Barbara Kay: Scotland scandalized over rapists placed in women’s prisons, while Canada turns a blind eye

News from Scotland on the gender rights file is attracting international attention. At its centre is Adam Graham, a tattooed brute who, following rapes committed in 2016 and 2019, re-framed himself as a woman named Isla Bryson and was granted a transfer to Cornton Vale, a women’s prison.

During Graham’s recent trial, the Glasgow High Court judge addressed Graham as “Ms. Bryson.” The jury was told that the defendant had used “her” penis to commit rape. (Note to readers: I don’t use female names or pronouns for rapists — on principle, but also as a courtesy to the victims it further humiliates.) Described as “smirking,” Graham was photographed arriving to court in a blonde wig and tights that clearly revealed the outline of his genitals.

Graham only started identifying as a woman after he was accused of the rapes, which suggests to some that he is “bullsh—ing the authorities,” as his ex-wife Shonna put it. “Never once did he say anything to me about feeling he was in the wrong body or anything,” Shonna Graham told the British press. She expressed concerns that being housed in an all-female prison would allow him to prey on “the vulnerable women inmates,” noting that, “He won’t stop, it’s in his nature.” The mother of one of his victims also said that, “He’s very manipulative and everybody falls for it,” and that she doesn’t “believe a word he says.”

Immediately, a surge of public revulsion had officials promising to move him to another prison. One former prisoner at Cornton Vale shared her experience of forced intimacy with violent trans inmates. “These incredibly violent men were walking around the communal shower area naked and sometimes clearly aroused,” she told the Daily Record. “I was shaking with fear.”

The incident proved politically timely for critics of Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP). Sturgeon has been fixated on the passage of her gender recognition reform bill, which would allow people to legally change their gender after self-identifying as the opposite sex for three months and remove the need for a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria. The bill is not only highly contentious within her own party. In a historical first, the U.K. government invoked its own power of disallowance to block it.

Although normally a rebarbative absolutist on the subject of trans rights, Sturgeon recognized the Graham fiasco as a hill she was bound to die on, and wisely chose to live another day. A pause was called in all movement from men’s to women’s prisons, pending a review by the Scottish Prison Service.

Graham’s a bad egg, but worse people than him would end up in women’s prisons if not for the pause. Andrew Burns, for example, who’s considered “one of the most menacing people” in Scottish prisons, has since 2016 demanded that he be recognized as a woman named Tiffany Scott. He asked, and received assent for, a transfer to Cornton Vale, as well.

Burns’s rap sheet is long and unsettling: assaults, vandalism, stalking a 13-year-old girl, resisting arrest. He has attacked prison officers — including female prison staff — and medical professionals on multiple occasions. In one altercation, it took 11 staff to subdue him. He has bitten his own veins to spray blood on guards.

After one such incident, Burns was due to stand trial, but was deemed “too dangerous for the dock.” Rare among prisoners, his risk assessment is so high, he is subject to an “Order for Lifelong Restriction.” Yet this monster was considered fit to live amongst trapped women.

Canada’s leading politicians and cultural influencers are as woke as Scotland’s. A similar policy of allowing self-identified transgender inmates to transfer to women’s prisons was put in place by the Trudeau government in 2018 — with exactly the results one would expect.

When Tara Desousa was known as Adam Laboucan in 1999, the then-17-year-old boy sexually assaulted a three-month-old baby so brutally that the child required reconstructive surgery. At the time, he was considered to be Canada’s “youngest dangerous offender,” and incarcerated with men. Now, a self-described “two-spirit person,” Desousa is housed in what has been described as a “mother-and-baby unit.”

Then there’s Matthew (Madeline) Harks, a long-term offender who, according to a psychiatric assessment, has an “all-encompassing preoccupation in sexually abusing young girls.” Detectives believe Harks had at least 60 victims before being nabbed for 200 offences that occurred in British Columbia. He was housed in a women’s prison and even admitted to a women’s halfway house for a time.

(A 2022 directive allows for a case-by-case assessment of gender-based transfer requests, which begs the question: why not a one-is-too-many rule for sex offenders?)

The Canadian Bar Association believes that any association between biology at birth and fundamental human identity is an “incorrect assumption.” It has affirmed that, “It is imperative that the policy be attentive to the realities and needs of trans women and trans men.” About the constitutional, sex-based rights of women? Nothing.

How do progressive elites justify such irresponsibility? Only an implacable faith in radical gender dogma can explain their credo that when a man — even sociopaths like Burns — discovers his authentic female self, his subjective feeling confers a total character and personality transformation, which must then be validated by a legal rubric applying to all who make the same claim. That sexual predators may abuse such a system to stalk victims and satisfy their perverse desires does not matter. In our brave new world, gender mysticism has replaced justice. The sane mind reels.

It was a sad day for feminism when Nicola Sturgeon labelled people who begged for a guardrail amendment on her gender recognition bill to protect vulnerable women in prison as “deeply misogynist.” In reality, by endorsing this grotesque experiment, which uses vulnerable women as lab rats, it is Sturgeon’s extreme misogyny that has now been revealed in all its ignominy.

Chickens do come home to roost. It will not be forgotten that the SNP, the Greens and Labour voted down an amendment designed to prevent sexual offenders from fraudulently applying for gender-recognition certificates by requiring them to present “authentic evidence” of gender dysphoria and notifying police when certificates were issued to convicted felons. Or that it was a man, Conservative member of the Scottish Parliament Russell Findlay, who spoke out so passionately against the “obscene situation” that Sturgeon has presided over.

Our situation in Canada is no less “obscene” than Scotland’s. We know who presides over it. We also have a Conservative party. Where is that party’s Russell Findlay?

National Post
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Twitter.com/BarbaraRKay

1. Barbara Kay: The complicated truth about transwomen in women’s prisons

2. Christie Blatchford: Women’s prison left to cope after getting male inmate who identifies as female

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