Last week it was announced that the UK charity, Mermaids, would receive £500,000 in lottery funding. I immediately wrote the Big Lottery Fund to express my concerns over this grant given that my knowledge of Mermaids dates back over six years when I interviewed one of their representatives for an article I wrote in 2013. Here is what transpired in my discussion with this charity then:
I spoke to Linda at Mermaids, a support group in London formed in 1995 by parents of transgendered children. She told me that this group supports parents who have children who do not ‘fit in’ with ‘gender roles.’ I ask what she meant exactly by ‘fitting in’ and Linda explains, ‘If you are a little girl who behaves like a boy, you will want to have your hair short, to play with the boys. Even at play group they will be different…they will be picked on and those are the problems.’ I tell Linda that many little girls will have short hair and play with boys—I was one of those little girls. She says, ‘I have known a lot of girls in my time and they don’t like rough and tumble..they don’t like playing with boys. They like to play with dolls, dressing up, playing in the Wendy House, to grow their hair…’ Linda emphasises that it is important that these children ‘fit in,’ a phrase she often repeats in our discussion. Is this what transitioning for some trans adults is about? Is this the ‘support’ that parents are receiving in order to understand ‘gender roles’?
Since this article was published, Mermaids has gone on to expand its reach in the UK for children’s lives, with a British High Court judge banning Mermaids from communication with a family after it was discovered that the mother had forced her four-year-old son to live “life entirely as a girl.” In fact, Mermaids, a political lobby group and not a professional organization, recommends the services of Dr. Helen Webberley, a GP (general practitioner) who was told not to run her online transgender advice surgery by watchdog Healthcare Inspectorate Wales (HIW) earlier this year and who just two weeks ago was found guilty of offering sex-change hormones to kids. And even after this last ruling, where Webberley was suspended from her practice and fined £12,000 for failing to register her online advice services with a health regulator in Wales, still Mermaids continued to recommend this doctors practice on its website. They have only removed their recommendation to Webberley’s services very recently.
It’s not only that the chief executive of Mermaids, Susie Green, has waxed poetic about her son’s playing with the “wrong toys” as Linda from Mermaids also echoed to me years earlier, but Green engaged in what would be considered highly illegal acts in the UK had Green been a Muslim woman whisking her child off for FGM (female genital mutilation) for rituals back in her home country where such atrocities are still committed upon female children. Instead, Green, in defiance of NHS (National Health Service) regulations on how to treat young children suffering from gender dysphoria, took her son to the United States to Dr Norman Spack, a pediatric endocrinologist at the Boston Children’s Hospital who put Green’s son on hormone blockers at the age of 12 while also introducing female hormones which is well below the age recommendations made by the NHS. And then Green took her son to Thailand for what is medically called SRS (sex reassignment surgery), but what the transgender lobby has rebranded with a positive spin, “gender affirmation surgery.”
Despite the media coverage of Green and her own performance on Tedx Talks, Green has been quite successful in not only telling her story, but she has also managed to enlist the West Yorkshire Police to silence those who recount Green's actons on social media. For example, earlier this year Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull was interrogated by the West Yorkshire Police for using the term “castrated” (I presume instead of “gender affirmation surgery”) and for relating all the information of Green’s having taking her son abroad for acts that would be—and likely are entirely—illegal even if the various medical treatments were not specifically for religious-based practices such as female genital mutilation.
The thing is that Mermaids espouses the true knowledge to best practices even if it is a political lobby group which has no professional scope or focus. More troubling however, the NHS has produced literature on transgender youth entitled, “A guide for young trans people in the UK,” whereby Mermaids is not only featured but is said to “support parents” even if noticeably absent from this document is the mention of other organizations that also support parents with an ideological balance afoot. For instance, Transgender Trend is a UK-based organization that allows parents to understand the full spectrum of information on this subject, with its website stating its mandate is for “everyone who is concerned about the social and medical ‘transition’ of children, the introduction of ‘gender identity’ teaching into schools and new policies and legislation based on subjective ideas of ‘gender’ rather than the biological reality of sex.” What better balance to an issue—if truly and uniquely a medical one—than to allow a broader range of players into the discussion. As it stands Mermaids has dominated the discussion on supposedly transgender kids in the UK (I say supposedly since most specialists would agree that a boy liking a Wendy house or a girl having short hair is hardly indicative of gender dysphoria). That is until the past two years when more and more women’s groups have emerged speaking out along with more journalists daring to question this growing tide of gender normativity cast as “subversive.”
Yet, Mermaids is still spinning its own brand of scientific hokum as can be attested in recent months through its interventions in various conferences. First, the “We’re Still Here” conference, held at Bloomsbury Baptist Church on 8 September where many of the transgender rights movers and shakers were present to include: Jane Fae, Christine Burns, James Morton, Adrian Harrop, Giuliana Kendal, Edward Lord, Heather Peto, Helen Belcher, and Helen Webberley with a pop-up stand promoting her online GP services. Labour MP, Dawn Butler, gave the keynote speech to this conference. The findings here were reported to me by a woman who attended this event later sending me information as to what transpired in what can only be described as a private meeting between a government official, healthcare practitioners, and transgender political advocacy groups and individuals. She posted many of her notes online as well, reporting on the Mermaids portion of the conference stating, “Transgender rights campaigner, Christine Burns, presented saying that children have “gender awareness” from around the age of two. The general consensus was that a child who articulates that they want to change their gender should be able to—no matter how young they are.” She went on to relate, “[Burns] also said that we “baby” children in our culture, whereas in other countries twelve-year-olds are considered old enough to fight in wars.” The ethos is astonishing in that the barometer used to legitimize age of consent for serious medical intervention is this: if it’s good enough for child soldiers in South Sudan, then it’s good enough for all children.
Then two weeks ago, Michael Conroy, trainer/consultant from Men At Work Organisation, attended and recorded a lecture given by Mermaids (which can be heard here and here) at a university in the Midlands. The presenter, a woman called Jan who works for Mermaids, delivered a course which formed part of the the free CPD (Continuing Professional Development) sessions offered by the university to local high schools and further education colleges. As I listen through the session, Jan completely misinterprets scientific fact, spinning a rather interesting fiction to buttress the ideology of transgender children:
And actually trans is...there's scientific data to say that it is part of the human race. It's not a choice, but we'll get onto that a bit later on. So, we all know Nemo and we know Nemo is a clownfish, and if we're really honest, we only know he's a clownfish since Nemo, before then he was just a fish. All clownfish are born male, so the only announcement that they have is “It's a boy!” What happens at breeding season, the dominant males, so all the GI Joe Nemos, will physically change biological sex and become female. Then they will mate. When that female dies, the next dominant male will come forward and take her place. It's known as sequential hermaphroditism.
So we skip from child soldiers to Nemo and basically I learned that clownfish can talk and make sex revelations at birth! Do they also hand out cigars? This is where I was left hanging. But I digress… The reality is that protandrous hermaphrodites are a fact of nature not limited to clown fish—loon wrasse, laevapex fuscus, and coeloplana gonoctena are also protandrous hermaphrodites. So are we to understand life according to Nemo or can we return to science whereby humans are sexually dimorphic? Again, we are in the throes of various scientific revolutions today where whole genome sequencing companies are able to give detailed data about a human’s longevity, but does a scientific truth related to clown fish have anything to do with the fact of human sexual dimorphism?
The reality is that there is a burgeoning medical industry and social apparatus which seek to label gender non-conforming children as “transgender” and which then undertakes to medicalize these children. And this trend is hardly limited to the United Kingdom. In the US, Diane Ehrensaft, Director of Mental Health at San Francisco’s Child and Adolescent Gender Center, gives the some rather unscientific examples of transgender identification in small children—from a toddler ripping out her barrettes, a one-year-old girl enunciating “I boy,” and a one-year-old unsnapping his onesies. One need not read beyond these examples to see some very dangerous reductions made between what is a child’s natural behavior in experimenting with the world around and adults ready to fixate on every action to lend a reading of gender. Rather than focus on “gender” as the “problem,” it is far more likely that toddlers find barrettes and onesies uncomfortable, just for starters.
With organizations like Mermaids attempting to “educate” those within the public health services, teachers, and parents, we must be wary of the hokum being pawned off as “science.” It’s no more scientific than talking clownfish. And the downside of this story is that such balderdash is affecting our culture and ability to speak frankly with each other about the reality of sex and social expectations placed upon each sex. The true revolution around gender will come when we stop attempting to match or alter sexed bodies to a presumed “correct gender.”
