MLAs reject UUP motion on banning 'vulnerable' men from women's prisons - as Alliance brand move 'insensitive'

The motion was defeated after Sinn Fein, Alliance and the SDLP opposed it – with support coming from the DUP, UUP and TUV.

It came after a controversy last year over where a male, who identifies as a transgender woman, won a High Court case to be transferred to Northern Ireland's female prison.

UUP MLA Doug Beattie said that there was a “conflict of rights” over the issue – and that concerns over transgender policy stretched into other areas such as women’s sports and language, searches conducted on or by women, and the use of terms like “chestfeeding” and “cis women” in public policy.

He said “a woman is an adult female” – and challenged others to set out another definition if they had one.

The Upper Bann MLA said the issue of sex segregation in prisons is important because parts of the women’s prison estate had unlocked doors and inmates held keys – and that putting a man in this environment is wrong and contrary to UN principles, which say men and women must be housed separately.

“Nobody is saying that all transgender women are predatory, but, again, the very presence of a male in a space designed for women creates problems and, possibly, anxiety and stress for the women housed there. At no stage are those women consulted before a biological male is placed in their midst”, Mr Beattie said.

The Upper Bann MLA also accused the justice minister of failing to grasp the issues involved. He pointed to a Department of Justice document which defines woman as “female adults and girls, and those who identify as female or non binary”. Non binary has no definition in law, and covers both men and women who describe themselves as such.

In her response, the justice minister Naomi Long criticised the UUP for bringing the motion, claiming that the party’s own MLA team had been a “single sex space” for quite some time until the arrival of Diana Armstrong last year. She said that there needed to be sensitivity in discussing the issue and that no two men or two women were the same, while describing trans people as “vulnerable”.

The Alliance leader framed the discussion as one about identity and “culture wars”, and attempted to move the discussion on to the decisions made by staff within the prison service and away from the overarching policy.

Mrs Long said that she found it “incredibly depressing” that despite the Prison Service managing risks “without serious incident or cause for alarm, we find ourselves second guessing the policy approach that it has taken”.

She said it was “foolhardy to suggest” that legislation, in the way proposed by the UUP, could manage risk “in a meaningful way as a person transitions through the justice system”.

The minister said a review of the procedures for managing transgender individuals was completed “some years ago” following engagement with the Equality Commission and the health service. A policy was then implemented which dealt with transgender prisoners on a case-by-case basis.

Her party colleague Paula Bradshaw said she was as disappointed as she was outraged “by the gross insensitivity” of the motion. She accused the Ulster Unionist Party of playing “a very dangerous game with some of the most vulnerable people to have been committed to the care of our Prison Service”. The South Belfast MLA said a “rigid ideological policy that segregates prisoners solely based on biological sex does not account for the nuances or the realities of often challenging custodial environments”.

People Before Profit’s Gerry Carroll said “the denial of trans and non binary identity in prisons is inhumane” and trans prisoners should be provided with “appropriate clothing and gender-affirming healthcare”. Gender affirming healthcare is a euphemism for medical interventions such as cross-sex hormones, mastectomies, castrations and phalloplasties and vaginoplasties (the creation of artificial genitalia).

DUP MLA Joanne Bunting, chair of Stormont’s justice committee, said MLAs “must decide whether we will protect the rights of 50% of society, or sacrifice their rights and safety for the sake of a minority of men who want to be women or regard themselves as such”.

She said sexual predators will exploit self-ID. “Those who present a serious risk and threat to women will absolutely seek to exploit self-identification, and any loophole that they can find, for their own sinister ends. It is only a matter of time”.

“Of the 245 transgender prisoners in England and Wales who, as of 31 March 2024, reported their legal birth gender as male, 151 had been convicted of a sexual offence. We have therefore already seen, and should have learnt from, cases in England and Wales in which those convicted of rape and other sexually violent crimes self-identified as women and were placed in female prisons, to the severe detriment of biological female inmates, some of whom ended up being sexually assaulted as a consequence”, the DUP MLA said.

TUV MLA Timothy Gaston – who proposed an amendment removing a commitment in the motion to “continuous support” for the ‘LGBTQ+ community’ – said right of women to have their own space in the penal system “had to be fought for and won”.

He added that “the reforms won by Elizabeth Fry against incredible odds at a time when women were excluded from the democratic process are being disregarded by the Prison Service today because of the unscientific, silly and, frankly, dangerous idea, which is blindly accepted in the guidance, that: ‘people’s gender identities can be different from the sex they were assigned at birth’”.

Mr Gaston asked the justice minister to state how many genders there are – and if there were an indefinable number of genders how could any panel considering appeals ever be truly gender balanced.

Sinn Fein’s Deirdre Hargey said her party wanted a “risk based approach” which wouldn’t allow convicted sex offenders in women’s prisons – but would allow males convicted of other crimes to be placed there on a case-by-case basis.