MALE rapist who attacked 2 WOMEN, then changed gender is now off to a WOMEN’S prison
A TRANSGENDER woman who raped two women while living as a man was yesterday sent to an allfemale prison.
Isla Bryson – who was still living as shaven- headed, face- tattooed Adam Graham when she attacked the two women – will be held in a segregation unit at a women’s jail for up to a month while risk assessments are carried out before she is sentenced.
Officials will decide whether she should serve her sentence in a women’s or men’s prison.
The extraordinary case in Scotland will reignite public debate over Nicola Sturgeon’s controversial Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which would allow anyone over the age of 16 to ‘self-identify’ as the opposite sex without the need for medical evidence or diagnosis.
The bill was passed in Scotland but blocked by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak following advice the reforms would undermine women’s rights in the UK.
Critics fear the ‘self-ID’ plan – which would allow people to seek a Gender Recognition Certificate after living in their new gender for just three months – could allow biological males to access women-only spaces including changing rooms, hostels and prisons.
Bryson, 31, was born male and claimed to have experienced gender issues since the age of four, but only began transitioning from male to female in 2020, after being charged with the rapes. She appeared at preliminary court hearings in July 2019 as Adam Graham, but by the start of her six-day trial she was known as Isla Bryson, and is currently taking hormones and seeking gender reassignment surgery.
Both her victims knew her as Adam, and
‘An affront to the victims’
prosecutors said she ‘preyed’ on the vulnerable women after meeting them online.
She met her first victim on the dating site Badoo, shortly after the end of Bryson’s marriage to a woman.
The 30-year-old victim from Clydebank, West Dunbartonshire, said she had been ‘head over heels in love’ with her attacker, but told the jury the ‘caring man’ could fly into a rage over trivial problems.
The woman told jurors she was raped in her mother’s home in 2016 in a 30-minute attack.
Bryson threatened to harm her family if she told anyone, she said.
The second woman was raped in 2019 after chatting to Bryson on the social media app Bigo. Bryson, who used the name DJ Blade, arranged to go to the woman’s flat in Drumchapel, Glasgow, to watch the Lindsay Lohan film Mean Girls.
The 34-year- old woman described feeling ‘crushed’ by Bryson – who she also knew as Adam – and told jurors that Bryson used ‘her penis’ to carry out the rape, even after being told to stop.
Bryson had denied both attacks and claimed the sex was consensual, although she did not like sleeping with women. She said she had shared her ‘sexuality issues’ with the second victim after they met online.
Bryson has received hormone treatment and told the court she wanted to undergo surgery, saying: ‘I obviously want all the surgery that the NHS can provide.’
Jurors heard Adam Graham was now her ‘ dead name’ as she no longer used it. Bryson was convicted by the jury yesterday and was remanded in custody by judge Lord Scott until February 28, when she is due to be sentenced.
It is understood she will be held in the segregation unit at Cornton Vale women’s jail in Stirlingshire. It is a unit where inmates can be held for their own safety or the safety of other prisoners. A subsequent move to the general population, alongside other women, is possible pending a risk assessment.
Prisoners can be held in segregation for years but it must be kept under regular review to comply with human rights laws.
In December, protesters gathered outside Cornton Vale after transgender woman Katie Dolatowski – a convicted paedophile – was jailed.
Dolatowski, 22, who was born male but identifies as female, is thought to have been in the segregated unit since October. Campaigners want the Scottish government to ban suspects from changing their gender while awaiting trial for sex offences.
The gender reform law was passed by the Scottish parliament last month, with backing from Labour and the Liberal Democrats as well as the ruling SNP.
Scottish Conservative shadow community safety minister Russell Findlay told the Mail that Bryson’s case was ‘an affront to victims’. He said: ‘ This rapist decided that he was no longer a man only after appearing in court on a rape charge. We now have the utterly perverse situation where a Scottish court refers to someone who says he identifies as female using “her penis” to rape two vulnerable women.
‘We warned of the inevitability of this happening if the SNP’s gender self-ID law passed, but for it already to have become reality is deeply worrying and an affront to the victims.’ Tory MP Miriam Cates added: ‘It is almost impossible to believe that in a civilised society a man convicted of raping two women can be remanded in a women’s prison.’
Analysis by the Policy Exchange think-tank has warned that ‘it is not inconceivable that a man with no trans identity would make a strategic decision to change legal sex in order to move prisons’ simply because they wanted to ‘get out of the harsh, and often dangerous, context of a male prison’.