The furore surrounding the placement of transgender offenders in Scottish prisons has sharpened personal safety fears across Scotland’s LGBTQ+ community, the Guardian has been told.
Soon after Nicola Sturgeon announced her resignation on Wednesday, Scottish equalities campaigners expressed unease at the loss of such a visible LGBTQ+ ally.
But even before then, campaign groups and individuals reported that the political tone and relentless media coverage around the case of Isla Bryson, the double rapist whose initial remand at a women’s prison caused an outcry almost three weeks ago, was contributing to a climate of escalating hostility towards trans people online and on the street.
“I’ve heard from a lot of people who are very frightened,” said Jennie Kermode, a writer, film-maker and adviser for Trans Media Watch, based near Glasgow, who added that she hoped Sturgeon’s successor would show the same commitment to “a vision of Scotland in which nobody would be excluded”.
The impact of this acute media and political focus was felt close to home, she said: “It makes it harder for a trans person to move comfortably about their local area, be that a village or a housing estate. It emboldens individuals with existing prejudice who might previously have been held back by the acceptance of the majority of the community.”
There is nervousness among LGBTQ+ activists about future support for the Scottish government’s gender recognition bill, which had cross-party support at Holyrood – aside from the Scottish Conservatives – but was blocked last month by the UK government, leaving Scottish ministers a three-month window to challenge the ruling in the courts.
Opponents of the overhaul, which introduces a process of self-identification for people wanting to change legal gender, argue the Bryson case vindicates their concerns about lack of safeguards in the bill, while members of Scotland’s LGBTQ+ community view this in the context of a broader backlash.
This comes as police investigating the killing of Brianna Ghey, a 16-year-old girl found with fatal stab wounds in a park near Warrington on Saturday, said they had not ruled out the possibility it was a transphobic hate crime.
Vic Valentine, the manager of Scottish Trans, the group that previously advised on Scottish Prison Service guidelines for transgender offenders, said that while it was “completely reasonable” to have questions about where someone like Bryson was accommodated, “inevitably headlines like this spill into people’s personal lives”.
“I’ve had a number of people say they’ve had family members getting in touch to have fractious conversations,” Valentine added. “Definitely people are much more worried about safety, in particular women who are visibly trans. We shouldn’t live in a world where it’s only the trans people you don’t notice who are safe.”
Valentine said much of the current framing presented trans people as predators, regardless of the caveats employed. “There’s only so many times you can say ‘we don’t want to associate trans people with sex offenders’ when you’re only having conversations about trans rights in the context of sex offending.
“People don’t hear your little proviso, and the average member of the public doesn’t know a trans person, so how can it possibly not have an influence if the only reporting they are reading about trans people is about sex offenders?”
King Dalby, an events producer and trans advocate from Dumfries, said they had seen a distinct rise in “online hate” over the past few weeks. “It’s inevitable that people will focus on a case like Isla Bryson, but the fact people are talking about it gives you a chance to explain and be seen, so that’s a positive.”
While police caution that a rise in hate crime may be partly the result of better reporting and recording, figures published last month by the Scottish government found hate offences against transgender people were rising more steeply than for any other category.
The anti-abuse charity Galop said it had recorded a 19% increase in demand for its hate crime support services in the last six months of 2022. Its chief executive, Leni Morris, identified “an escalation [of abuse and violence] against our community” and said: “There are real-world consequences to the hostile public narrative that trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming people are currently facing.”
The Edinburgh-based lawyer and commentator Eilidh Douglas said: “This is simply the latest in an escalating pattern of attack on the validity and dignity of LGBT people in Scotland. I have never felt so unsafe to be a gay woman in Scotland as I do now, but trans people haven’t caused that: bigots and those who enable them have.”
Lisa DeBruine, a professor of psychology at Glasgow University, said: “Recent events really shown just how tenuous the progress the LGBTQIA+ community has made over the past decade is.”
