Is Nicola Sturgeon a transphobe?

Is Nicola Sturgeon a transphobe? I ask because she has decreed that Isla Bryson, a violent man who identifies as a woman, should not be locked up at a women’s prison. And every woman who has said similar in recent years, every feminist who has said that no blokes should be allowed into women’s prisons, women’s domestic-violence shelters and women’s changing areas, has been horribly attacked by the right-on. They’ve been denounced as phobes, bigots, TERFs and worse. So is Sturgeon a bigot, too? Should she be cancelled?

This is the disturbing story of the male rapist who says he is a woman. Scot Isla Bryson, whose birth name is Adam Graham, was found guilty of raping two women. Following his conviction he was remanded to Cornton Vale, a women’s prison in Stirling. There was uproar. Of course there was. What kind of unhinged society houses the violent tormentors of women in a building full of vulnerable women? Sturgeon said Bryson would be moved out of that prison. The BBC reports that he has since been moved to HMP Edinburgh.

There’s actually a straightforward answer to the question of what kind of society puts male rapists in with women. It’s Scotland. Before anyone rushes to congratulate Sturgeon for her rare exercise of common sense in this case, let us remember that it is the gender ideology she so enthusiastically supports that led to Bryson being held, if only fleetingly, in a women’s jail. Indeed, when the SNP’s gender bill was going through the Scottish parliament at the end of last year, MSPs rejected an amendment that would have forbidden convicted sex offenders from identifying as women. They created this insane situation. It’s on them.

Here’s what sticks in the craw: Bryson may have been denied the ‘right’ to go into a women’s prison, but he is still being treated seriously as a woman, by the media and by campaigners. Everywhere one looks, he is being referred to as ‘she’. There have been numerous references in the media to ‘her penis’. The Independent reports that, in the courtroom itself, jurors were told that Bryson ‘entered the victim with ‘her penis’ and was told to stop because Bryson was ‘crushing’ the victim’.

‘Her penis’? What madness is this? It is an affront to language and truth to say ‘her penis’. It is an affront to Bryson’s victims too, who presumably had to listen as the man who assaulted them had his identity flattered and his delusions validated. In elevating Bryson’s ‘truth’ – his belief that he is a woman – we denigrate the truth of his victim’s experiences. Which is that a man attacked them. With his penis. Telling these two women that they were raped by a woman is an offensive lie. It compounds their victimisation, in fact. First, Bryson forces them to engage in sexual activity. Then society forces them to acknowledge Bryson’s identity. You must respect your rapist – this is the perverse logical conclusion to gender self-ID.

This horrible case raises a broader question, then. It goes beyond the issue of women’s prisons into the question of who gets to self-identify as a woman. Given that the courts and the media accept that Bryson is a woman, with all of them dutifully referring to him with she/her pronouns, why isn’t he being sent to a women’s prison? Given that Nicola Sturgeon and other correct-thinkers in the SNP accept the mantra ‘trans women are women’, why isn’t this trans women being treated fully as a woman by being housed in a women’s prison? Is he a woman or not?

My view is that he is not. I know some will consider me a dreadful bigot for saying that. Alas, I feel compelled to put truth and science ahead of the ‘right’ of a rapist to assume the female identity.

Surely the broader problem here is the idea that ‘trans women are women’? That any man who says he is a woman is a woman? If you accept this idea, then you have to accept it for Bryson too, right? This is what I would like to ask Sturgeon: Do you think Bryson is a woman? Do you think his self-identification as female makes him female? If you do, why haven’t you put him in a women’s prison? And if you don’t, will you finally admit that JK Rowling and the many other critics of self-ID have a point when they say men are not women?