Nicola Sturgeon’s trans prison saga continues

Could the extraordinary scandal of transgender sex offenders being sent to women’s prisons come at any worse a time for Nicola Sturgeon? Only days after her flagship Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Bill was stalled by Westminster’s government on the grounds that it might have an ‘adverse impact’ on women’s safety, it emerged that women have already been endangered by the Scottish Prison Service (SPS). In their anticipation of this very legislation, Scottish prisons have been allowing male sex offenders to routinely self-identify as women for almost a decade.

How was this allowed to happen? How did the First Minister not know until last week that rapists, such as Isla Bryson (formerly Adam Graham), were being housed in women’s prisons? How could it have been that a sex offender was caged in with female prisoners, ‘like a fox in a henhouse’, as the dissident SNP MSP Kenneth Graham aptly put it? The questions keep coming.