Adam Graham, who claims to be a transgender woman named Isla Bryson, has been sentenced to eight years in prison by the High Court in Edinburg on Tuesday after being found guilty of raping two women.
The 31-year-old rapist — who was widley credited with taking down the local government of far-left Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland after she was unable to say whether Graham was a woman or not — was convicted in January of raping two women in 2016 and 2019, while still identifying as a man.
Shortly after being put on trial, Graham would go on to claim to be a transgender woman named Isla Bryson, and was therefore innitially afforded the privilege of staying in a female-only prison. After widespread public backlash over concern for the saftey of women prisoners, the Scottish government reversed its decision and moved Graham to a male prison.
Sentencing Graham (Bryson) on Tuesday, Judge Lord Scott told the defendent: “You are not yet ready at this stage of accepting what you did or the serious harm you have inflicted on vulnerable women.”
“You raped two women who could both be regarded as vulnerable,” the judge said according to the Daily Record, noting that Graham had “preyed on these women because of their vulnerabilities and raped them in their own homes”.
The judge said that he would placing the rapist on a sex offenders register “indefinitely” because of the “high risk” of sexual reoffending and the “significant risk to any woman with whom” the rapist formed a relationship with.
In addition to the eight year prison sentence, Judge Scott also sentenced the supposedly transgender convict to three years supervision on liscence following release from prison.
The court heard during the trial that the first victim was preyed upon when Graham stayed at her mother’s house in 2016 after going through a divorce.
Providing evidence in a pre-recorded video to the court, the victim, 30, said that she was raped for a half an hour, saying: “All I said was ‘no’ over and over and over again,” and adding: “At the time I was so scared. Sick to the stomach. I just didn’t know what was going on.”
The other victim, who testified via video-link, said: “I said to stop but he (Graham) just kept on going, and that’s when I just closed my eyes and I am doing what he wanted to do.” The court went on to hear that the victim was penetrated by “her (Graham’s) penis”.
During the trial, Graham (Bryson) said that both women had consented to having sex, and claimed that they had “colluded” to contrive the charges, however, provided no evidence to this effect.
Although no legal gender recognition certificate was provided, the rapist claimed to have started identifying as transgender at the age of four and later made the decision to transition to a woman at the age of 29, shortly after charges were levied. The court did hear, however, that the convicted sex offender has since begun taking hormones and will seek a sex-change surgery.
Earlier this month, the Scottish Prison Service (SPS) went on to follow the lead of the UK government in Westminster, in removing the Sturgeon-era policy of allowing prisoners to “self-identify” with the gender of their preference.
The issue of prisoners self-identifying as females has continued to be a central issue in the leadership race to replace Nicola Sturgeon as first minister, with finance minister Kate Hobbes, a leading contender, coming under critism from the left in her own party for openly declaring that Graham is not a woman. Though he has supported the self-identification policy, her chief opponent, Humza Yousaf, has also expressed doubt that the convict is actually a “true trans woman”.
