The decision was taken by the Scottish Prison Service (SPS), and the Scottish First Minister has insisted she played no role in it.
However, sources with intimate knowledge of how the prison service in Scotland operates said it was inconceivable that SPS bosses would have taken such a monumental decision if they thought it would be strongly opposed by ministers.
Jack McConnell, a former Labour first minister, said on Thursday night: “Let us be absolutely clear. There are no circumstances where this rapist would have been sent to Cornton Vale without ministers knowing.”
The SPS overhauled its policies in 2014 to state that a prisoner’s accommodation “should reflect the gender in which the person in custody is currently living”.
The shift was heavily influenced by the Scottish Trans Alliance, a vocal cheerleader of the SNP self-identification law and an offshoot of the Equality Network charity that is almost entirely reliant on Ms Sturgeon’s government for funding.
Of almost £600,000 in taxpayers’ cash handed to the Equality Network last year, £100,000 was ringfenced for the Scottish Trans Alliance.
James Morton, then the director of the trans group, admitted in an essay for Trans Britain, a 2018 book, that the group had deliberately targeted prisons as a means of persuading other public bodies to follow its agenda.
“We strategised that by working intensively with the Scottish Prison Service to support them to include trans women as women on a self-declaration basis within very challenging circumstances, we would be able to ensure that all other public services should be able to do likewise,” he wrote.