First Minister refers to double rapist held in male prison as ‘she’ and ‘her’
NICOLA Sturgeon has effectively referred to the double-rapist Isla Bryson as a woman, sowing more confusion in the row over transgender prisoners.
After days of refusing to say if Bryson, who raped while known as Adam Graham, was a man or a woman, the First Minister referred to them by a series of female pronouns.
“She regards herself as a woman,” Ms Sturgeon said of Bryson.
At FMQS last week, Ms Sturgeon carefully avoided assigning a gender to Bryson, referring to them as “an individual” and “a rapist”.
She was accused of being too afraid to come down one way or another in case it antagonised supporters of trans rights, including her Green party allies in government.
But at a Scottish Government press conference yesterday, Ms Sturgeon referred to Bryson as “her”, before hastily correcting it to “the person”.
Asked about the “Freudian slip” and whether she did indeed regard Bryson as a woman, Ms Sturgeon tried to avoid the question, but used more female pronouns in the process.
She said: “Don’t read anything into… what I’m trying to do is address the issues rather than take it into... headline-generating. I’m trying to rationally deal with the issues.”
Asked again why she had referred to Bryson as her, Ms Sturgeon said: “I can’t remember. What I’m saying is, Isla Bryson calls herself a woman.
“But what I’m trying to say is, in the context of the prison service, that is not the relevant factor here.
“The relevant factor is the crime that the individual has committed and has been convicted of.”
Pressed again, Ms Sturgeon said: “She regards herself as a woman. I regard the individual as a rapist.
“What matters is the individual was convicted of rape, and that is what we’re talking about here.”
Bryson was found guilty of raping one woman in Clydebank in 2016 and another in Glasgow in 2019 at the High Court in Glasgow last month.
The 31-year-old, who was initially sent to a female prison but is now in a male jail, only began identifying as a woman after being charged.
Ms Sturgeon said last she week she thinks Bryson is “almost certainly” gaming the system for an easier life.
Tory MSP Rachael Hamilton said’s Ms Sturgeon’s “telling slip” had betrayed her true feelings, and urged her to publish the urgent case review into Bryson being sent to a women’s jail immediately and in full.
She said: “Her whole self-id policy has turned into a mess of her own making. She cannot just hope this goes away and the public will forget.”