Mermaids’ useful idiots Journalists, teachers and activists all defended Susie Green

During her time at Mermaids, Green has been advising parents, schools, the police, the media and NHS trusts about how to deal with other children who dare to not be gender stereotypes. She was their first staff member — before Mermaids was run by volunteers — and under her leadership, she has transformed the organisation from a quiet, low-key charity to an energetically active lobbying group, and her theories about childhood and gender have been at least as influential as Judith Butler’s. Mermaids has been endorsed by the Be Kind brigade, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jameela Jamil and Emma Watson, accrued a slew of corporate sponsors and been awarded £500,000 by the National Lottery. Progressive newspapers advise readers to contact the service should they have any concerns about their child.

Since 2017, I regularly asked editors at the newspaper where I worked if I could write about Mermaids in general and Green specifically, because it was so obvious that something was very wrong here. The answer, always, was no, but the reasons given were fuzzy: it wouldn’t be right in that section, they couldn’t see the news peg, it felt too niche. A more likely reason was one articulated to me with some passion on social media any time I tweeted anything sceptical about Green or Mermaids: to question either was to wish trans children would die. Doubt the charity, hate the cause, in other words. Weirdly, this attitude seems to hold true only for charities connected to trans issues: no one, as far as I know, screamed that The Times hates starving people when they investigated Oxfam in 2018 about allegations that some of its workers paid for sex.

I do have some sympathy with those who were too scared to question Mermaids. Under Green’s leadership, the organisation has done its utmost to evade scrutiny, trotting out — even in parliamentary committees, even in the 2018 ITV drama Butterfly, starring Anna Friel, and for which Green was the series lead consultant — the claim that 48% of young trans people attempt suicide. A terrifying statistic for any parent of a gender dysphoric child, and almost as scary for any organisation that cares more about being kind than being accurate. Happily, the statistic is bunkum, as the researcher behind the study it’s based on has said, because the study involved 27 self-selecting trans volunteers, and therefore its findings should not be widened out to all gender dysphoric young people, as Mermaids had done.

You would think that discovering attempted suicide is not as common among young gender dysphoric people as previously believed would be greeted with triumphant cheers and celebrations by a charity that claims to support them, and the celebrities who frequently tweet their love for the group routinely described as “the most oppressed people in the world”. And yet, strangely, not so much. As a result, that statistic is still routinely banded around by activists. (Is telling oppressed people that they are likely to try to kill themselves, despite the facts suggesting otherwise, really Being Kind?) It’s the same story with puberty blockers: for years, Green and Mermaids insisted they were fully reversable. Green had given them to her child, as she repeated so often, and she wouldn’t deliberately harm her own child, right? Online obsessives — such as one full-time tweeter, part-time lawyer and occasional fox murderer — parroted these claims, and people went along with the theory that a drug originally licensed to treat prostate cancer would be fine for children. In fact, it is now becoming widely accepted that blockers affect bone development, and may prevent the young person from ever being able to orgasm.