October 24, 2024 - 4:00pm
Child transition charity Mermaids will today be grateful for a very easy ride from the Charity Commission.
A 22-page report, which took two years to complete, has found that “there has been mismanagement in the administration of the charity by the trustees”. The document concludes that this was because the “governance, culture and practices had failed to keep pace with its growing size”.
It is true that the charity has expanded rapidly, its income swelling from under £84,000 in 2016 to almost £2.3m in 2023. And, over the years, its approach has changed, too.
In 2009, Mermaids’ website included the statement “Gender Identity Disorders in infancy, childhood and adolescence are complex and have varied causes: in the majority of cases the eventual outcome will be homosexuality or bisexuality. Only a small proportion of cases will result in a transexual outcome.” Yet in the intervening period Mermaids has become a child transition machine, aggressively pushing for legal and medical changes to recognise the existence of so-called “transgender children”.
When Hilary Cass this year published her report into the scandal-struck gender identity services at the Tavistock clinic, Mermaids was aghast. The charity responded with a breathless statement, complaining that the findings of the world-leading paediatrician had been misrepresented in the press and Parliament. Rather than digesting Cass’s findings, it promised to continue to advocate for “access to medical interventions such as puberty suppressing and cross gender hormones”. The Charity Commission has rebuked Mermaids for this, instructing it to “give further consideration to the findings and conclusions of the Cass Review Final Report”.
This seems unlikely. Today, Mermaids is an ideology-led lobby group, not a support group that simply follows the science. Controversial campaigns launched by Mermaids include the right of students to take legal action, without parental consent, against schools which do not refer to them by their chosen names and pronouns; the provision of cross-sex hormones for children under 16; and a ban on any therapeutic treatment that does not affirm a child’s cross-sex or non-binary identity. Arguably even more concerning are the charity’s attempts to silence critics.
In 2021 Mermaids, with the help of the Good Law Project, launched legal action against the decision of the Charity Commission to award LGB Alliance charitable status. Then-CEO Susie Green claimed: “The work of the LGB Alliance is clearly designed to divide the LGBTQ+ community in an attempt to undermine and isolate trans people.” The case failed, and shortly afterwards the Charity Commission launched its investigation into Mermaids.
What was found by the Charity Commission is the tip of a murky genderberg. The remit of the report was narrow, based on 62 complaints and press coverage. Yet the Commission confirmed that Mermaids had appointed a trustee with a somewhat laissez-faire attitude to paedophilia, that breast binders (devices to flatten breast tissue) had been sent to young girls behind their parents’ backs, and that Mermaids had been unclear about whether medical information offered was “factual evidence” or merely the organisation’s own opinion.
Had a donkey sanctuary in rural Wales been found to have been so poorly managed, it might not matter so much. But Mermaids not only deals with a vulnerable group of children, it has been feted by celebrities and political figures across the world. These include Prince Harry, actor Emma Watson and US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The story of former CEO Susie Green, a woman who took her own child to Thailand for sex reassignment surgery for his 16th birthday, inspired the ITV television series Butterfly and the charity advised on the BBC Radio 4 series Just a Girl. Make no mistake, Mermaids has created ripples across the global and media landscape.
The line between activism and charitable work is often blurred. But when it comes to the physical and mental health of children, one would hope that evidence might outweigh ideology. Mermaids does not deserve a ticking off: it deserves to be struck off the charitable register altogether.
Josephine Bartosch is assistant editor at The Critic and co-author of the forthcoming book Pornocracy.
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SubscribeThe Right contorting itself between the Trump/Farage Populist types and proper responsible politicians not a new theme and will play out over next few years. Little signal there though for the Populist form – it ain’t as popular as you think because people grasping Populists all hot air and about themselves first and foremost. Taken a while but it’s registering.
On the 2nd and 3rd stories – the Muslim world has it’s dangerous conspiratorialist streak as much as the Alex Jones nutjobs in the West. It’s the same psychology at work. Bedfellows.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that not very many people in the free world want the United States to be led by a moron. It is shocking to me that so many Americans do!
True Tories are Uniparty liberal globalists so of course they want KH to win.
They are also finished as a political entity.
Of course the swivel eyed loons at Reform would prefer Trump!
Anyone else, especially after watching Trump’s trainwreck last night, would prefer Harris as leader of the free world.
and endless wars
Who Brits (or any other non-US citizens) want to win the election is entirely irrelevant.
Indeed…this is a typical MSM filler piece, which UnHerd shouldn’t be running…
Not a lot more irrelevant than who US citizens want. After all they are going to get who they are given.
Most Brits haven’t been to the USA. Very few have been in the last few years. A negligible number of Brits have any reliable basis whatsoever to judge who is the best candidate. It’s like asking us who we want to win the next Indian general election.
True, but the US President is still the “Leader of the Free World”, so people in a lot of other countries do take the trouble to form a view.
Not quite. Whilst the number who take a broader interest may be small the US election has much more impact on us than the Indian. Although the latter is rapidly increasing in importance.
In terms of who has a Vote that is self-evident. But in who has a stake in the outcome and should be interested then Brits, and the western world per se should have a fundamental interest/concern.
The US Election gets so much coverage here because it has so much impact. The reverse of course is not true.