Why is the SNP still fighting for a trans killer to be in a female jail?
Saturday February 07 2026, 2.00pm, The Sunday Times
The women who won the Supreme Court sex ruling are taking on Scotland to ensure no biological men are in women’s prisons. It’s a test of Nicola Sturgeon’s legacy
Susan Smith and Marion Calder helped For Women Scotland win the Supreme Court ruling on biological sex and are now challenging the Scottish government
LUCY NORTH/PA
Daniel Sanderson
, Scottish Political Editor |
John Boothman
, Political Correspondent
In November 2013, the Scottish courts dealt with an “utterly depraved” murder. Eight months earlier, Robert Shankland, a “caring and vulnerable” 46-year-old in poor health, had been lured to a property in the town of Glenrothes, Fife.
There he was subjected to grotesque torture over several hours, including a sexual assault. After a ligature was tied around Shankland’s neck and a plastic bag pulled over his head, his three killers ate ham sandwiches alongside the body.
Among them was Paris Green, 22 at the time, who was born Peter Laing.
Paris Green, previously known as Peter Laing
Over three days last week, the case was back in the spotlight in a high-profile legal dispute involving the Scottish government.
But to the dismay of many, the taxpayer-funded KC fielded by ministers was not there to protect the public from Green. Instead, he was fighting the corner of the killer, and at least two other biologically male murderers who identify as women, in defence of what was presented as their inalienable right to be considered to serve their life sentences in female prisons.
The case has been brought by For Women Scotland, the feminist campaign group, which argues that after its seismic legal victory in the Supreme Court last April, when it established that under UK equalities law, sex is defined by biology, the practice in Scotland of housing biological men in women’s prisons is unlawful
Under Scottish prison rules, violent trans offenders, including murderers, are not automatically considered a risk to women if their victims were men. Only those with “a history of violence against women and girls” are ineligible for placement in the female estate, a situation many see as perverse. After repeated requests to the government to consider their position, the group says it felt compelled to take them to court once again.
Opening the case, Aidan O’Neill KC, who also represented For Women Scotland in the Supreme Court, posed a question that many in the SNP are now asking. “Why are they fighting this?” he asked. “If it’s not the law — they don’t have a legal case — then presumably it’s a political calculation.”
If it is a political move, it appears to be a bizarre one. Even Sir Keir Starmer accepted years ago the need to ditch his support for gender self-ID, after remarks such as that it was “not right” to say only women had a cervix attracted derision.
On the eve of the case, which is unfolding with Holyrood elections just weeks away, Anas Sarwar, Scottish Labour’s leader, said he would ban biological men from women’s prisons within days if he became first minister in May.
Yet the leadership of the SNP remains unwilling to wave the white flag in the gender wars. The Scottish government KC, Gerry Moynihan, explained that a rule in which prisoners were “segregated” on the basis of only biological sex would amount to a breach of their human rights. And Green is no isolated example. More than a quarter of trans women prisoners (14 out of 51 — 28 per cent) have been permitted to serve their sentence in female jails since 2014.
Other beneficiaries include Melissa Young, who stabbed a neighbour 29 times, and Alexandria Stewart, formerly Alan Baker, who murdered a father-of-two in a “wicked and brutal” attack. Notwithstanding the fact that most trans criminals in Scotland are housed in the jail that aligns with their biological sex, Moynihan said a “blanket” policy would risk driving “vulnerable” trans inmates to suicide.
The Scottish Human Rights Commission, a Holyrood-funded quango, intervened in the case to argue against a blanket exclusion. While not endorsing the current policy, which it said could threaten women’s rights, it said “the rights of one group cannot be systematically prioritised over those of another”.
The campaign group Scottish Trans said the case could affect* “trans people’s equality and human rights more broadly than in prisons”, noting that For Women Scotland’s previous legal victories had led to a “restriction of trans people’s rights”.*
The devolved government’s many critics said the rights of female prisoners to single-sex spaces appeared to be of secondary concern.
Joanna Cherry, the former SNP MP, said the fact that John Swinney, the first minister, was prepared to go to court to defend the rights of trans criminals showed he was “not in fact his own man” and remained “Sturgeon’s heir”. She said he had, after all, “been her fixer for many years”.
Joanna Cherry
PETER SUMMERS/GETTY IMAGES
While Nicola Sturgeon is a diminished force, Cherry said “lackeys” who surrounded her during her reign and “hounded out” gender critical women from the SNP, still retained influence.
“It’s important to be aware that from an early stage in Scotland, trans activists strategised that if they could get trans-identifying male prisoners into the female estate, then they could get trans-identifying men into women’s spaces across the board,” Cherry said.
“Prisons are their bridgehead, and there is huge pressure on John Swinney to fight this case. John is surrounded by activist civil servants and SNP parliamentarians, staffers and activists who have bought into the ideology of self-identification of sex, and thus he fears a backlash should he face up to the reality of the UK Supreme Court judgment.”
Sturgeon, Scotland’s longest-serving first minister, quit unexpectedly in early 2023, after refusing to back down in a trans prisons storm all of her own.
Swinney repeatedly refused to say at Holyrood last month whether the “evil killers” Green, Young and Stewart were really women. His response drew immediate comparisons to Sturgeon’s infamous non-answer when asked about the sex of Isla Bryson, the double rapist formerly known as Adam Graham.
Bryson was initially sent to a female jail in 2023, weeks after Sturgeon had burnt through political capital in her failed attempt to impose a legal system of gender self-ID on Scotland. “That individual is a rapist,” became her much-derided stock response.
Rules were tightened after the scandal over Bryson, who is now in the male estate, on both sides of the border. However, England went further, banning all violent male offenders, regardless of the sex of their victim, as well as those with male genitalia, from the women’s estate.
Cherry, an eminent KC, retreated from the world of politics in 2024 after losing her Westminster seat, and returned to legal practice.
While an SNP parliamentarian, she was once a lonely voice in expressing opposition to Sturgeon’s leadership and determination to push through self-ID. Increasingly, however, internal critics are putting their heads above the parapet, bemused and angry at Swinney’s stance on the prisons issue.
Ruth Maguire, a respected SNP parliamentarian, recently told Swinney at Holyrood’s equivalent of prime minister’s questions of “countless testimonies” from female prisoners, many of them victims of physical or sexual violence, of how traumatic being locked up alongside men could be.
In a devastating payoff, she asked him whether he realised “how appalling the government’s actions feel to many of us”.
The latest such harrowing account was heard in the Court of Session case last week.
A prisoner known only as AA told in sworn testimony how her life had been made a “living hell” by biologically male inmates free to roam a female wing in a prison she had been held in. One, she said, had taken an unwanted interest in her, leading to threats of sexual abuse.
The woman described how the attention had brought back memories of a past “toxic relationship”, when she had been tied naked to a radiator by a man who told her “it was his way of loving me”.
The SNP government argued against the affidavit being admitted to the case, suggesting in its legal pleadings that a man in a female jail was as harmless as a mother taking her young son into a female changing room.
One SNP MSP said many of their colleagues had “drunk the Kool-Aid” on gender issues during the Sturgeon years, and that Swinney feared a party split if he were to abandon her stance.
Senior figures in the SNP close to Swinney have long consoled themselves with the notion that the gender wars are the preserve of a vocal but small number of obsessives. That view, however, is now misguided, according to several SNP figures who have been campaigning before May’s elections.
For Women Scotland staged a protest outside the SNP’s International Women’s Day event in Edinburgh last year
ALAMY
“The issue is now coming up on the doorsteps when we are out campaigning, and people cannot understand how this is still a priority,” said one SNP backbencher. “On this, we are completely out of step with the public. The vast majority of people do not want to see men, however they identify, in women’s prisons.”
Swinney is also grappling with a potential cabinet split. Kate Forbes, the deputy first minister, is said to be “dead against” the agenda. She recently told Holyrood magazine that she “understands” questions about whether the SNP has a women problem, though she said it was not her experience locally.
Another nationalist MSP normally supportive of Swinney appeared exasperated when asked how the SNP government had managed to find itself back in court again over gender. It is, after all, less than a year since For Women Scotland inflicted the humiliating and costly defeat for the SNP government in the Supreme Court.
It followed an earlier, lesser-known 2022 court victory, secured by the group of three women volunteers, who met on Mumsnet, against a government with a £68 billion budget.
Given the implications of last April’s ruling, and the fact that the Equality and Human Rights Commission largely backed For Women Scotland’s legal arguments last week, in an official intervention, few would bet against a hat-trick of legal wins.
Perhaps the best Swinney can hope for is that Lady Ross, a busy judge who also has High Court cases to preside over in coming weeks, does not get around to delivering her ruling until after May’s elections.