Daily Mail Article on Susie Green with comments from former mermaids staff

A fascinating thread and a revealing article.
I can't help being enraged that the Dept for Education, who are meant to hold the wellbeing of children at the centre of everything they do, funded Mermaids, Stonewall, Gendered Intelligence and countless other queer theory groups. Many of us have been writing to our MPs since 2017 ? and have repeatedly received insulting responses from the DfE / ministers. Write about safeguarding and they'll write back telling you how "inclusive" mixed sex facilities are for children. Or handwave away concerns. Or tell you that the guidelines are being written (5 years ago) 🙄

It's not just the catastrophic damage that Green / Mermaids have done to so many children - they've been enabled by those in power who should have known better.

Sorry you're going through that CurseYou - it's all necessary but that doesn't make it easy to work through it all. Pretty draining too.

That’s exactly it IMO, shera (love the name!)

Fly I’m glad you are leaving the posts, they are so insightful and it really helps to read other women’s stories. I have done a lot of looking back and making connections lately, not all to do with sexuality etc, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this time of deep introspection (due to a family event that triggered a lot of stuff as an abuse survivor) I also came back to MN again just to use this board.

I've long since been of the opinion suzie needed other parents to do to their children what she had done to hers, to provide validation for what was very extreme and largely experimental medical treatment. Mermaids was the perfect vehicle for that to happen.

'This tendency to absolutism is something that Zoe Mason also observed. 'Susie is certain she knows what's best for young people and will fight for them even when there are other people who might disagree,'

Well, she would do, wouldn't she?

She's hardly likely to turn around one day and say "oops, perhaps I was wrong, Jackie".

It's natural that she would feel the need to pour all of her energy into convincing the world (and herself) that she was right, because the alternative is too much for one human to cope with.

The problem is that other people and organisations should have said "well, hang on" for the five years her TEDTalk was online, instead of agreeing with her that the emperor has no clothes.

Yep, you're right. Anything that doesn't revolve around servicing men is basically taboo really.

swallowedAfly, I had to check I hadn't written your post for a second as your experiences sound so very similar to my own!

It's so hard to work out how one does feel about one's own sexuality (or anything else) when one's "normal" from birth is such a powerful and pervasive mix of misogyny and homophobia.

I do still lament the absence of like buttons on here sometimes but it would probably be a bad idea overall.

SerafinasGoose - thank you. I wouldn't know where to post and would probably go for a name change if I did but good to know it wouldn't be totally unfitting itms.

With Jazz I feel like Mum was the driving force not Dad and that it had more to do with narcissism and control and trend setting plus Jazz being her last child rather than Dad's homophobia personally.

Someone has commented this on Jill Foster's (the journalist) thread in Twitter:

On a minor technical detail - Thailand had in fact already passed the law that restricted this type of medical tourism. Green jetted in during the three month window between the law being passed and taking effect.

I've never heard that before. Somehow that's even more sinister.

No, don't do that. It was very interesting and useful post for others in similar situations.

👏👏👏👏👏👏 so true.

Yes, in poor Jazz's case the homophobia was enabled in a culture of stereotyping within the family. Jazz could be a happy 20 something healthy male instead of a miserable, in pain, overweight mutilated, drugged 20 something who can't have sex or procreate. But at least Dad doesn't need to be embarrassed that his son doesn't like football.

I'm glad you posted too. Really good to read of someone becoming comfortable with their sexuality: it's never too late.

I'm definitely bisexual, not lesbian, but it also took me until my thirties to fully recognize this. I'd thought my experiences of my teens and twenties were just youthful phases. They weren't.

You'll find plenty of understanding on these boards - hope you feel able to post on here for support if and when you start unpacking the past. All the best to you.

Sorry - flowers were for Swallowedafly

No, it mentions in the article J is the eldest child.

Maybe it is not. Maybe it is.

Ultimately we need brave people to simply be honest and open.

And maybe that includes people working it out in real time too - because then others see that there is a whole load of baggage and contributing factors that impact on people and you don't immediately join the dots because you are so mired in your own life you can't see the woods for the trees.

“Green told the Mail that when GenderGP founder Dr Helen Webberley was suspended pending a GMC investigation into her treatment of a particular patient — in which she was cleared of wrongdoing — she 'made the difficult decision' to remove the service from the Mermaids website.”

I find this incredibly misleading from Susie.

Yes, they removed the link to GenderGP from the Mermaids website and stopped posting the GenderGP newsletter on the Youth Forum, but moderators completely turned a blind eye to adolescents eagerly recommending GenderGP to each other and given the lax vetting process to get access to the forum, who knows how many of those adolescents weren’t actually adolescents.

I'd get off the internet and go and touch grass if it wasn't pissing down with rain

"So many of us can see we would have been at risk from this ideology because of being gay or gender non conforming or depressed or autistic or sexually abused or otherwise traumatised etc if it had been prevalent when we were children and it can be quite triggering"

There is no like button on here and I can't even find a thumbs up so I'll give you this 👌

Thank you. I had a bit of a... connect the dots moment and realising that part of my outrage and sadness and whatever else I feel about all this is rooted in my own youth and family dynamics. I would be purely intellectually and ethically against it anyway but I just connected that it is also triggering (sorry to use that word that has been so utterly co-opted and overused by many) and connected to traumas in my own childhood and that one of those traumas was around my sexuality.

Need to do some unpacking but this isn't the place really.

@swallowedAfly I appreciated your insightful posts and I expect many others will too. Please don't feel that you overshared, this is an anonymous forum. If we can't share our truth here, where can we share?