend however, to men convicted of murder or torture.

“We know about these other cases because information about them has made it into the press over several years.

“They are not a secret that has emerged only in the last few days.

“And if any of them had to be held in segregation while in a women’s prison for any period, ministers would have known about them, because they would have been required to sign off the decision to restrict their contact with other prisoners.

“But none of these cases appeared to trouble Ministers.

“Instead, it has taken a full-blown political crisis and the risk to political careers for ministers to take any notice or care about the impact of their policies on the vulnerable women housed in Scotland’s prisons.”