Out of the frying pan into the fire.

An NHS Trust taking over care of trans children from the Tavistock clinic is being trained by controversial charity Mermaids, The Telegraph can reveal.

Why go to all the trouble of removing care of trans children from the Tavistock only to get training from Mermaids? Why not find people who aren’t captive to a deranged ideology?

The charity, which is at the centre of a number of safeguarding rows and is currently under investigation by the regulator, will provide sessions for staff at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust (SLaM) starting this month.

It’s under investigation, but in the meantime – “Keep doing what you’ve been doing!”

Mermaids’ influence on the Tavistock was cited by some whistle-blowers as one of the reasons why it lost its way, with claims that activists put pressure on clinicians to affirm children’s belief that they were trans and to prescribe potentially life-altering drugs.

Ya think?

Medics who blew the whistle on Tavistock said that the trans charity’s involvement with SLaM is a cause for “concern” and that previous training has been “inaccurate and misleading”. They called for a “completely different approach” at the new NHS service.

But but but we don’t want to. We want to go on doing what we were doing.

Sue Evans, a Tavistock nurse who first raised concerns in 2005, told The Telegraph: “My experience was that groups like Mermaids exerted pressure on the clinical service which was not always helpful in terms of thinking about patients holistically.”

Mermaids doesn’t do holistic. Mermaids knows one thing and one thing only.

Mermaids say that its Continuing Professional Development (CPD) training is “tailored to the needs of your organisation, exploring: gender diversity, barriers faced by trans people, transitioning and treatment pathways, and ways to improve your diversity policies and procedures.”

If you’re a hammer, everything is a nail.

Consultant psychotherapist Dr Marcus Evans, who resigned from the Trust over their treatment of whistle-blowers, told The Telegraph “There are a lot of parents who are already worried after Tavistock said it would be involved in advising the new service providers, and now Mermaids is offering training as well.

“The old service system is discredited. We need a completely different approach that avoids preoccupation with gender to the exclusion of all other facets of the family, child and young person’s personality and development.”

But without preoccupation with gender, life has no meaning.

A SLaM spokesman said: “This training is not related to the development of an early adopter service for children and young people experiencing gender incongruence and gender dysphoria.

“We commission as well as directly provide high-quality professional training courses from a wide range of providers as part of our training offer for our staff to further support the provision of personalised, safe and therapeutic care for young people and adults using mental health services.”

But Mermaids isn’t high-quality. It can’t provide high-quality training courses because it’s not high-quality itself. It’s myopic and obsessive; its quality is low.