Transwomen are not women any more.

JK Rowling was attacked as a transphobic bigot now Nicola agrees with her

Nicola Sturgeon has torpedoed her own gender policy. Faced with a public outcry at a male-bodied trans rapist, Isla Bryson (formerly Adam Graham) being placed in a women's prison, she ordered the Scottish Prison Service to reverse ferret and send the lad/lass to a male prison where he should have been in the first place.

Ms Sturgeon has changed Scottish prison policy by decree. She has allied herself with supposed “transphobes” like JK Rowling who had been warning about predatory men changing gender to access women's spaces.

The BBC still insist on calling Isla Bryson 'she' even though 'she' had been guilty of two rapes. But why do they bother? Nicola Sturgeon has now said that, contrary to the law as the prison service interpreted it, transwomen are not women. “She” is a man. “He” is now being sent to a male prison. Mr Graham has been misgendered by incarceration.

Initially Bute House tried to claim this was a special case. But it soon emerged that Tiffany Scott, aka Andrew Burns, another violent inmate had also been cleared to move to the female estate. He had attacked a female prison officer and stalked a child from prison.. Another male-bodied sex offender, Katie Dolatowski, a six foot five paedophile, had already been in Cornton Vale women's prison despite pleading guilty to assaulting fellow inmates.

The Scottish Government's gender policy is a shambles. For the last three years, SNP politicians have been dutifully parroting the dogma that transwomen are women; transmen are men”. No buts, no qualification. If you disagree you are “transphobic..misogynistic, homophobic and possible racist” , according Nicola Sturgeon only last week. But how can transwomen be women be if, on the basis of their reproductive apparatus, they can be barred from a woman's jail?

Ms Sturgeon insisted at first that there would be “no blanket ban” on sex offenders being installed in women's jails – that would be transphobic of course. The Justice Secretary Keith Brown insisted that the government would not interfere with the “best practice” of the Scottish Prison Service which has been placing inmates in the prisons of their declared sex. That didn't survive the weekend.

On Sunday Brown decided that the SPS aren't so expert after all and instructed them to halt the movement of transwomen with a history of violence against women while a “thorough review” took place. The only review should be into how it could've been the policy of the prison service to place male-bodied sex offenders in women's jails in the first place.

It has been argued that this affair has nothing to do with the Gender Reform Recognition Bill and self ID because it is not yet law. But that is an even more astonishing aspect to this case. For we now learn that for nearly a decade, the Scottish Prison Service has being applying self-declaration in advance of the law. They process offenders purely on the basis of their own self-expressed identity. We now see just why the Scottish Government rejected an amendment to the Gender Bill preventing convicted sex offenders from changing sex before being imprisoned. They knew that this was already the policy.

There is an unintentionally hilarious prison service video from 2014, presented by the Scottish Government-funded, Trans Alliance, informing us about how this enlightened scheme works. Various bearded transwomen appear and are duly processed as women - and body searched by women prison offices. There is no questioning of their sexual identity. This was mission creep before there was a mission.

Trans prison policy is a classic case of institutional capture. The Scottish Government had been persuaded by Stonewall lobbyists that transwomen are women. Civil servants then handed this policy over to the prison service which logically concluded that, if they are women, they should be in women's prisons, their actual offence being irrelevant. Only now the politicians, running scared of public opinion, are telling the SPS: no, silly, of course we didn't REALLY mean that transwomen are women. Duh!

This is not over. Why apply the ban only to transwomen who attack women? What about violent transwomen who attack male inmates or prison warders, as did Tiffany Scott, when not covering himself with excrement? The point is that these are often strong and aggressive male-bodied violent offenders. What possible justification could there be for installing such people in a women's jail?

It will eventually dawn on the Scottish Government that it Is just too politically risky to place any male bodied transwomen in a women's prison in case there is a future assault, sexual or otherwise. Biological sex has finally been installed in SNP central.

Moreover, it will no longer be reasonable to claim that it is transphobic for women to wish to be treated by doctors and nurses of their own biological sex. Women will insist on single sex changing rooms. Mothers will demand that their daughters are not exposed to male bodied pupils in toilets

It is deeply regrettable too that sexual offending is now linked in the public mind with people who are transgender. The vast majority are not sexual perverts and should be treated with respect. But it is the failure of the Scottish Government to discuss this issue openly with the public that has led to this situation. Activists were allowed to claim that there should be “no debate” on sex and gender so it is only now that voters are asking why natal males are in women's prisons

The obvious solution to the present storm is to have transgender prison wings. But how to reconcile that with the dogma that transwomen are women? It also conflicts with the interpretation of the law laid out by Lady Haldane in the Court of Session last month that trans people with a gender recognition certificate are legally female “for all purposes”. Indeed, the former governor of Cornton Vale, Rhona Hotchkiss, has said that transwomen barred from women's prisons may have grounds to sue for discrimination since their gender recognition certificates say they are legally female.

This is now a huge political problem for the SNP. Gender reform was Nicola Sturgeon's flagship policy, her own personal crusade. She insists that she is a feminist and that gives her a right to label anyone who criticise her, like the author JK Rowling, as bigots and misogynists. But she now stands accused of a far worse crime against the sisterhood: allowing women to be placed in danger by her commitment to a policy that denies the reality of biological sex.