How SNP's deeply sexist policy on transgender prisoners was finally overturned – Lisa Mackenzie
After the Scottish Government agreed to move trans prisoners to jails aligning with their birth sex following a court ruling, Lisa Mackenzie argues minsters had forgotten about the rights of often-traumatised female inmates
In April 2012, I began work as a policy adviser to the Howard League for Penal Reform in Scotland. In my first week, I attended the launch of the report of the Commission on Women Offenders, led by Dame Elish Angiolini.
The report concluded that women in Scottish prisons were more often troubled than troubling. For the most part, they had committed low-level crime and were incarcerated for short periods, but long enough for them to lose tenancies and custody of their children. It also brought out that many of them were themselves the victims of male physical and sexual violence.
None of this was particularly revelatory to those familiar with the criminal justice system. Indeed Labour peer Baroness Corston had produced a similar report on women in prison in England and Wales five years previously.
READ MORE: Trans prisoners to be moved to jails according to their biological sex after court ruling
A deep-seated fear of men
But there was now a consensus that Scotland could and should do better by these women: by imprisoning fewer of them and opting for community-based sentences where appropriate. The buzz-word back then was ‘trauma-informed’, in recognition of the fact that many women caught up in the justice system had complex trauma and a deep-seated fear of men.
Two years later, after lobbying by the Equality Network, a Scottish Government-funded charity, the Scottish Prison Service introduced its transgender prisoner policy. This enabled prisoners who claimed a transgender identity to be accommodated in the prison estate of their choice.
Male prisoners who identified as women could now be placed in the female estate (although in reality, this practice had already been happening before the policy was instituted).
In the summer of 2018, I extracted, via a freedom of information request, the equality impact assessment conducted by the prison service into the transgender prisoner policy. When it came back, my jaw was on the floor.
It was quite clear that prison managers had not considered the impact of the policy on female prisoners, nor even female prison officers, who were now being asked to perform intimate body searches on male prisoners. The only external groups consulted were those who claimed to speak on behalf on the transgender community.
Enlightened 19th-century attitudes
Along with my colleagues, criminologist Kath Murray and Lucy Hunter Blackburn, former head of the Reducing Reoffending Division at the Scottish Government, I began to write about and research this issue, connecting with newly formed feminist groups like For Women Scotland.
As the years rolled by, more stories emerged about the oftentimes extremely violent men who were now being held in Scottish prisons alongside women. We learned about their attacks on female prisoners and female prison officers, taking every opportunity to bring these issues to the attention of the Scottish Government and opposition politicians.
In the end, it took the persistence of three unpaid volunteers in the form of Susan Smith, Marion Calder and Trina Budge, of For Women Scotland, to pursue the Scottish Government – ultimately responsible for the Scottish Prison Service – through the courts and overturn this deeply sexist and misogynistic policy.
Never would I have imagined that the 19th-century social reformer Elizabeth Fry would have turned out to be more enlightened about the plight of women in prison than the 21st-century SNP government.
Lisa Mackenzie, a former policy adviser to Howard League Scotland, is a member of think tank Murray Blackburn Mackenzie