Kate Coleman

Kate Coleman, founder and director of the criminal justice reform group Keep Prisons Single Sex, discusses her organisation’s advocacy for the sex-based rights of women throughout the criminal justice system and Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill. Expounding upon the importance of sex to risk, safeguarding, and data recording, Coleman elaborates the needed changes to current practices within prisons throughout the UK. Observing how Sturgeon pushed through the Gender Recognition Reform Bill with astounding rapidity, Coleman describes her participation at Stage 1 of this bill, having given testimony on a panel in Holyrood. She also elicits her horror during Stage 3 as Coleman witnessed discussions around approximately 150 significant amendments to this bill—from child protection and the safeguarding of vulnerable adults. Coleman recounts how these proposed amendments were arrogantly dismissed with jeers from SNP politicians and accusations of bigotry towards women asking for reasonable accommodations to not be imprisoned with men. Articulating how the transgender lobby has introduced the concept that sex is something “about which you can and should be able to keep private,” Coleman analyses how this, together with collapse of gender and sex, has piggybacked “gender identity” onto intersex medical conditions in order to give this project a veneer of a proper medical diagnosis while disappearing the reality of sex.