John Swinney is allowing the trans prisoners row to become an election issue

Has John Swinney ever been inside a women’s prison? I only ask because as someone who spent a lot of time working my way around the prison estate, following on from the fractious times of the late 1980s and into the noughties when prison overcrowding led to riots, hostage-taking and dirty protests, they’re not for the faint-hearted. 

And for me, while every prison captures the very essence of society’s failings, it was in women’s prisons where the real gut punch of social disintegration could be so tangibly felt – and heard. Vulnerable women. Damaged women. Deranged women. Women who had been violated, victimised and repeatedly let down. Women who existed on the margins, living with all kinds of trauma, wrapped up in guilt, self-loathing and suppressed rage at the injustice of the world.

Women, agonisingly, separated from their children and who self-medicated with drugs, alcohol and self-harm. Sad, mad, and the not-so-bad women, for whom prison was never really the solution and for some whereby suicide often offered an escape. Women for whom their lived reality was so obviously caught up in their biological sex and how that was weaponised against them, that to argue differently would be absurd. Little wonder, then, that Cornton Vale became known as the ‘Vale of Tears’.

And for these wretched women, men were too often the cause of their spiral into criminality. Pimps, abusers, dealers, manipulators, liars and sharks. I can’t remember ever interviewing a female prisoner where abuse at the hands of a man was not writ large. And if you want to understand how trauma truly manifests itself in lives half-lived then go speak to those women or those who care for them.

And the shame on John Swinney is that as first minister, ultimately, he holds responsibility for their care. He can shift the blame and argue that prison policy is not for him or that he is balancing rights and merely seeking legal clarity as an insurance policy against future claims. But it’s balls. He holds the levers of power and despite mealy-mouthed words about toxic masculinity and strategies for tackling violence against women, he presides over a penal system that has misogyny baked in. 

Only last week, an independent report into the Scottish Prison Service’s suicide prevention programme, Talk To Me (TTM), identified a culture of “institutional contempt” towards women in jails. It revealed women were subjected to forced strip searches which failed to take into account their prior history of abuse and trauma. And menstruating women were forced to wear “safer clothing” more suited to men that was ill-designed to protect their dignity as they bled. 

How more dehumanising can you get?

And into this hellish mix, the first minister is prepared to defend the placing of trans women (biological men) into the female estate, arguing their presence is akin to that of a small boy accompanied by his mum in a female changing room. I can hardly bear to contain my fury that vulnerable women, who have already lost agency over their lives, can be almost offered up as sacrificial lambs in the dogged pursuit of a policy that is so obviously misguided. 

And while the so-called progressives think this is humane, let’s face it, who in their right mind would ever argue that locking dangerous men up with women was a good thing and yet only last weekend, when asked by Trevor Phillips on Sky News what possible justification there could be for putting “persons with penises” in women’s prisons, Swinney argued there was. He said that “complex legal issues” needed to be worked through following on from the Supreme Court’s judgment last year which made it entirely clear that single-sex spaces were for biological women. 

There are no complex legal issues to be worked through. Swinney knows it, otherwise he wouldn’t have admitted, in the same interview, that the law was being corrected in other areas such as schools where guidance now calls for separate toilets for boys and for girls. If it’s done there, then why not apply the same principles to prisons where the dangers of mixed sex adults are surely more acute?

The first minister might not want to listen to me; he certainly won’t listen to For Women Scotland who brought the original case against his government that led to the Supreme Court ruling and are now back in court, arguing that the female prison estate should be what it says on the tin, for females. I get that, but he might want to listen to his own party colleagues who have been privately expressing how this is becoming an issue on the doorsteps or he might want to heed the words of his own backbenchers. Women like Michelle Thomson who carries her own trauma following a sexual assault and raised the prisons issue at FMQs or Ruth Maguire who described the actions of her government as “appalling”. 

All of this begs the question of why the first minister, so doggedly, refuses to back down. I get why he isn’t up to speed on the trans issue because he, like so many of his colleagues, stepped back, wilfully put their hands over their ears to reasoned debate, refused to arm themselves with the facts because it was easier to follow like sheep and decry critics as bigots, but what I will never understand is why someone so politically astute is allowing this to become an election issue.

No female-only prisons, no promised law on misogyny, no amendment to the hate crime bill to include sex, no clear impetus to implement the Supreme Court judgment, no real support to end prostitution, no urgency to investigate rapes and sexual assaults in hospital – you could be forgiven for thinking that the SNP has a problem with women. 

And while he may only have himself to blame, it has become increasingly obvious that the first minister of Scotland, despite the hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money spent on legal advice and defending the indefensible in court, has never immersed himself properly in an issue so fundamental that it has already cost, to one degree or another, his two predecessors their jobs.