Gender laws: Jails ‘can cope’

Asenior prisons official has said the service will be able to weed out people seeking to abuse reforms to gender recognition laws.

Under current Scottish Prison Service (SPS) regulations, the housing of trans prisoners is decided on a case-by-case basis, with a number of factors – including the safety of fellow inmates – considered before a decision is made.

The Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill is working its way through Holyrood and would allow for a gender recognition certificate (GRC) – a document that changes the holder’s legal sex – to be supplied without the need for a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria.

The bill would also cut the time needed for applicants to live in their acquired gender from two years to three months, with a further three-month reflection period, and see the minimum age for an application drop from 18 to 16.

Opponents say the process could be abused by predatory men, risking the safety of women in the prison estate, as well as other single-sex spaces.

But James Kerr, deputy chief executive of SPS, told the equalities, human rights and civil justice committee at Holyrood that the process currently in place would protect those in prison.

Rules for dealing with trans prisoners are undergoing a review but Mr Kerr said he expected the new process would cope.

“Might people try and use a GRC for nefarious purposes? Yes, that is one possibility,” he said.

“But, the GRC is only one aspect of consideration we would give the care of and placement of that individual in custody.

“I would be confident that our current approach, and actually what we anticipate the outcome of the review being, in that it would still follow that individualised, multidisciplinary, open, caseconferenced risk assessment approach, being able to respond to that.”

But Mr Kerr added that risk assessments were not “an exact science” but a “judgment call”.

Updating the committee, he said that, as of March 31, there were 16 trans prisoners in custody across Scotland, with 50% of trans women housed in the female estate and 75% of trans men in the female estate.

CONFIDENT: A prisons chief said those trying to abuse new reforms will be dealt with.