Mermaids wants more of it, much faster
Susie Green of Mermaids accidentally posted a bunch of highly personal emails online.
Many of the emails, written between 2016 and 2017, included the full names of the parents and children, pre- and post-transition, along with telephone numbers and intimate details of treatment and care. They were sent in confidence by the parents, or forwarded by other agencies, to Susie Green, chief executive of Mermaids, the high-profile transgender children’s support group.
…
The messages could be found through a simple online search until Friday, when Mermaids removed them after being contacted by this newspaper.
Alongside the client emails were hundreds of often revealing internal ones showing trustees’ concerns about Green’s leadership, accusations from parents that Mermaids felt like a “cult” and alcohol problems at residential weekends putting children “at risk”.
Green appears to have thought she had set up a private email group, using a common webmail platform, to share information with her trustees. But she, or Mermaids, had failed to read her group’s homepage which said that its “archives are visible to everyone”.
Oops.
But that’s ok, go ahead and trust her with struggling unhappy children anyway, all she wants to do is help them block puberty and then transition to the other sex.
[Mermaids] was given £500,000 by the national lottery, £128,000 by the BBC’s Children in Need and £35,000 by the government. It also has the support of Prince Harry, City banks and large parts of the media.
Green was series consultant on Butterfly, the recent ITV drama about a transgender child that gave a flattering portrait of Mermaids, with its logo visible in some scenes and a script reflecting the group’s talking points.
It all seems very hasty, but hey, it’s only changing sex, sometimes with surgery but sometimes merely with a lifetime of hormone-fiddling drugs. What downside could there possibly be?
Green, who took her own son, aged 16, for a sex-change operation in Thailand, believes medical intervention is “absolutely vital” for children unhappy with their biological sex.
Mermaids wants more of it, much faster. It campaigns to end the NHS ban on children being given sex-change hormones that reduce fertility and require lifelong medical support. Most doctors believe that children, who may change their minds, are too young for this irreversible step.
Green claims the lack of such treatment is making children suicidal. She has said patients of the main NHS clinic that treats gender-dysphoric youngsters, the Tavistock Centre in north London, have a “48 per cent suicide attempt risk”. The true rate, says the clinic, is less than 1 per cent.
48 per cent, 1 per cent, whatever. Green is so well-meaning!
Green, an IT consultant, has no medical training. Responding on Twitter to an NHS psychiatrist who accused her of “making stuff up”, she wrote that “you need to f*** off. You know nothing.”
A Tavistock clinician said: “Mermaids push simplistic views, emotional blackmail and conscious misinformation at parents. They do so much harm.”
In evidence to MPs, Mermaids complained that the Tavistock spoke too much of the “uncertainty and complexity” of gender transition. It singled out a doctor at the clinic by name as “anti-trans” and demanded “a thorough audit of staff and their views”.
Yeah. It’s not uncertain and complex at all, it’s as simple and benign as getting a haircut. Susie Green, with no medical training, must know all about it, unlike those “science” types at the Tavistock.
Given this tension, one surprise of the private emails is the apparent closeness of the relationship. Perhaps the pressure was working. Sally Hodges, a senior Tavistock manager, promised to “co-ordinate” the text of the clinic’s website with Mermaids. “It would be valuable to think with you about the content going forward,” she wrote. The clinic’s director, Polly Carmichael, told Mermaids it was good to be working together.
“Perhaps the pressure was working” – Andrew Gilligan has a way with understatement.
It’s reminding me of Jonestown again. A whole bunch of people doing what this one narcissistic psychopath told them to do, even though many of them had doubts and would have preferred to leave…but the pressure was working.
The pressure is working; pressure does work. That’s one reason I despise this movement so intensely: it relies so very heavily on pressure instead of anything less coercive and more persuasive. There is far more slogan-flinging than reasoned argument, and far more bullying and ostracism than compassion and generosity. It’s becoming more and more difficult every day to think of it as a political rights-based movement like others as opposed to a cult that attracts every raging disordered narcissist on the planet. Even if I thought they were right in their confusion of “gender” with personality I still wouldn’t want anything to do with the movement, because their rhetoric and behavior are so repellent.
It’s been said before, but I’ll say it again: There is likely to be a huge legal backlash against these places when adults that were given unnecessary treatment and surgeries as teenagers start suing.
This should all have been handled much more carefully.
There’s likely to be a huge backlash of all kinds. Not a pretty one.
Agreed.
What made me think of the legal stuff in particular here is the disregarding of medical professionals, the pressure, the dissemination of known misinformation…I’m not super familiar with U.K. law, but here in the U.S. any halfway decent lawyer would crucify them in court.
The real shame is of course the victims. Any backlash isn’t going to restore their bodies.
Susie Green subjected her own son to sex reassignment surgery, iirc. Because he liked “stereotypically girl things”.
Not in the UK, of course, where it was illegal for a boy as young as he was. She shipped him off to Thailand, where it is now illegal there, or so I am told.
Yes. Gilligan reports that in the piece.
Fuckin’ Jonestown, I tell ya.
Cult is exactly the right word. I’ve always been fascinated by cults and the psychology behind them. How they rope well-intentioned and even seemingly intelligent people into believing the most outlandish nonsense, and defending it rabidly. That’s how I ended up a reader here, actually. I went from a fascination with Scientology to an afffinity for atheist activism (and a brief membership with CFI), and now my main fascination is with the trans cult. The similarities between trans activists and Scientologists are just uncanny. I still can’t believe the woke lefties and philosophers and atheists don’t see how foolish they’re being. I am absolutely certain there is a reckoning on the horizon, and it will be ugly indeed.
Is this the 21st century? Because if feels like the 1950s, only with hormone therapy and surgery. We had started leaving this shit behind until the backlash started. The trans movement fits in perfectly with the backlash against women being able to do things that are not “stereotypically girl things” and men being able to do things that are “stereotypically girl things”.
I like to do some “stereotypically girl things” and some “stereotypically boy things”, but that doesn’t mean I should make half my body female and half my body male. Nor does the fact that I am a scientist who likes tromping in wetlands and can’t match my colors mean I should become a man. Any more than my librarian husband who picks out all our artwork because he can match colors should become a woman.
I had hoped by 2019 we would be past all this…back in 1969 I hoped that. I still hoped it in 1979. Still hoping in 1989. 1999. Still a little hope in 2009. Now, I have very little hope that we will ever get past all this. Not because it is speaking to a scientific reality, but because there are too many people who have too much invested in the division of the sexes, and will find ways, no matter how, to keep pushing women backwards every chance they get.
Artymorty @ 7 – cool that that’s how you ended up a reader here, because it’s much of how I ended up scribbling and collecting others’ scribbling here. I too have always been fascinated by the psychology. Remember that mass suicide of people who thought they were going to a spaceship that was hiding behind a planet (or was it the moon?)? Maaaan…how do people manage to get themselves to a state like that.
The trans doctrine is all too like that, and yet serious people in droves have fallen for it, fallen so hard that they think monstering skeptical women is perfectly reasonable. Actual academic philosophers who teach (and do) philosophy in universities…they repeat all the solemn nonsense as if it were entirely reasonable, and then monster feminists who don’t buy the nonsense.
Behind Hale Bopp comet.
I think this came from the dynamic of “always believe [fill in whatever marginalized group is the current fad]”. At one point, it was “always believe the women”. I didn’t buy into that then, since women can lie, and I don’t believe it now. I think there are better approaches. I always hate to quote Reagan, but I think in this case “Trust but verify” is a better mantra. They trust, but don’t verify.
The trans community cites statistics. Lots of statistics. Few people understand statistics. I get that, but in this case, it isn’t even about understanding the statistics, it’s about being willing to admit that the statistics they cite are in many cases just made up. That is easy to determine at this point by a simple internet search, but before the so-called “TERFs” started collecting the data, it was somewhat harder, because you actually had to go in and look for them. And maybe understand them a little.
That, plus the piggy-backing on the LGBQ community that has done most of the hard work for them….they use statistics that apply to gay men and lesbians, or to the LGBTQ community as a whole as if they apply only to the T, and they utilize the LGBTQ infrastructure to push their own agenda. The left is very sensitive to any hint of homophobia, and they locked trans issues into that.
The left has never been all that sensitive to any hint of sexism. That has become so embedded into our culture and normalized, we often don’t see it. Plus, many on the left are themselves sexist. This has been evident for a long time with the constant exhortations to throw women under the bus on abortion issues, pay issues, etc – jettison any discussion of women’s rights in favor of getting votes from the center right.
Oh yes, Hale Bopp. How could I forget.
Heaven’s Gate cult:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven%27s_Gate_(religious_group)
Ditto for me, and likely for everyone with a wide variety of interests. I like to knit, for example, and I am unashamed to sit outside in the sun publicly knitting in the park. Me, a 53-year-old slightly pudgy white man. Yes, trans activists, you read that right: “man”. My pleasure at knitting doesn’t make me a woman any more than my interest in soap making and various handicrafts. Frankly, it’s absurd to think that one’s interest in something could possibly affect their freakin’ biological sex. What’s going to be the next bizarre claim? That one’s preference of sock colors determines their height? “Sorry, I can’t be five feet tall, I wear green socks so that means I’m six foot, eleven inches.”
Um, so this is slightly out of the left field for this thread but these two bits of info jumped right out at me from the (separate) quotes:
1) “Green appears to have thought she had set up a private email group, using a common webmail platform, to share information with her trustees. But she, or Mermaids, had failed to read her group’s homepage which said that its “archives are visible to everyone””
and
2)”Green, an IT consultant, has no medical training(…)”
At first glance, that’s just ironic/funny: an IT consultant making such a dog’s breakfast out of setting up an email group (that’s a pretty serious “oops” if you are in the industry, if you did something like that while working at some company’s IT department, you’d be fired, just for starters, then possibly sued, and unlikely to get another job in IT ever again). At a second glance, it hints at Susie Green being a hack (as in, incompetent, not to be confused with cognates of “hacking” and “hacker”). I get that it’s an ad hominem, but I would argue that a public show of gross incompetence in your ostensible area of expertise should maybe count for something, when you are engaged in attempts to push a set of, at face value, dubious claims on the general public (one of the claims being that you know what you are talking about)
Not left field at all. I had a very rudimentary version of the same thought. “IT? But couldn’t keep emails private? Huh?” That rudimentary. But yes, it jumps out, doesn’t it.