Now Isla Bryson is claiming to be a victim of hate crime

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Isla Bryson, Scotland’s most notorious transgender rapist, has claimed to be a victim of ‘hate crime’.

In a letter to prison authorities, seen by the Sunday Mail, Bryson, a man known formerly as Adam Graham, lists a number of supposed indignities he has been made to suffer while serving an eight-year sentence for raping two women. Back in 2023, the tattoo-faced criminal was infamously sent to a women’s prison, HMP Cornton Vale, sparking a huge public outcry. Since he was moved to the all-male wing of HMP Edinburgh, he says he has been denied access to women’s toiletries and make-up, and has been persistently ‘misgendered’ by prison officers. One female prison officer allegedly referred to him as ‘son’, for which she has since apologised.

According to Bryson, this ‘transphobia’ is ‘disgusting’. As he sees it, he should be treated as a woman because ‘I have boobs’ and no longer ‘sound like a man’. Anyone who questions his sincerity to live as the opposite sex, he says, ought to be charged with a hate crime.

Of course, none of what Bryson claims to have experienced actually constitutes a hate crime. Even under Scotland’s draconian new Hate Crime Act, ‘misgendering’ – that is, accurately referring to someone by their biological sex – is not in itself a crime.

Nevertheless, what Bryson has revealed is how the Hate Crime Act, and its ban on ‘stirring up hatred’ against trans people, is emboldening scumbags and opportunists like him. Clearly, very few people are actually fooled by his female identity. His fellow inmates have dubbed him Mrs Doubtfire. And no amount of diversity training has managed to stop his prison officers from accidentally calling him a man. Back in 2023, even the then Scottish first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, usually a strict adherent to gender ideology, could not quite bring herself to refer to someone so obviously male as a woman. Yet, with the Hate Crime Act, the likes of Bryson have been handed a new weapon that can be used to instil fear in anyone who might be tempted to ‘misgender’ them. Regardless of the letter of the law, playing the ‘hate crime’ card can still make people think twice before expressing the truth.

When the scandal of Isla Bryson’s internment in a women’s prison first hit the headlines, it soon helped to bring down Nicola Sturgeon and to scupper the SNP’s plans to introduce gender self-identification. Could these ludicrous complaints of a hate crime do the same for Scotland’s illiberal and unworkable Hate Crime Act? We can only hope so.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on Twitter: @FraserMyers.