Billy Bragg didn’t much care for my appearance on Andrew Doyle’s Free Speech Nation.

He got it wrong, though. I had not accused trans people or gay men of anything of the kind. I had simply pointed out that Minor Attracted Persons (MAPs), a sanitised term for paedophiles, were being included by queer activists in the ever-expanding rainbow flag and that it should be a matter of some concern. What I said was: “I don’t, as a lesbian, want to be lumped in with ‘minor attracted persons’, which, of  course, is the latest addition to this rainbow coalition and means ‘child abusers’”.

The first use of the euphemism “minor attraction” to describe those who desire sex with children was back in 1988, by a journalist called Elizabeth Peterson in a Christian publication. She was appealing for empathy and understanding towards “paedophiles”. Since when, there has been a creeping attempt in certain quarters to normalise their desires.

In particular, a number of British academics within the Queer Theory discipline have, over the past few years, pushed the idea that “paedophilia and child abuse are not the same thing”, and that “paedophilia is a sexual attraction pattern that shares common features with other sexual orientations”. Bafflingly, child sexual abuse is being described by some clinicians as a sexual identity worthy of empathy. Additionally, attempts have been made  to bring it under the rainbow coalition where it should be treated with dignity and respect; Norwegian “queer” academic  and professor of ethics Ole Martin Moen argues that paedophilia should be treated as a sexual identity.

Jacob Breslow, feels the same. He was, until his affiliation with organisations promoting paedophilia as a sexual identity came to light, a trustee at Mermaids. When a graduate student at the London School of Economics, Breslow gave a presentation at a 2011 event for the US-based organisation B4U-ACT, co-founded in 2003 by a convicted child sex offender to help people “who are sexually attracted to children and desire assistance”. There, he said that: “Allowing for a form of non-diagnosable minor attraction is exciting, as it potentially creates a sexual or political identity by which activists, scholars and clinicians can begin to better understand Minor Attracted Persons.”

Then, in June 2021, trans-identified queer scholar Allyn Walker published their book A Long, Dark Shadow: Minor-Attracted People and their Pursuit of Dignity, making a clear link between queer theory and child abuse apologism.  In it, Walker posits there are many similarities between MAPs and lesbians and gays. Walker’s PhD thesis, titled “Understanding Resilience Strategies among Minor-Attracted Individuals”, argued that such men should be permitted to view child abuse imagery as a “harm-reduction technique” or “form of therapy” to help “maintain abstinence from sexual contact with children”. Following complaints about their book being “pro-paedophilia”, Walker was suspended from their professorial post at Old Dominion, Virginia.

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Mermaids is a threat to gay rights

By Julie Bindel

You might remember Karl Andersson, a UK-based student in queer studies at the University of Manchester, who got into trouble last year when an essay based on his experiences of masturbating to Japanese comics of child sexual abuse was published in the academic journal Qualitative Research. When the complaints flooded in, the university had no choice but to suspend Andersson, claiming that because he worked in a “niche area” of studies, no one noticed what he was up to. That “niche” is queer studies.

Andersson also publishes the magazine Destroyer: A Journal of Apollonian Beauty and Dionysian Sexuality, a Swedish-based journal focused on sex and “romance” between men and underage boys. Its stated objective is “to bring back the adolescent boy as one of the ideals of gay culture”.  Breslow has praised Destroyer in his own work, claiming it documents the “sexual desire of boys”.

Queer theorists such as Breslow, Walker and Andersson are pushing the line that paedophilia is a hardwired medical condition, and that therefore there must be some kind of “paedophilic gene”. And if these attractions are both innate and uncontrollable, the answer is, according to queer theorists, to feed the beast.

Craig Harper, Associate Professor at the School of Social Sciences at Nottingham Trent University (NTU), also promotes this line of thought. He collaborates with Prostasia — a California-based charity which advocates the use of sex dolls as a way for men wishing to rape small children to vent their sexual frustrations. Prostasia also gives pointers on its website as to “age play” — adults fantasising during sex that one of them is a child.

Harper says MAPs are targeted by unfair online abuse. His study on their use of child sex dolls found that “when asking participants directly about their engagement with criminal activities, we found that there were no differences in self-reported offending between those who owned child-like dolls and those who did not.” The term “self-reporting” is key here. As Caitlin Roper, feminist activists and author of the book Sex Dolls, Robots and Woman Hating points out, arguments used in support of men’s use of child sex abuse dolls, “build on previous arguments by paedophiles and queer theorists in support of men’s sexual access to children”.

A number of organisations, such as Virtuous Paedophiles and B4U-ACT, argue that child abuse imagery and sex dolls are good ways of keeping these men “satisfied”. But Kathleen Richardson, Professor of Ethics and Culture of Robots and Artificial Intelligence (AI) at De Montfort University, is deeply concerned about the way that men’s desire for sex with children is being enabled and encouraged. “For adults to identify with practices that involve the abuse of children implies these are not lone individuals,” says Richardson, “but groups to discuss these issues and are working with academics who use ethics to do their politics of persuasion by arguing they present no harm to children. In fact, it is impossible to have a ‘sexual identity’, without consideration of what it entails.

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The founding myth of Stonewall

By James Kirchick

There are, according to Gail Dines, author of Pornland, studies of use of Internet pornography which have drawn attention to the extent of adult sexual interest in children. “Clinical experience and now research evidence are accumulating to suggest that the Internet is not simply drawing attention to those with existing paedophilic interests but is contributing to the crystallisation of those interests in people with no explicit prior sexual interest in children,” says Dines.

Prior to the internet, groups of men that seeking to decriminalise child sexual abuse met as special interest groups. In 1974, a group of “paedophile rights” activists in the UK formed the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) and somehow managed to be welcomed into the upper echelons of polite, liberal society.

PIE, which openly argued for the abolition of the age of consent, convinced the National Council of Civil Liberties (NCCL) to accept them by claiming to be an oppressed sexual minority similar to the gay community. When I interviewed PIE leader Tom O’Carroll in 2015, he told me he had never liked the word paedophile, and that one of the main positives of being accepted by the NCCL, and, as a result, by some gay groups, was that it would mean that men like him could unify and “organise against oppression”. “We were kind of stuck with the word,” O’Carroll told me. “If we had another word, more like gay, it would be hard to stigmatise us.”

O’Carroll suggested that, rather than “paedophile” the word “kindly”, should be used, because it was similar to the Dutch word “kinder”, meaning “children”. “Being ‘kind’ as well as being sexual,” he said.

Alarmingly, these men were not only being painted as harmless, partly by their association with NCCL, but also potentially beneficial to society. In his study of PIE, published in 1983, the psychologist Glenn Wilson made the extraordinary claim that “many members admitted sexual feelings for children which they had been able to contain or turn to social good. Some gravitated toward occupations such as schoolteacher or social worker, where they could enjoy the company of children without plotting abuse”.

But the bad old days of PIE appear to have taught us nothing. PIE was disbanded in 1984, up until 1983 it lobbied for the age of consent to be abolished, appearing on Newsnight to argue its case.

Their influence is being felt still within the echelons of academia and now echoed in the thoughtless slurs of musicians. Those of us who campaign to end the sexual abuse of children do not point the finger at gay men as likely perpetrators, despite Billy Bragg accusing me of doing so. I lived through the Eighties when it was a regular occurrence for lesbians to lose custody of their children, usually to violent ex-husbands, because we were considered to be sexual perverts and dangerous for children to be around.

It is clearly an abhorrence to suggest that gay men, by virtue of being same sex attracted, are a danger to boys. But our defence of gay men from prejudice and bigotry must not act as a smokescreen for those groups that are seeking to normalise sex with children. And this is why including so-called MAPs as part of the rainbow flag would be a disaster.

We should have learned by now that sexual predators of children are not just another oppressed sexual minority in need of support and understanding. Their apologists should not be corrupting our universities with a dangerous ideology. The sexual abuse of children is stigmatised for a reason, and so it should remain.

I wasn’t a tomboy. I liked dresses, my long red hair, my collection of Sylvanians who lived soap-opera lives in neat plastic houses carefully arranged by me and my sister. But I knew there was something contemptible about the girlish things I enjoyed from the way the boys at school talked about them. Little by little, I learned to be ashamed of being the kind of person these things belonged to.

Then there were the unmistakable signs that me and my body would not, after all, enjoy our peaceful union forever: the adult women I overheard sociably griping about their own deficiencies (too fat, too big-bummed), the girls my age whose bodies were erupting into curves. The boys leered; the girls yet to start puberty judged. We whispered that the ones wearing bras were stuffing their cups with tissue paper, and said they rustled when they walked. I dreaded becoming one of them, and I feared what it would mean if it didn’t happen to me. One day — I suppose I was 10 — I stood at the corner of the playing field (which was, as usual, taken up by boys playing football) and thought I will not be a girl.

I got no say in the matter, though. My compact, reliable body sprouted embarrassing hair, turned to gooseflesh when boys (not even boys I liked!) looked at me, and exceeded its former bounds so rapidly I was striped with stretch marks all over my hips. We were two things now.

One day, I was dozing in the back of the car as my parents drove the family home and I heard a short story on the radio — I was almost 12 — about a man who wishes to be free of his body, so first cuts off his head, then has his brain removed from his skull. I would like to do that, I thought. To be pure self, no flesh at all. I was in the wrong body. It announced my femaleness, it invited certain ways of being looked at, sometimes touched. It betrayed me. I couldn’t dispose of it, so I hated it instead.

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Porn will destroy you

By Sarah Ditum

The metamorphosis of puberty is hard for almost everyone. For girls, though, there is a specific trauma. You don’t simply become an adult: you become a product on the sexual marketplace, regardless of your own will. This divides you: you learn to see yourself from the outside, as an object, through the imagined eyes of men. You lose your space in the world, and any part of you that goes beyond the strictly minimal can start to feel like grotesque excess.

Did I have dysphoria? There was no one to diagnose me; I only have my own memories to guide me. What I can say is that I don’t know of another word that describes my desire to discipline and punish myself into something safely un-sexed. When I read accounts from other female people describing their own dysphoria, I feel a painful recognition.

Trans man Lewis Hancox’s graphic novel Welcome to St Hell: My Trans Teen Misadventure has a diagram of Hancox’s teenage body, with the breasts marked “fatty lumps that need to be gone” and an arrow pointing to “hips from hell”. These are things I thought about myself. Not so severely as Hancox (I didn’t have an eating disorder), but I thought them.

If I had been offered a way out — a medical “pause button”, as hormone blockers are casually called — would I have taken it? I can’t think, actually, of anything I would have received more gratefully at this time in my life. Nor can I think of a more carelessly poisonous response than adults affirming what I felt about my body. It’s strange, then, that for 31 years, a specialist unit existed within the NHS which effectively took girls like me and told them: “yes, you’re right, your body is wrong, but we can fix that for you.” The unit was the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), contained within the Tavistock and Portman Trust in London. What happened there, and how it went so appallingly wrong, is now the subject of a remarkable book by the journalist Hannah Barnes called Time to Think.

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By Hadley Freeman

GIDS didn’t only treat girls, but it’s the girls who particularly interest me. That’s partly because, as Barnes outlines, GIDS itself was remarkably uninterested in them. The service was founded by child and adolescent psychiatrist Domenico Di Ceglie in 1989, and initially, the patients had a clear profile: mostly boys, and usually referred in pre-pubescent childhood. Girls with dysphoria weren’t unheard of (the initial case that got Di Ceglie interested in gender identity was female), but they were not typical.

That changed dramatically. In 2011, GIDS saw for the first time an equal number of male and female patients. In 2020-21, 68% of the patients for whom GIDS recorded sex were female. (A repeated theme of the GIDS scandal is poor record keeping: shockingly, no birth sex was recorded for 22% of patients referred in 2021-22.) And these girls were arriving at the clinic older than the boys: pubescent adolescents who, like me, had no previous history of dysphoria.

But while they were strikingly unlike GIDS’s previous patients, these girls were astonishingly similar to each other. Barnes relates the description given by Anna Hutchinson, a senior clinical psychologist formerly employed at GIDS, and one of the many whistleblowers to have gone on the record about the service’s failings:

“Self-diagnosed adolescent trans boys — natal females — started to fill up GIDS’s waiting room with similar stories, haircuts, even names – ‘one after another after another’. They’d talk about their favourite trans YouTubers, many having adopted the same name, and how they aspired to be like them in the future.”

One thing that all GIDS patients had in common, regardless of sex, was that they had far more going on than just gender trouble. A 2012 study found that associated difficulties included “non-suicidal self-harm, suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, autism spectrum conditions (ASCs), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), symptoms of anxiety, psychosis, eating difficulties, bullying and abuse”.

Also, a lot of the girls presenting at GIDS were bisexual or lesbian — over 90%. Or rather, they would have been lesbian, if they’d identified as female. One clinician Barnes speaks to recalls female patients saying things like, “When I hear the word lesbian, I cringe. I want to die”, and “I’m gonna vomit if I hear the word lesbian another time”. Gay and lesbian clinicians who asked whether such internalised homophobia should complicate a dysphoria diagnosis were told that they were “too close” to the subject to be objective. That this dismissal of same-sex attracted people’s experiences and insights was itself a signal instance of homophobia seemed not to occur to GIDS as an institution.

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GIDS, it seems, was no longer interested in asking questions. When the service was founded, one of its principles had been an explorative approach: “Di Ceglie could see that, in some cases, by addressing other difficulties experienced by the child — things like depression, abuse or trauma — it might ‘secondarily affect the gender identity development’. In other words, sometimes the gender identity difficulties might resolve if other difficulties being faced were dealt with as well.” But by the time the majority of GIDS’s caseload had become female adolescents, the culture of the service had decisively changed. In 2009, Polly Carmichael took over from Di Ceglie as head of the clinic. Her tenure saw the clinic adopt a high public profile — participating in a string of documentaries that boosted GIDS’s image and promoted its work — while internally adopting an “us against the world” attitude. Clinicians were encouraged to see themselves as a “family”: disagreement became a personal betrayal. One GIDS staff member recalls that anyone raising criticisms of the service was likely to be told “this has made Polly cry”.

Perhaps as important as the clinic’s leadership, though, were the external pressures: as the concept of “gender identity” took hold more widely, the idea that one’s “subconscious sex” ought to supersede the physical body began to direct treatment. Trans support groups like Mermaids and GIRES promoted an “affirmative model”, which insisted that any child who said they were trans should be treated as trans. This influenced both the expectations of patients and their families, and the practice of GIDS doctors. Hormone treatment became the default. Patients came, not because they wanted to explore their gender issues, but because they wanted puberty blockers. If doctors were unwilling to prescribe them, Barnes reports, patients would simply be referred to a different doctor. There was usually little opportunity for reflection: GIDS staff were expected to manage caseloads of up to 100 patients each, as referrals increased from 97 in 2009-10 to 2,748 in 2019-20 (a 2,800% increase overall, and an even more shocking 4,200% increase in girls). Once patients were on puberty blockers, nearly 100% would go on to take cross-sex hormones.

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Children can't be experts on themselves

By Lionel Shriver

A service that had once prided itself on treating its patients as individuals had become something more like an assembly line. Whatever issues a child had, the only answer the clinic had was blockers. What’s terrible about this isn’t just that many children will have been put on a path to transition that could have been avoided; it’s that they were not receiving specialised support for their other, more pressing problems. Barnes tells the story of one boy who, as well as identifying as a girl, had such severe OCD that he couldn’t leave the house. His family got no support for the OCD, but GIDS sent a psychiatrist who offered to make an endocrinology referral.

With its one-size-fits-all plan, GIDS was failing every one of its patients: one of the reasons why, in 2022, an independent review commissioned by the NHS into gender identity services for children and young people made an interim recommendation that GIDS be shut down and replaced with regional specialist centres. (This spring, that advice will be enacted.) But — without diminishing the harm done to boys, which was plentiful — girls were particularly damaged by GIDS, because girls were being put on a pathway that was the definition of male default. GIDS had developed its approach to serve the traditional paediatric sufferer of dysphoria: a pre-pubertal boy. Because the clinic’s culture militated against self-reflection, the treatment stayed the same even though the patients had drastically changed.

It’s not uncommon for women to be badly served by medicine in this way, given that women are neglected as research subjects. Historically, femaleness has been treated as an abnormality, to be ignored if it cannot be remedied. What’s exceptional about the GIDS case, though, is that the underlying philosophy of trans identity effectively made these girls doubly invisible. They were invisible, firstly, to a model that had never taken them into account. But secondly, and more profoundly, they were invisible because gender identity doctrine held that even to think of them as female was to “misgender” them. You couldn’t say how they were different to boys without conceding that they were not, in strict fact, boys.

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The empty promise of pop psychology

By Sarah Ditum

But to hate your body as a teenage girl is one of the most categorically female experiences possible. I didn’t hate my body because I wasn’t a girl; I hated it precisely because I was, and because of everything I feared or knew that being a woman might mean.

Trans activists tend to dismiss stories like mine: if I had truly been dysphoric, they say, I would never have grown up to be the basic bitch I am today. I would have found a way to transition. But if I’d had YouTube, Mermaids and a compliant medical service, the way would have been signposted for me in neon lights. I learned to live with my body, in time, because no one gave me an alternative.

One of the many reasons that the “pause button” claim about blockers is a lie is that going through puberty is one of the ways you become reconciled to puberty. Discovering your sexuality might help you discover that your body exists for your pleasure, not just external judgement. Gradually, the alien flesh can become familiar again. The girls who went through GIDS were denied this. Taking puberty blockers means you never reach adult sexual function. Tentative research suggests that girls who went on blockers actually felt worse about their bodies after several years. Blockers didn’t treat their dysphoria: they exacerbated it.

For some few, transition will have been the right outcome. Others are left forever learning to live with bodies that have been made strange and vulnerable — weakened bones, dropped voices, vaginal atrophy, scarred and breastless chests if they went on to have mastectomies. There is a small, but growing, community of female detransitioners. Barnes quotes one, who has undergone a double mastectomy and a hysterectomy: “I regret all of it… I wish someone would have been there to tell me not to get castrated at 21.”

The things these women did in an effort to become not-girls remind me so keenly of the girl I used to be, with her vague longing for a bodiless life. A perverse sisterhood of doomed escapologists, looking for a get-out from what biology had planned for us. The way I once felt about myself was terrible, but it was also normal: the terribly normal fact of feminine self-loathing. The tragedy of a misogynistic world is that it makes girls believe they need a cure for femaleness. The scandal of GIDS is that it pretended it could supply one.

From her early interviews in 2012, when her trans daughter, Jackie, then 19, became a Miss England finalist, Green, then an IT-manager, was utterly open about how she first knew her child was trans: “As a toddler, Jackie always headed for the dolls in toy shops.” And if a four-year-old looking at dolls weren’t evidence enough that this child should be committed to a lifetime of medicalisation, Green added, “[Jackie] loathed having her hair cut.” Green put Jack — as he was then known — on puberty-blockers and flew him to Thailand for a sex change operation when he was 16, making him the youngest person in the world to undergo that surgery.

She merrily recalls in a YouTube interview that because Jack’s penis hadn’t developed due to the blockers, “there wasn’t much for the surgeon to work with” when constructing their vagina. “Sorry, Jackie!” she laughs.

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.

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Despite telling Jackie’s story over and over, and always including the detail about the girls’ toys, Green took pains to stress that being trans child went deeper than a desire for dolls. But how else would a four-year-old boy express a wish to be a girl other than through the medium of toys? What else would being a girl mean to them? In her Tedx talk, Green says that as soon as her baby boy “got mobile” — ie, learned to crawl — “he was gravitating to things that you would think are stereotypically female”. Like what, tampons? Was her one-year-old trying to book an appointment for a cervical smear test? Nope, “the Polly Pocket and My Little Pony”, she says, and then quickly adds “that was fine – but not for Dad”. Green’s then husband disapproved of his son playing with My Little Pony toys and therefore banned them from the house. (A macho father who abhors effeminacy in his son is a common feature in the life stories of trans women; Paris Lees’ semi-autobiographical novel, What It Feels Like for a Girl, is a recent example.)

Shortly after that, the child then known as Jack told his mother, “God made a mistake and I should have been a girl.” As Green recounts in her talk, “What I had come to the conclusion, up until she was about two, was that I had a very sensitive, quite effeminate little boy who was probably gay.” So when four-year-old Jack told her he should be a girl, Green felt “it explained so many things”. And to be fair, a trans four-year-old makes about as much sense as a gay two-year-old. No one has ever accused Green of failing to maintain fidelity to her extraordinary version of logic.

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Jackie Green has occasionally spoken up in defence of her mother. In 2018, a journalist tweeted that Green had “castrated” her teenage son when she arranged for the sex change operation in Thailand. Jackie tweeted back that this was untrue: “I was meant to be female and thus had surgery to correct my small defect,” was how she put it. As to how she knew she was meant to be a girl, Jackie said, “For a long time I was told I had to play with action men and other ‘boy toys’, another concept I find rather silly, but I still wanted the Barbies and little mermaids.” And so her mother arranged for the “small defect” to be “corrected” so she could.

No one has said why Green is suddenly no longer the CEO of Mermaids. But the fact that the charity has said they are appointing an interim one for now suggests the decision was quite sudden. The timing was certainly peculiar, coming 10 days after Green gave a rare interview, refuting all recent criticisms of her organisation.

Slowly, it seems, the tide is turning against Mermaids. When it was announced this year that the NHS was going shut down Gids, its gender identity clinic for children, in the spring, attention quickly turned to Mermaids. Former clinicians at Gids have accused the charity of having a “harmful” effect on the clinic by promoting transition as a cure. Mermaids has denied this, but it didn’t help matters by putting itself in the spotlight when it launched an appeal against the Charity Commission’s decision to award charitable status to the LGB Alliance, now the only specifically gay charity in this country which does not include trans people. Witnesses for Mermaids have had to defend gender theories under questioning this autumn, which has led to extraordinary moments such as Mermaids’ chair of trustees, claiming, “I’m not sure that people come out of the womb with a sex.”

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A Daily Telegraph investigation in September found that the charity was offering to send breast binders to children against their parents’ wishes, which prompted the Charity Commission to open a regulatory compliance case. Green later defended Mermaids in The Guardian by saying a binder is better than “a young person using duct tape on themselves”. In October, the Times revealed that one of the Mermaids trustees, Jacob Breslow, gave a 2011 presentation for B4U-ACT, an organisation that aims to promote better understanding of paedophiles, in which he criticised the negative ideas about “paedophilic desire”. “We did some general top-level Google and internet searches. We did a social media search [and it] didn’t come up,” Green told The Guardian. Then, 10 days later, she was ousted.

Maybe the Mermaids board belatedly realised that if they want their organisation to endure, they needed to get rid of the wacky front woman. Ultimately, I don’t care why she went, because so much damage has already been done. But what I do want to know is this: how did so many people take Green so seriously for so long? Why did so many people turn off their intelligence when faced with this former IT consultant from Leeds? And how could so many LGBT activists champion and defend a woman who saw effeminacy — and therefore homosexuality — in her two-year-old and feel she had to “correct” this “defect”?

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Green kept telling the story of Jackie because, for a long time, it gave her moral authority. No doubt, parents have long been great advocates for the rights of their marginalised children. But an alternative way of looking at Green is she was at least as good an advocate for her own rights: the right to put her child on untested hormone pills, the right to take her child to Thailand for a sex change. There is a fine line between using your parenting experience to help others, and validating your parenting choices by encouraging others to do the same.

I’m not waiting for celebrities such as Emma Watson to own up to their foolishness, mainly because I don’t care what Emma Watson thinks about anything. But all the journalists, teachers, editors and activists who endorsed Green’s obviously ludicrous ideas and shouted down anyone who didn’t, they really need to take a long look at their judgement, their motives and themselves. Because Green never once hid who she was.

This summer, I had been asked to speak about male violence towards women at a library in Nottingham, in a working-class area, similar to where I had grown up. The talk sold out with mainly young, working-class women planning to attend. But while I was on the train up to the event, I was told it had been cancelled. In fact, it was made clear that I and the organisers would be forcibly removed if we entered the library.

I don’t need a room to make my point, and so in the spirit of feminist resistance, I made it in the library’s car park. Many brave women were there, as well as the predictable group of trans activists. They rocked up, making a show of themselves by playing loud music, shouting slogans and, during my talk, one man pushed right up close to me — close enough to touch — in an attempt to distract me. It didn’t work.

The same day, NCC released a statement: “Nottingham is an inclusive city and as a council we will support our LGBT community and have committed to supporting trans rights as human rights through Stonewall. We did not want the use of one of our library buildings for this event, taking place during Pride month, to be seen as implicit support for the views held by the speaker which fly in the face of our position on transgender rights.”

I have been an out and proud lesbian since the age of 15, and have campaigned against anti-gay bigotry for decades. So the statement was incredibly insulting, if not entirely surprising. In recent years, the “holy month of Pride” seems to be focused only on trans issues, with lesbians so far down the pecking order we feel distinctly unwelcome.

I think something is starting to shift though. As I was speaking to this angry and vibrant crowd of women, messages of support began to flood in, including offers from lawyers to represent me if I wanted to sue. Since I am now so thoroughly sick of being called a fascist and nazi, i decided to go for it.

A few days after the carpark debacle, an email was forwarded to me from Cllr Rosemary Healy in response to a complaint about the cancellation:

“We cannot grant a platform to a public figure who has repeatedly expressed transphobic views. Not only are Ms Bindel’s past statements incredibly hateful to the trans community; she has also demonstrated homophobic and biphobic views in the past that we take issue with.”

Her clarification was helpful. In cancelling me in the way and for the reasons that they did, NCC was in breach of the Public Sector Equality Duty under the Equality Act 2010. It was also in breach of the substantive duties under the Equality Act applying to the Council in its exercise of public functions and as a service provider, for which the Council is susceptible to judicial review.

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The transgender lobby wants to rewrite the law

By Maya Forstater

My very presence at the library, regardless of the subject of my talk, was deemed dangerous and traumatising. As such, my legal team cited the ruling in Forstater v Centre for Global Development Europe, the case in which Maya Forstater successfully sued her employers for pushing her out of her consultancy role because of allegations of transphobia by colleagues.

Initially, NCC refused to admit that I was covered by the same protection as Forstater: “The Tribunal held that Ms Forstater’s views were consistent with the law [but] the same cannot be said of the views as to trans people expressed by the Claimant. There is no evidence that the Claimant’s views are widely-shared, and certainly not among respected academics. Indeed, the Claimant’s views are often deprecated.”

Their stupidity beggars belief. NCC’s evidence of such “deprecation” was a 12-year-old article by a trans activist who, unsurprisingly, disagrees with me about matters of sex and gender.

As well as issuing an apology, NCC has since accepted that it acted unlawfully in cancelling the event. As part of the claim, we also requested that NCC carries out a review of its Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) strategy, policies and procedures, with assistance from an external body. This is because it was clear that the demands and rights of trans issues trumped those of any other group that faces discrimination. It is also apparent that NCC felt it had the right to review and cancel bookings on the basis of a speaker’s reputation.

This clearly unsettled the trans activists. They began to deny that we had won at all, pulling apart the phrase “procedurally unlawful”, suggesting that the phrase means something akin to “unlawful lite”. In this context, there is no real difference between an action being procedurally unlawful and substantively unlawful. The decision to ban me resulted in NCC taking actions which it should not have taken.

The line, “NCC has agreed that, if Nottingham Women for Change seeks to seek [SIC] to make a booking at any NCC venue by way of a fully completed booking form, the Council will make a fresh decision in response to such request upon a lawful basis,” has also been wilfully misinterpreted, with trans activists claiming that it is phrased in a way that would allow NCC to find a legal way to stop me from speaking at a subsequent event.

This is such an important win because any future refusal will be open to legal challenge. And other local authorities will have to think twice before deciding to de-platform or ban a speaker because they have decided their legal and reasonable views are offensive.

For years, trans activists have been trying to intimidate feminists and other refuseniks of trans ideology but we have fought back hard. And various organisations that have been brainwashed by Stonewall, including Garden Court Chambers, successfully sued by the black lesbian barrister Allison Bailey, have been given a legal kicking of late.

Women’s hard-won rights are not up for grabs. And I think the message might be finally getting through. So let this be a lesson to all councils. You need to follow equality law as it is, not the law as Stonewall wants it to be. Or you will be sued. And you may well lose.

Dr Jacob Breslow was a graduate student at the London School of Economics when he gave a presentation at an event for the US-based non-profit B4U-ACT in 2011. According to its website, B4U-ACT promotes services and resources for people “who are sexually attracted to children and desire assistance”. In his 2011 paper, Breslow compares a child to a shoe — which, in case you weren’t sure, is an inanimate object. He stated:

“Just as the desire to and the act of cumming on a shoe requires a rethinking of the shoe and how it comes into being, I want to now argue that the desire to and the act of cumming on, or possibly even with, a child requires a rethinking both of the child, which we just begun, and of the person for whom the child is a sexual fantasy or partner.”

Breslow wrote in the same paper that “allowing for a form of non-diagnosable minor attraction is exciting, as it potentially creates a sexual or political identity by which activists, scholars and clinicians can begin to better understand minor-attracted persons [MAPs].”

Beneath the usual academic gobbledygook, this statement is clear: the intention is to ally those who identify as “MAPs” — who others would rightly label as adults that desire sex with children — with the rest of the rainbow community, including lesbians, even those who campaign to expose the atrocity of child sexual abuse.

This scandal might date back 11 years, but there is ample evidence that Breslow has only strengthened his views rather than backtracking from them. He is, for example, writing a book on “the queer lives of children’s desires”. Five years after his presentation for B4U-ACT, having argued in his PhD thesis that some kids were “queer”, Breslow defined this as “the queering that ‘queer’ does to the child, is one of resisting the child’s alleged asexuality and heterosexuality; allowing for the child’s pleasures, desires, and perversities…”

Mermaids, clearly, did not check Breslow’s suitability as a trustee prior to him being appointed in July this year, or surely they would have rejected him as unsuitable? Or maybe they do not consider his beliefs to be in any way problematic. He is Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality (what else?) at the London School of Economics, and his profile on the university’s website revealed how wedded to trans ideology he is. This thread by feminist barrister Anja Palmer lists some of the other easily-available clues that Mermaids either missed or ignored. The charity Sex Matters also picked apart the crazed beast that is the LSE Gender Studies Department, by exposing an article by one of Breslow’s students, Matt Thompson that was peppered with sexualised threats against women in public life. Thompson wrote that he would “take my knife to your throat” in response to perceived transphobia — from women, of course.

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Perhaps they were keen to appoint Breslow as a trustee because he appears to be a virulent critic of so-called TERFS, and has practised castigating academics who defy trans ideology — such as Professor Jo Phoenix ,who was hounded from her job at the Open University following accusations of transphobia. In the spirit of “your enemy’s enemy is your friend”, Mermaids recruits all the support it can get on its mission to discredit anyone that exposes its dangerous practices and belief system.

Mermaids, had they responsibly scrutinised Breslow prior to inviting him to become a trustee, would have seen that his child abuse apologism was neither hidden nor obscured. In January this year, in an article on feminist website 4W, Dana Vitalosova wrote: “Jacob Breslow … does not only rally against women critical of faux feminism. Despite his young age, he has already established himself as a prolific campaigner against child safeguarding. Last December [Breslow said] during a launch of his book: ‘Is it really that children or young people having sex is the problem? Or is it [the problem] the conditions under which that sex happens?’”

Any minute now, an apologist for Mermaids will start arguing that it’s wrong to dig up comments made 11 years ago to discredit a person who has doubtless redeemed himself. The apologist will remind those of us who are deeply critical of Mermaids, and the trans ideology that props it up, that we have railed against similar tactics against us. After all, I have been targeted and vilified since the publication of a 2004 Guardian Weekend article that saw me eternally labelled as transphobic. Almost 20 years later, that article regularly gets wheeled out as evidence for why I should be de-platformed and publicly condemned as soon as I am invited to speak at any event in universities.

So why does it matter what a Mermaids trustee said 11 years ago?

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Any charity that focusses on children should — and I can’t believe I have to spell this out — make it their business to avoid any association with advocates of sex between children and adults. But unfortunately, Mermaids has a history of disregarding the safety of children — and promoting an ideology that sexualises them, as well as “affirming” absolutely anything a child says they want, however vulnerable and mixed-up that child might be at the time. It has continually argued, despite reems of evidence to the contrary, that puberty-blocking drugs are perfectly harmless and totally reversable. It promotes disturbing gender ideology to young children in schools across the UK. And it justifies sending breast binders to 13-year-old girls without their parents’ consent, despite being fully aware of the damage they can cause. This is dangerous stuff because it presupposes the “agency” of the child — which may then absolve the responsible adult of any wrongdoing in relation to it.

Mermaids is lauded by those who adhere to queer theory. This rainbow alliance first emerged in the Eighties, when the National Council of Civil Liberties caused a scandal by supporting the inclusion of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE). There was much dissent among feminists and lesbians, who were appalled that PIE was looking to join hands with those who were sexually “non-conformist”. Many gay men did not see that those lobbying for the normalisation of child sexual abuse had misappropriated their legitimate fight for equality, protection and rights.

Sexual libertarianism is the backbone of queer theory and is often promoted by gay men. Look at staunch supporter of Mermaids, gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, who recently appeared on TV in order to defend Mermaids over the breast binding scandal. He has long campaigned for lowering the age of consent for all to 14.

Trans ideology, part and parcel of queer theory, also legitimises the prostitution of children. For example, Janet Mock, a male-to-female transgender activist, appears to celebrate it, writing: “I was 15 the first time I visited Merchant Street, what some would call ‘the stroll’ for trans women involved in street-based sex work. At the time, I had just begun medically transitioning and it was where younger girls, like my friends and myself, would go to hang out, flirt and fool around with guys and socialise with older trans women, the legends of our community.”

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Mock goes on to explain how they “idolised” the prostituted trans women in the area. “These women were the first trans women I met and I quickly correlated trans womanhood and sex work,” says Mock, explaining that they came to understand the role of the sex trade as a “rite of passage” for “trans girls”.

The link between queer theory, transgender ideology and child abuse apologism has never been clearer. The recent revelation that German sociologist Rüdiger Lautmann, a board member of the Gay Counselling Service in Berlin, authored a book entitled The Lust for Children: A Portrait of Paedophiles is further evidence that this is a widespread and increasingly normalised phenomenon. Pro-paedophilia is the latest ideology included in the LGBTQQIA+ acronym.

This latest scandal should be the nail in the coffin of Mermaids, which is a danger to children and should be immediately shut down. Perhaps the many celebrities, corporate entities and high-profile individuals who have passionately defended and supported it — such as Emma Watson, Jameela Jamil, Little Mix, Harry and Meghan, Starbucks and Wagamama — will now publicly denounce the charity. Perhaps those of us condemned as bigots for raising red flags about Mermaids over a number of years will receive abject apologies.

Even if we do, the fight must go on. Queer theory still dictates the mission of far too many charities and institutions that are supposed to protect children. This ideology tears down boundaries between the adult and the child, and dismisses safeguarding put in place by those of us who fight night and day to end child sexual abuse and exploitation. It cannot be allowed to corrupt all of society.

Mermaids claims that LGB Alliance was not, in fact, established to support lesbians, gay men and bisexuals — but rather to discredit and disband Mermaids itself. The LGB Alliance, allegedly, “does not have charitable purposes”. If Mermaids wins this case, the consequences will be devastating for lesbians and gays. Any future charity set up to advocate specifically on our behalf will be wide open to legal challenge.

LGB Alliance was founded in 2019, in response to Stonewall’s refusal to engage with concern, voiced by lesbians and gay men, about trans orthodoxy. We are concerned that “same-sex attraction” has been recast as nothing more than a dog whistle for transphobia — an argument made by Mermaids in court. We are concerned, too, that lesbians are being labelled bigots for not wanting to have sex with people who have penises. And we are concerned, most of all, by the wholesale acceptance of this orthodoxy by organisations, such as Stonewall, which are supposed to protect same-sex attracted people. Mermaids’s case is being supported by Gendered Intelligence  and the LGBT Consortium, groups that promote the notion that “gender identity” should carry as much, if not more, weight in law as biological sex. Together, they are arguing that LGB alliance is “denigrating trans people” and does not “serve the public interest”.

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But what does “denigrating trans people” actually mean? Before gender ideology captured the liberal masses, and allowed misogynistic men to scream “TERF” at any passing feminist, it was a phrase that might usefully be used to describe the discriminatory and cruel treatment of people living as the opposite sex. But in 2022, “denigration” can apparently mean campaigning for women-only services such as rape crisis centres and changing rooms.

And how is advocating for lesbians and gays not a positive public service? As someone who came out in the Seventies, facing hellish bigotry and a lack of any legal protections, I desperately needed the support of a community that respected same-sex attraction. The Gay Liberation Front was, for me, a lifeline. It was set up in 1970 by Bev Jackson, who found herself compelled to come out of retirement to start the LGB Alliance. Her cofounder is another veteran of the movement, Kate Harris, who was a Stonewall Ambassador until breaking ties with the charity after it shifted away from lesbian and gay issues to trans orthodoxy.

“When Kate and I met in 2019, we discovered that we’d both been trying, independently, to engage with Stonewall about our concerns,” Jackson tells me. “We met a brick wall. The mantra was ‘no debate’. We were also told the change from ‘sex’ to ‘gender’ did not cause any conflict.” Jackson tells me that, in her view, “something has gone very wrong with this movement”.

Between them, Jackson and Harris have spent a century campaigning for the rights of same-sex attracted people. They have set an example by living as out and proud lesbians. And yet, every day, they are attacked on social media. Journalist Owen Jones, for instance, has branded them “monstrous, unhinged, horrible fanatics”, adding that LGB Alliance is a “ludicrously titled organisation”, simply because it chose not to add the T to the LGB.

Why is it considered “ludicrous” to focus on the needs of a specific minority? The LGB Alliance mission statement seems perfectly reasonable: it will stand up for the rights of same-sex attracted people; it will uphold the definition of homosexuality as same-sex attraction; it will accept the biological reality of sex. How have we got to a stage where this is seen, by trans activists and their allies, as hate-filled bigotry?

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The scenes I’ve witnessed in court since 9th September have suggested that what is ludicrous about this case is not the position taken by LGB Alliance, but rather Mermaids’s arguments that gender identity trumps biological sex. Paul Roberts is Chief Executive of the LGBT Consortium, representing more than 500 LGBTQ+ groups. A disciple of gender orthodoxy, he said during cross-examination that he believes “anyone who identifies as a man is a man”, adding that he believed if a biological woman identifies as a trans man, that person should be able to access male-only services. When Roberts was asked if, given his view that people are attracted to gender identity rather than sex, a lesbian couple in which one is butch and one femme are actually a heterosexual couple, he responded: “I don’t believe there are many lesbian couples like that.” Many of the lesbian spectators in court, myself included, couldn’t help but laugh out loud at that.

John Nicolson MP, Deputy Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global LGBT+ Rights, also submitted evidence in support of Mermaids’s position. He pompously declared that he knows what a lesbian is, because he is a gay man. “You are a lesbian because you declare yourself one,” he proclaimed. Male-bodied trans women are, in other words, entitled to use this label.

When Michael Gibbon KC, counsel for Mermaids, was cross-examining Harris, he asked her to reflect on whether some people would understand “lesbian” to refer to something other than a natal female who is attracted to other natal females. Or, as he put it, would Harris consider whether some people would have a different understanding of “lesbian” from the understanding her organisation is based on?

Harris broke down into tears, asking: “That a lesbian can be a man with a penis?” After composing herself, she responded: “I’m going to speak for millions of lesbians around the world, who are lesbians because we love other women … We will not be erased and we will not have any man with a penis tell us he’s a lesbian because he feels he is.”

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By Hadley Freeman

The phenomenon of men claiming to be lesbians is nothing new. In 1973, at the West Coast Lesbian Conference in Los Angeles, there was a row over a scheduled performance by Beth Elliott, a folk singer who was referred to as transsexual (the terminology which was applied before gender ideology prevailed). Robin Morgan, the keynote speaker at that event, said: “I will not call a male ‘she’. Thirty-two years of suffering in this androcentric society and of surviving, have earned me the title ‘woman’.” Today, almost 50 years after Morgan spoke truth to power, the situation is far worse than any of us in the lesbian rights movement could have imagined.

The fact that one of Mermaids’s key criticisms of LGB Alliance is that they even use the phrase “same-sex attraction”, which Mermaids claim is “weaponised” against trans people, tells us all we need to know. We are no longer allowed to use the language we have developed to describe ourselves because eliminating perceived slights towards trans people must always come first.

“Sometimes one person’s demands clash with another’s rights,” Bev Jackson tells me. “That is what happens when someone with a penis claims to be a lesbian, and lesbians object. We have the right to define ourselves and not to be redefined by others. Basically, the whole concept of ‘gender identity’ erases homosexuality and is homophobic at its core.”

If it is ruled that LGB Alliance was founded with the purpose to undermine Mermaids, it will mean that same-sex attracted people have no right to campaign for their specific needs: a terrifying prospect. But win or lose, the case brought by Mermaids has revealed the organisation’s ideology for what it is: deeply homophobic and relentlessly misogynistic. This offensive contortion of “LGBT rights” will, it seems, backfire, by inspiring people to support LGB Alliance and rescue our once-proud movement from the jaws of gender fanatics.

“We are one small organisation facing a global movement to eliminate the sex-based rights of LGB people,” says Jackson. “We have experienced an ongoing torrent of abuse, but also an outpouring of love and gratitude. We will not be silenced or discouraged: we will prevail.”

“Thoughtful” is a self-description that crops up repeatedly. In response to critical reporting from Newsnight in 2019, the clinic’s Gender Identity Development Service insisted that it was “a thoughtful and safe service”. When Keira Bell and others took their case to the High Court a year later, arguing that under-16s could not give informed consent to puberty blockers, a GIDS spokesperson replied obstinately that theirs was “a safe and thoughtful service”. And when the Care Quality Commission rated the service as “inadequate”, the Tavistock’s ensuing statement defensively began: “The first thing to say is that GIDS has a long track record of thoughtful and high quality care.”

Alongside this manic insistence on thoughtfulness, there has also been a marked tendency to engage in special pleading about the especially difficult and highly contested cultural position the service occupies. For instance, in response to the damning CQC report, CEO Paul Jenkins replied that GIDS “has found itself in the middle of a cultural and political battleground”. And to the news of the closure last week, a spokesperson commented, with the air of someone sighing heavily: “Over the last couple of years, our staff… have worked tirelessly and under intense scrutiny in a difficult climate.”

Presumably what they really mean by this is that, as is now known, for several years GIDS has been caught between the emotionally blackmailing demands of transactivist organisations such as Mermaids and GIRES, talking constantly about suicide risk and lobbying hard for yet more relaxed attitudes to medicalising children, and the criticisms of those who profoundly object to the notion of a “trans child” in the first place. Former employees such as Susan Evans have reported the historical influence of Mermaids and GIRES on managers at the service, despite their lack of formal medical expertise and the possession of clearly vested interests.

Now, you might think that it is the job of a healthcare provider — and especially one who dispenses medication to children — to try to remove itself from current furores, social trends, and pressure from political activists, and to just get on with providing evidence-based medicine according to whatever gold-standard methodology is available at the time. And you might also think that while being thoughtful is all very well in a medical provider, you don’t exactly want them to emulate Hamlet. But to apply these earthbound medical standards to GIDS is to fail to recognise some of the distinctive and converging influences on the service that have led to the unholy mess we now see.

A crucial yet underappreciated part of the story is the clinic’s strong emphasis on psychoanalysis and psychodynamic approaches to mental health. The founder of the Tavistock, Hugh Crichton-Miller, was explicitly influenced by Freud and Jung. And when Domenico Di Ceglie founded the Gender Identity Service for children in 1989, later commissioned nationally as the only English NHS provider, he too was heavily influenced by psychoanalytic methods.

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In a 2018 article describing his process, Di Ceglie quotes a Jungian perspective approvingly: “the psyche speaks in metaphors, in analogies, in images, that’s its primary language, so why talk differently? We must write in a way that evokes the poetic basis of mind… it’s a sensitivity to language.” He goes on to describe some of the metaphors and images he has found useful in trying help young dysphoric patients understand their own experience: the metaphor of being “a stranger in one’s own body”, for instance, or the image of navigating between the binary of sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis from The Odyssey. Throughout Di Ceglie’s published writing, there is an emphasis on the co-creation of meaning with young patients in the absence of access to any empirical certainty about who the patient “really” is.

This intellectual focus upon the fluidity and construction of meaning, and upon the power of narrative to create more stable personalities, is also heavily present in the published work of Bernadette Wren, Head of Psychology for 25 years at what insiders tweely call the “Tavi”. By her own description, she was “deeply involved” with the GIDS team for much of that time. Alongside psychoanalysis, she adds post-structuralist philosophy to her formative influences, citing figures such as Richard Rorty and Michel Foucault as important in her thinking.

True to the relativism of these philosophers, in Wren’s intellectual vision there are no objective truths but only a series of subjective narratives. She writes: “If the idea of living in the postmodern era means anything, it is that in all our activity together we are in the business of making meaning.” She continues: “In our time, it is hard to see any knowledge or understanding as ‘mirroring’ nature, or ‘mirroring’ reality.” She concludes: “There is an implication here for our work in gender identity clinics: that we are in the business of helping actively to construct the idea and the understanding of transgender, and for this we should accept responsibility.” In other words, ordinary binary notions of truth and falsity, or of discovering what is right and wrong, are inapplicable when it comes to the treatment of gender-dysphoric youth — because there are no prior fixed facts about identity, or truth, or morality here to discover. All meaning is up for grabs.

Against this intellectual background, the Tavistock’s flannel about being a thoughtful service sheltering from the storm of our present culture wars starts to make more sense. At least historically, senior clinicians at the Tavistock have never believed there is anything but certain context-bound forms of thought, floating about in a post-modern void. They have assumed meaning is constructed, not found. They have denied that there is any certain or timeless knowledge, but only specific cultural dynamics to navigate in the here and now. Under such an approach, what else could you do but be “thoughtful”?

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A recognition of ambiguity within the life of the psyche would be perfectly fine — indeed, I assume, therapeutically helpful — if all that had ever happened at GIDS was that people sat around talking to one other. But the general relativist stance of senior clinicians was made incredibly dangerous for patients by the presence of an additional factor in the therapeutic mix, nestling somewhat anomalously among Di Ceglie’s stated foundational aims for his service. Alongside commonplace psychodynamic goals such as “to ameliorate associated behavioural, emotional and relationship difficulties”, “to allow mourning processes to occur”, “to enable symbol formation and symbolic thinking” and “to sustain hope”, we also find: “to encourage exploration of the mind-body relationship by promoting close collaboration among professionals in different specialities, including paediatric endocrinology.”

I don’t know about you, but when I read this, the birds — or rather the mermaids, perhaps — stop singing. For it’s at this point that it becomes clear to the percipient reader that these people think it a reasonable goal to alter a child’s healthy bodily tissue in order to accommodate a mind which is, by their own admission, constantly developing. It’s true they don’t think medicalisation is inevitable for every particular child, and it’s also true that they admit lots of uncertainty and liminality. But still, this option is on the table at GIDS, courtesy of friendly endocrinologist colleagues and their injections. (Even more shockingly, academic Heather Brunskell-Evans has documented how Mermaids and GIRES helped put this option on the table at GIDS in the first place.)

Worse, with the availability of a medicalised option, there seems to have been little real recognition among managers that its presence put the remit of the service on an entirely new footing — one that absolutely required stringent standards of truth and falsity, and a thoroughly old-fashioned belief in the existence of prior standards of right and wrong. Talking to children about their identity issues and co-creating meaning with them may be an art, but giving them gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogues (GnRHa) is still very much a science — or at least it should be.

During GIDS’s experiment in administering these unlicensed drugs, doubts were already emerging about the poor quality of the evidence base, and about the potentially negative effects of GnRHa on brain maturation, bone density, kidneys, height, sexual function, and mature genitalia formation. Yet the Patient Information Sheet offered to patients and their parents by clinicians minimised the then-suspected risks. And though the process was widely advertised as a harmless “pause” on puberty, of the initial 44 children in their initial cohort for the treatment, almost all went on to cross-sex hormones, raising the question of what made this treatment a meaningful pause for reflection in any real sense. By 2017, the Mail on Sunday was reporting that GnRHa had been prescribed to 800 adolescents under 18, including 230 children under 14 and some as young as ten.

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As with Di Ceglie’s method, there is a lot of euphemism generally around discussing what happens to gender-questioning children and adolescents once they are started by adults on a medicalised route like this. Whether it is metaphors of strangers in their own bodies, heroes steering between sea monsters, mermaids, or butterflies, the effect remains pleasingly distanced and somewhat etiolated. So it’s perhaps worth spelling some things out.

Consider the following: for over a decade, and for highly uncertain gains, an NHS service appears to have been been potentially “sterilising” a cohort of minors dominated by homosexual and autistic children, leaving some unable ever to experience orgasm at all. It has exposed them all to increased risk of other irrevocable physical effects (only this month, for instance, the US Food and Drug Administration added “loss of vision” to potential side effects of GnRHa). And it has apparently made it highly likely that each will eventually end up taking cross-sex hormones in young adulthood, so moving towards a permanent change in their sexual characteristics and the surgical loss of body parts.

When looking for a suitable Homeric metaphor for GIDS clinicians and their endocrinologist associates, we should probably think about sirens, luring passing young sailors with enticing songs to their ruin on the rocks. Perhaps the sirens are somewhat quietened now, thanks to Dr Hillary Cass and her review. Unfortunately, though, there are Mermaids still out there. With a bit of luck and a following wind, the closure of GIDS will eventually spell the end of them too.

In recent years, queerness has also become a fascinatingly multifunctional symbolic object in the psyche of the nation, simultaneously representing both sexily avant-garde transgression and fully paid-up membership of the British establishment. Compelling new evidence of the latter is provided by the opening this week of a museum celebrating “LGBTQ+” history in central London. Entitled “Queer Britain”, the venture is financially supported by M&C Saatchi, Allen and Overy, Levis, and Coutts, and lists partnership with the V&A, the National Trust, the Tate, the British Library, and English Heritage on its website.

In stentorian tones more reminiscent of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee than Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, we are told that the museum “will be an essential place for all regardless of sexuality or gender identity, to find out about the culture they have been born into, have chosen or seek to understand. It will help complete the Nation’s family tree.” Online events in the run-up to its opening included partnering with a wine company to run a competition asking what “queer creativity” means, and a celebration of the launch by the Bank of England of what’s surely the least visible banknote in its history to date — a £50 note featuring Alan Turing, unlucky in his timing once again.

A project on the history of the gerrymandered categories of “LGBTQ+” and “queer” is, of course, a fantastic idea; were it done properly, it would be genuinely exciting. Ideally such a museum would interrogate the sociological and historical conditions of its own movement. It might ask, for instance: what economic forces have shaped its transition from the gay rights movement of 20th Century to the present rainbow soup, in which many lesbians and gays feel they are not waving but drowning? Who gains and who loses from this radical reorientation?

Relatedly, a serious historical inquiry might ask: how did Stonewall move from defending the rights of homosexuals in the Nineties to arguing in 2022 that lesbian women should date members of the opposite sex — that is, males who identify as women — or else be judged as motivated by “social prejudice” and even “sexual racism”? And while historians were at it, they might also consider how our society has moved from the laudable aim of depathologising homosexuality, to a now fairly widespread acceptance of the chemical castration of confused gay youth, under the guise of “transitioning” them — a fate horribly reminiscent of the one meted out so vindictively to Turing. All fascinating historical questions, none of which are remotely likely to be asked within the glossy corporate-friendly walls of Queer Britain, I predict.

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By Kathleen Stock

In truth, queerness as framed by its most culturally powerful representatives has absolutely nothing to do with the average gay man, lesbian, bisexual, or adult transsexual in the UK. For most of these, their sexual orientation or feelings of gender identity are not the chief source of meaning or motivation in life, and hence they are not particularly politically engaged in activism nor in posturing online about queerness. This leaves the field clear for rather more self-interested people to take both the mic and the money. The fantasy conjured up by the overused phrase “LGBTQ+ community” might suggest a cohesive group with genuinely shared interests, if not some sort of glittery high-camp version of the Bruderhof, but in fact the term is a shiny carapace shielding the eyes of straight people from big underlying divisions.

Though you’re unlikely to see an exhibit about it at Queer Britain, at the top of the pile sits an uneasy coalition of two radically different factions, each indifferent to the interests of many for whom they jointly claim to speak. The first of these factions is the sexual libertarians, mostly accounting for what remains of the avant-garde reputation of queerness in the public mind. Broadly speaking, this group wishes to erode most prohibitive sexual norms in society, considering them as pernicious curbs on individual freedom. Some are gay men, some are transwomen, and some are — as the lingo goes — “cis-het” but overcompensate for it by means of elaborate tattoos, the sort of facial hirsuteness last seen on a Victorian parson, and an ostentatious interest in pornography. All have a strong theoretical interest in sex (perhaps not so much in practice, given the amount of time spent talking about it, but who knows?).

What unites this group is the conviction that there’s no sexual act between adults that cannot be redeemed through the magic of “consent”. A significant number of them are to be found in universities, opining scholastically about chemsex, BDSM, furries, sexual choking, or whatever the latest and hottest transgression is supposed to be. Another notable presence is in the creative arts. In terms of concrete political projects, they mostly nick ideas from the instinctively libertarian youth culture currently going haywire on the internet. Indeed, a lot of unthinking public support for sexual libertarian projects comes from the merging of those projects with those of more idealistic and naive teenagers, doing their best to piss off their mothers by talking loudly on the internet about sexual deviancy.

Meanwhile, to situations where consent is obviously absent — as in the large number of sexual offences against women — the response from sexual libertarians is mostly studied indifference. These people are not in the business of public sexual disapproval, after all. Yet despite being norm-averse in sexual matters, they are often happy to enforce social sanctions against those who they consider political enemies, tending to be highly censorious about speech they perceive to threaten their own interests. They like to call themselves feminists, though only on the understanding that Judith Butler has definitively shown that women don’t really exist. Though a few pay surrogate “birthing bodies” to produce Insta-friendly babies, most don’t have children; but this doesn’t stop them having very confident opinions on the rearing of “trans kids” or on sex education in schools.

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The second significant influence on contemporary queer culture could not be more different. These are the rainbow bureaucrats: the charity workers and trustees, managers, PR specialists, lobbyists, and equality advisers who keep the whole corporate-friendly show on the road. In contrast to the sexualised norm-busting swagger of the libertarians, the dominant idiom here is completely asexual and intensely moralised. The self-appointed role of the rainbow bureaucrat is to educate, to sooth, to care, to “manage difficult conversations”, to protect, and to inspire. The tone is comforting, homely, and eminently responsible. It’s time for tea and biscuits, not for chemsex. And as with bureaucrats everywhere, there is also a positive relish for rules and norms: what words to say and not to say, what badges and lanyards to wear, what Stonewall holy days to mark, what petitions to sign, what bake sales to have, what mantras to chant, what merchandise to buy. There is also a strong legislative instinct — as soon as there is a norm they approve of, there probably ought to be a law or a policy to help it along.

An illustrative example of this side of the queer coin is the Mermaids website, where a basic aim of the charity — lobbying to make medical and social transition easier for minors — is placed within a miasma of cooing, caring, supporting, “affirming”, and consoling. Colluding against potentially protesting parents, the site even tells kids that “if you are nervous about visiting our site then you can click on the arrow over on the right-hand-side of the screen and it’ll take you to another page”. (The arrow takes you to Wikipedia.) So much for out and proud.

These, then, are the two signatories to the exceptionally weird pact underpinning queerness as a contemporary cultural phenomenon in the UK — between one side who believes nothing and one who believes everything; between the icily cold and the warmly caring; between those who say fuck the police, and those who want to call the police (in Mermaids’ case, quite literally, as was revealed last week). The sexual libertarians steal their ideas from youth cultures online, while the rainbow bureaucrats operationalise those ideas, earnestly selling them back as identities to the next generation of young consumers, as well as selling on the victimhood tropes that will keep the cash flowing from corporates keen to have a socially responsible-looking brand.

Perhaps it won’t have escaped the reader thus far that there’s a biological element to all this too. The sexual libertarians are mostly men; the staff and trustees of Mermaids are nearly all female — no matter how they identify — and, in my experience, so are most other rainbow bureaucrats. Despite foundational intellectual myths, it turns out biological sex matters in the queer world too. And though they won’t like it, it’s tempting to see these two factions as part of a tediously conventional nuclear family, with rebellious jack-the-lad Dad and solicitous stay-at-home Mum, and with many confused children shunting between the two.

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Between them, these two symbolic parental figures allow queerness to be all things to all (non-)men, depending on what the interest is at the time: sexily threatening or passively threatened; thrillingly disruptive or reassuringly conventional; cynically nihilistic or earnestly idealistic. Their joint influence explains why the adjective “queer” might as easily be added to a Brighton nightclub flyer as to an NHS pamphlet or an article in the Women’s Institute magazine. It also explains why the whole “LGBTQ+ movement” remains so impervious to criticism. Should a sexual libertarian ever go rogue and overdo the transgression (say, by claiming that “children have sexual desires at an early age”), or should a rainbow bureaucrat ever get sloppy with procedure (say, by committing a massive data breach), other bureaucrats will instantly appear in reassuring mummy-mode to steady the horses, talking soothingly about best international practice and strong safeguarding policies.

If a back-up is needed, a pre-digested narrative stands ready for employment at any time, which says that any criticism must be motivated by phobia. And since victimhood sells these days, both to troubled kids looking for a spiritual home and to corporates looking for a progressive brand image, a crisis is thereby neatly turned into an opportunity for growth. Truly, when they called this whole racket queer, they weren’t wrong.

But even as I rippled through the deep, marvelling at flashing schools of fish, there was a trade-off: constant self-control. Don’t breathe out through your nose. Don’t sneeze. Never, ever panic. For a short while it’s possible to pretend that you have the freedom of such an alien world, but in truth you’re only ever a tourist, granted safe passage thanks to technology, training and self-discipline.

Something about this sense of crossing an uncrossable threshold surely also powers our obsession with mermaids. And it is an obsession: mermaids are everywhere. Monique Roffey’s novel The Mermaid of Black Conch: A Love Story recently won the Costa Book Prize, while “mermaiding” — swimming in the sea wearing a “mermaid tail” — has gained a cult following in Australia. And you only need to browse the girls’ clothing selection in a high-street shop to find countless cartoon girls with fish-tails, sequinned and sparkly, smiling at you from t-shirts, dresses, wellies, duvet sets, pencil cases and the like.

As a parent of a four-year-old, I’m more familiar than I’d like with mermaid content, and Disney is a rich source. Sofia the First: A Mermaid Tale is a favourite with my daughter, who is entranced by the moment when Sofia is magically transformed into a mermaid and dives underwater. There, she swims in circles exclaiming: “This is incredible!”. And it is. The rest of the story is almost an afterthought, with the whole narrative punch condensed into that moment of metamorphosis, and the dive into a new and mysterious realm.

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If mermaids offer an enchanting dream of transformation, perhaps it’s no surprise that the transgender movement enthuses about the special place mermaids have in their iconography. Activist Janet Mock links this to Ariel, heroine of the 1989 Disney film The Little Mermaid, who chafes at her underwater life and longs to visit the world beyond.

Ariel falls in love with a human, Prince Eric, and persuades the sea-witch Ursula to give her human legs, in exchange for her voice. Of course, being Disney, it all ends happily: Ariel gets her transformation at the end and marries the prince. It’s an elegant, arresting fantasy of pursuing and realising a seemingly impossible vision, and encapsulates perfectly the Disney motto: “Where Dreams Come True”.

Today, it’s increasingly accepted that we should support each individual in pursuit of their dreams — even to the extent, as in Ariel’s case, of accommodating those who radically alter their bodies to align with inner identity. So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that in the 31 years since The Little Mermaid was released, the association between mermaids and those who pursue an identity at the cost of physical transformation has only deepened. Six years after the film’s release, a charity was founded with the aim of supporting transgender youth — and given the name Mermaids. Meanwhile, Starbucks (whose logo is a mermaid) ran a 2019 campaign in partnership with Mermaids, celebrating the moment a young transgender person hears their preferred name spoken by a Starbucks barista and, for the first time, identity supersedes body.

But just as scuba divers gain the enthralling freedom of the deep only via technology and absolute self-control, a delve into the deeper iconography of mermaids suggests that crossing a threshold as un-crossable as that between air and water isn’t as straightforward matter of making Dreams Come True. As T.S. Eliot hinted in 1911, the dream of oneness with the ocean always comes with a price, or else comes to an end:

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

The modern mermaids of pre-teen iconography are both ultra-glam and sexless, sporting revealing, shimmery shell bikinis and jewelled hair — even as the iconography swims smoothly past the question of what’s going on below the waist. As transgender icon Amiyah Scott puts it to Janet Mock: “With mermaids, the bottom is kind of like an unknown and I like that.” It’s not really done to speculate about how mermaids make more mermaids.

For a culture that simultaneously offers pre-teen girls Playboy-branded merch and rages about paedophilia, this style of mermaid perfectly combines an alluring, hyper-feminine aesthetic with a convenient evasion of the sexual dynamic that hyper-femininity is meant to evoke in adults. But the deep history of mermaids — and their element, the ocean itself — tackles those far darker and more turbulent feminine sexual associations in a way that’s far less sanitised.

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Once you’re out on the open sea of unbounded female desire, the mermaids of legend aren’t pretty and sexless at all. They’re alluring, slippery and apt to steal your loved ones. In one Cornish folk tale, chorister Matthew Trewalla followed a mysterious woman out of the Sunday service in the mining town of Zennor, straight to the ocean where he vanished.

As the story goes, Trewalla was never seen again — until spotted by a ship’s captain some years later. He had transformed to a merman, swimming alongside his mermaid wife and mer-children. Zennor’s mermaid tempts Trewalla to turn his back not just on friends and family but on land itself. She’s far closer to the temptress of seafaring lore, who sings to passing ships and causes them to run aground.

In Old Norse mythology, sea-maidens are more menacing still: the nine daughters of Aegir the sea-god and Rán, goddess of the drowned, are waves on the ocean. Each of these nine sea-maidens has a different aspect — such as the frothing one, the billowing one, the welling one — “through which one can see heaven”. The seafaring Vikings who told these stories were intimately familiar with, and healthily afraid of, an ocean seen as both feminine and deeply dangerous.

This hostile undercurrent to the association between women and the sea comes out even today. There’s no shortage of not very polite modern euphemisms for women’s genitalia referencing seafood, for example, while in drag culture someone is said to be ‘fishy’ if they pass as a woman.

So is crossing to the other side desirable or detestable? And what’s the price of a visit? In the movie of The Little Mermaid, there is no price: Ariel’s father Neptune uses his magical trident to transform his daughter permanently into a human, whereupon she leaves permanently for the land and marries her prince. There’s no sense in the movie that this is anything other than an unambiguously happy ending. But while older mermaid tales evoke that same longing to cross the boundary, either seaward or landward, they usually carry a far greater sense of loss or danger than this “Dreams Come True” retelling.

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The hauntingly sad Hans Christian Andersen story that inspired Disney couldn’t be further from wish-fulfilment. As in the film, the mermaid falls in love with a prince she rescues from a storm. But in exchange for giving her legs, the sea-witch doesn’t just steal her voice but cuts out her tongue. Even as the magic grants her a pair legs, walking on them is agony. And though the prince is fond of the transformed mermaid, he loves someone else. There’s no happy ending: the mermaid knows his marriage will break her heart, but though her sisters beg her to break the spell by murdering the prince, the mermaid loves him too much to save herself in this way. Instead, she throws herself into the water and dissolves into foam.

From the Disney perspective, this is all a bit grim. After all, we can all be whatever we want if only we believe. Can’t we? Far from offering a happy tale of dreams that come true, though, Andersen’s story reads like a bleak cautionary tale about struggling against your own natural limits.

Disney animations have a way of crowding out earlier and more ambiguous fairy tales, and it’s a safe bet the founders of Mermaids hadn’t read Andersen’s story when they named their organisation. In their search for a positive depiction of youth gender transition, it seems unlikely they had in mind constant physical pain, the loss of one’s authentic voice and a lifetime of being passed over as a sexual partner.

So even as the ancient history of mermaids has mixed feelings about the beauty and peril of femininity, the modern mermaid reboot is just as ambivalent about what’s real and what’s artificial — and just how far artifice can help us realise our desires. Perhaps it’s fitting that even as we’ve filled our real-life oceans with plastic, we should make such a concerted effort to give the archetypal oceanic feminine a plastic-toy  — or plastic-surgery — makeover.

But despite this embrace of the mermaid as a poster-girl for a consumer approach to identity, the mermaid as symbol isn’t so easily sanitised, or persuaded of her own happy ending. Some mermaids decide they don’t like the land after all, even if they’re no longer quite at home in the sea either. Some find new voices, and use them.

For despite all the toys, t-shirts and upbeat Disney stories, darker, older currents still roll beneath the safe and sparkly modern mermaid. These currents invite us to wonder: maybe some dreams bring no relief, even when they come true. Maybe some kinds of restlessness can’t be cured, only navigated.