With a scheme to send harmful breast binders to children behind parents’ backs and staff pushing puberty-blocking drugs, children’s transgender charity Mermaids – whose promotion of breast binders the Metropolitan Police has said is potentially abusive – is a scandal unfolding before our eyes. Is it time to withdraw its status as a charity, asks the Mail.
In the past month alone, [Mermaids’] online help centre has told users (who say they are young as 13) that controversial hormone-blocking drugs are safe and “totally reversible”.
Mermaids repeated such claims when approached by the Mail, saying the drugs are “an internationally recognised safe [and] reversible healthcare option”, yet current NHS guidelines say “little is known about the long-term side effects”.
Elsewhere on its chatrooms, a Mermaids moderator publicly congratulated a 13-year-old who had written on the website that they were transgender and wanted drugs and “all the surgeries”.
Evidence also suggests Mermaids has been running a free “binder scheme” since at least 2019, sending the items to adolescents who say their parents oppose the practice…
Yet all this comes despite the fact that Dr. Hilary Cass, the former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics who is leading a review of trans children’s services for the NHS, has described the restrictive garments as “painful and potentially harmful”.
The Metropolitan Police has also confirmed that if instances of minors using binders are reported, they will be treated as potential cases of child abuse. (Binders have been shown to cause instances of breathing difficulties, chronic back pain, and even changes to the spine and broken ribs.)
Amid mounting criticism – including from author and women’s rights campaigner JK Rowling who tweeted on Monday that those who have “been cheering Mermaids on without doing the slightest bit of due diligence” should feel ashamed – the Charity Commission said this week it would be taking a closer look at Mermaids.
These revelations then will undoubtedly cast doubts over the influence and reach of the charity, whose close-knit relationship with London’s discredited Tavistock Gender Identity Clinic has been repeatedly highlighted by former clinicians turned whistle-blowers over the years.
Tavistock is set to close its doors next year, following a review in July by Dr. Cass, that found the centre’s treatment to be unsafe.
Some critics are now calling for Mermaids to be shut down, too.
“It has always claimed not to give advice for medical issues and yet its chatrooms consistently show people giving advice, often behind parents’ backs. It has not been fit for purpose for a long time,” says Stephanie Davies-Arai of Transgender Trend, an organisation of parents, professionals and academics concerned about the current trend to diagnose children as transgender.
The charity, which in 2016 controversially appointed as CEO Susie Green, a former IT consultant with no medical training, has received the endorsement of Prince Harry, who met with Green and invited the charity to join his Royal Foundation’s work on mental health. In 2019 it also received a lottery grant to the tune of half a million pounds, and shortly afterwards Starbucks announced a fundraising partnership with it.
Yet this was against a backdrop of clinicians at the NHS Tavistock children’s gender identity clinic warning about the clinic’s “unusually close” relationship with Mermaids, with former Consultant Psychotherapist Marcus Evans, who had worked at Tavistock for decades, breaking cover in 2018 to say that it “interfered with the ordinary clinical environment”.
Father Ted writer Graham Linehan, a prominent critic of Mermaids and transgender ideology, said it was “extraordinary” that “you now have a situation where a doctor has put on record that she is prescribing hormones to children on the recommendation of a former IT worker with no medical background”. Like many who speak out against transgender ideology, Linehan has taken a lot of flak, and says his planned stage show was recently pulled by producers Hat Trick because of it.
Linehan adds: “Mermaids joins a long line of British scandals happening in plain sight. It is promoting damaging concepts and interventions for children, and it is doing it publicly time and again. How much more of this do we have to see before it is stopped?”
As questions are raised about Mermaids’ charity status, it has itself recently mounted a legal challenge to the Charity Commission’s decision to award charitable status to the LGB Alliance, a gay rights organisation that is critical of current transgender ideology and policy. The hearing is ongoing and has been adjourned until November.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: The Telegraph reports that Mermaids is being investigated by the Charity Commission, which says it has opened a “regulatory compliance case” after concerns were raised about the transgender charity’s “approach to safeguarding young people”.
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No, we are way beyond that now. The people responsible should be arrested and put on trial for child abuse!
I have heard people now in their 30s and 40s saying, on being sold the idea that you can “change sex”, or be non-binary because you don’t feel like being your biological sex: “If this had been around when I was a teenager, I would have totally fallen for it.”
It decidedly was around when they were teenages as the only transperson I personally know is about my age, ie, 45 – 50. So, what was the point?
The idea was nowhere near as widespread as now. Being non-binary or anything other than your biological sex wasn’t actively promoted to impressionable children and teenagers like it is now.
That’s certainly correct. But it was decidedly possible for people in their teens to be told that they’re really wrong-bodied and need a cosmetic/ hormonal sex change simulation to become their actual selves.
The statement that family relations aren’t being based on the member of the family being … well … related (biology) but only on a human myth already appears in a book called The Web of Government from 1947 (I recently started reading but then cast away again as – while I’m all for self-educating – I don’t want to waste my time on a heap of postmodern/ epistomological babble, not matter how learned and academic the author tries very hard to appear). Which implies that this progressive ideology is in reality quite ancient (at least 75 years old and probably older).
Another comment on the text: The effect of so-called puberty blockers is obviously not reversible because stopping to take them doesn’t unage people or put them back into their former circumstances. Someone underdoing puberty from 18 – 23 will have a whole lot more problems with that when this happens between 10 – 15.
The trans-agenda is about is evil as it gets.
Every orifice of influence available to these maniacs is exploited to sexualise children and confuse them about their own body. Once the victim is on the road to actual body mutilation, there’s no turning back, and without family/friend support – they’re on their own.
Our social care services are appallingly bad, often times placing the “transitioned” person in direct or indirect harm.
A case I’m aware of is one where a female went through the horrors of altering their body to look like a man, via these heinous charities. She spiralled into a state of terrible mental health, resulting in psychosis and is practically living on the streets. I say practically, because her social carers keep throwing her into accommodation which is totally unsuitable.
The last accommodation, she was expected to share a flat with a violent bloke with a criminal history of domestic violence. It wasn’t long before he turned on her and she fled to sleep on the streets. She now tries to kill herself, and the police don’t turn up when called upon to help her.
This is only one example of how evil this is. The state promote and endorse the movement, then withdraw all support when it inevitably goes tits up. Such is life in progressive United Kingdom.
This suggests that she had a nascent psychosis to begin with which made her fall for the Safe and Effective gender dysphoria story.
I don’t believe so. Psychosis is extremely difficult to understand, but from my own observations and indirect experience, it occurs following trauma. Some professionals speak of psychosis as a mental health injury.
The victim I talk about above started the process of body mutilation in her teens. A very turbulent and confusing period for anyone while growing up, therefore an age where people are particularly susceptible to fall victim of the trans movement.
A cause-and-effect relation must be total, ie, A can only cause B when B always occurs after A (a neccessary but not sufficient condition). AFAIK, the person I mentioned in the other comment is living a fairly trouble-free life. Hence, she must have been different from the person in your example in some respect.
I don’t doubt it. Something I wanted to add was that victims of the trans movement are three to six times more likely to be autistic than those who correctly identify their sex. The person in my example above is also autistic.
As an autist, you’re very much handicapped when interacting with other people as you’ll constantly bump into edgy things because you have no idea what you’re supposed to do. As one person in a online article once near-perfectly worded it: Everybody here seems to have been given a manual for proper behaviour except me. This means that an autist, if he’s for once being told what he’s supposed to do instead of being scolded (or worse) for misacting, especially a young one, will usually gladly conform. Considering this, telling autistic people that they have to transition to become proper and whole is seriously evil.
Nevetheless, I still think the person you were referring to had a mental health problem (ie, a special kind of medical problem) and fell into the hands of a bunch of quacks whose (costly) miracle cure ended up making the matter worse than it already was.
I agree with your first paragraph, though I take issue with your second paragraph. Are you a doctor with relevant experience, or do you have significant personal experience of psychosis?
Well, are you?
NB: The answer to the question is equally irrelevant.
Yes I am (significant personal experience).
And since you didn’t answer the question, I’m left to assume you probably have little to no experience of psychosis.
Not surprised to see this “charity” mixed up with the royals.
It seems anything that is geared towards destroying this country and our people gets supported by at least one prominent member of the royals.
Do you remember the ‘good old days’…when adults felt it was their job to protect children?
Ah…happy memories….
Would Susie Green be the mother who took her 16 year old child to Thailand for gender reassignment surgery? Any parent doing that to their child should be charged with GBH
Each new day brings forth more & more LUNATICS wanting to run branches of the worldly Asylum !!…
I keep on telling my Partner not to buy Starbucks but does she listen….
Due diligence has been replaced by due deference. A woman with no medical training who put her own child into an unregulated environment for a risky operation is made CEO of an advocacy group. That advocacy group then violates every shibboleth of online safeguarding, effectively grooming vulnerable children for the trans cult. None of these bureaucratic dullards saw any red flags, they were blinded by an unthinking allegiance to the totalitarian cult of the pride flag. The good news is that it is starting to unravel, and I wouldn’t expect even Sir kneeler to bother with defending it when he has his eyes on the prize.