Nicola Sturgeon says she does not regret how she handled the issue of a rapist being placed in a women's prison, adding that the Scottish Prison Service had been dealing with trans prisoners “for years”.
In an interview with Sky News' Beth Rigby, Ms Sturgeon said the behaviour of a "tiny minority" including convicted rapist Isla Bryson could not justify denying rights to transgender people. Bryson was initially sent to a women's prison after being convicted of two counts of rape, before being diverted to a male prison following a public outcry.
The outgoing First Minister also said she received the most intense abuse of her political career over the gender recognition reform act, which seeks to make it easier for a transgender person to be legally identified in their preferred gender. She has denied being "out of step" with the public over the law, which will not affect a transgender person's ability to access their preferred facilities – a right enshrined in the Equality Act.
Ms Strugeon said of the Isla Bryson situation: “These are tough issues, but they are issues fundamentally about basic human rights. There is no other group in society where we take the behaviour of a tiny minority and use it to deny rights to that group.
“What gender that person said they were, was less important than saying they were a convicted rapist. The fact they were a convicted rapist should not have been used by anybody as a pretext for denying rights to the wider trans community.”
On the gender recognition reform act, she added: “I think I can sit here and argue I wasn’t out of step with the Scottish public. I’ve sat in rooms with young trans kids talking to me about wanting to kill themselves because of the stigma and the discrimination and the inability to be recognised for who they are.
“The threat to women is abusive and predatory men, not trans people. My regret was that I wasn’t able to take the debate and the discourse around it into a more rational place.”
Ms Sturgeon also said the abuse she had received from those opposed to the gender recognition reforms had been more intense than any other criticism in her political career.
She noted: "I’ve had more toxic abuse, on this issue, much of it from women claiming to care about women’s rights and women’s safety than I have from probably any other issue. All of us need to take a step back and reflect on that."
In the wide-ranging interview, Ms Sturgeon also conceded that the SNP leadership contest has been "messier than we would like it to be" and a "less than edifying process". However, she has insisted that the election process is "fundamentally sound".
Her final week in office has been overshadowed by the resignations of the SNP’s head of communications Murray Foote and her husband Peter Murrell as chief executive over claims press officers gave journalists misleading information on membership figures.
She also denied claims that she had chosen to step down amid a police investigation into alleged missing SNP funds, instead maintaining that she believed the time was right for her to quit. She added: “I preferred doing it this way, to step back a bit before everybody thought I should."
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