The women are at it again. For Women Scotland (FWS), specifically. They’re the pressure group who took on the Scottish government, which believes men are women if they say so, and secured a Supreme Court judgment that ‘sex’ in the Equality Act refers to biological rather than ‘certificated’ sex. Now they’re back in court taking on the same government over its policy of allowing some male prisoners who identify as trans to be held in the female estate.

Aidan O’Neill KC, who is representing FWS, suggested to the Court of Session on Tuesday morning that the Scottish government was doubling down as ‘a political calculation’ and that women locked up with men were being ‘used by the Scottish government in this case to be traded as pawns for political gain’. The government, for its part, contends that a blanket rule for accommodating inmates by sex ‘would violate the rights of some prisoners’, and says its policy allows flexibility to bar violent or dangerous male prisoners from entry to the female estate.

O’Neill flipped this on its head, asking the court: ‘Why do women have to be human shields to protect the nice trans-identifying male prisoners against the risk of violence against them if they were in the male estate?’ He went on to accuse........

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