Ex Greenock prisoner says former First Minister would have taken a very different view if she’d personally been sentenced to jail time alongside a biological male.
04:30, 25 Apr 2026
Former First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon
An ex-con claims the trans prisoner “mess” would never have happened if Nicola Sturgeon had experienced her own jail time alongside a biological male.
Jayney Sutherley spoke out after police charged Alex Stewart, a biological male, with sexually assaulting a woman prisoner at HMP Greenock.
Hairdresser Sutherley – who killed a man with a pair of scissors – has backed calls for the immediate transfer of all trans prisoners from the women’s estate.
Sutherley spoke out after she was released from Greenock prison and a year after facing claims in the town’s sheriff court that she’d “misgendered” Stewart, 38. She was cleared but the trial meant she was denied parole, leading to a longer jail term.
Jayney Sutherley at Greenock Sheriff
Sutherley, 52, said: “When I saw all that stuff about Nicola Sturgeon getting arrested, I was wondering if she might actually be able to see the situation for herself from the inside.
“I can guarantee she would have had a very different attitude to women sharing with men if she was forced to share a shower block with someone like Alex Stewart, the way I did and all the other girls at Darroch Hall in Greenock did.”
The former hairdresser’s case heard Stewart’s only surgery had been a tracheal shave – to reduce his Adam’s apple.
Last year the For Women Scotland group won a landmark case against the Scottish Government at the UK Supreme Court, which clarified that biology would define men and women.
But Scottish Prison Service did not ship out trans prisoners, instead allowing some biological males to remain in women’s jails after vetting.
Sutherley said: “The people who make decisions could never see our side because they never walked in our shoes.”
She said she felt the Scottish public were being “gaslit” when told it was safe to have men in women’s jails.
Stewart was in a relationship with notorious child killer Nyomi Fee in HMP Greenock.
Sutherley said: “What we had to live with in Greenock was a man who was living among us with a woman that he’s in a relationship with. We’re then told that it’s OK, that it’s safe, because he’s decided to be known as a woman.
“The reality is that there’s a guy with a penis having a relationship with a woman in a jail and any woman who didn’t like it had to lump it because Sturgeon decided it would be a nice thing to do for men who decided they were women.
“It’s mad and it should all be stopped now.”
Nyomi Fee
Sutherley was jailed in 2020 for the culpable homicide of Alistair MacFadyen. She was released last year.
Sturgeon was arrested in connection with the probe into SNP party funds and later released without charge.
The Scottish Government faced a flood of calls to make jails single sex after the Record revealed the allegation against Stewart on Thursday.
For Women Scotland called for an end to the “dangerous and stupid experiment”.
Solicitor Paul Lynch, who represented Sutherley in court, said if it wasn’t for the Scottish Government’s “contemptuous refusal to comply with the decision of the Supreme Court in For Women Scotland’s case, such an allegation could not have arisen”.
Police said a prisoner, 38, has been charged in connection with a sexual assault within HMP Greenock.
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