Susie Green

[dorade]

First thing first, I fully support Posie Parker.

I decided to look at a bit of the backstory including watching Susie Green's TED talk.

Starting from the premise that mothers want the best for their children, I tried to consider how she travelled down the path that she did.

Clearly she didn't have a problem per se with her son playing with 'girl toys' (although the father was sending strong messages to the child that he did).

To my mind, the only way Susie Green can have taken the path that she took is that she must believe that someone can really truly be born in the wrong sex body. If you believe that with religious fervour then the actions that follow, particularly if medical professionals are validating you, don't seem as outrageous.

There then comes a point somewhere down the line when you have gone so far, where you can't allow even a chink of doubt to creep in because the whole house of cards and the horror of irreversible decisions would be too awful to contemplate.

For Jackie, I am sure much of the attention has been unpleasant but equally instead of being a run of the mill gay man he can be feted as a 'brave beauty queen'. His mother gets validated by Buckingham Palace and the Police amongst others.

Sorry, this is all a bit stream-of-consciousness, but what I'm trying to say is that at the root of it we must challenge the narrative that it is possible to be born in the wrong body. It's not.

We also need to retain humanity towards those who, aided and abetted by professionals and under dire warnings of suicide, have made awful decisions.

rowdy - my personal view of how this situation has arisen in schools is (funnily enough, given the earlier discussion on this thread about conservative religion) that it is similar to what happened a few years back when schools were looking for guidance on how to accommodate Muslim children. Some of the groups that came forward and produced guidance and delivered training and made nice hand-outs available were later identified as promoting extremism, it's just that it wasn't recognised as such at the time because of a lack of general education. I suspect in five years time there will be a general incredulity that Mermaids was ever allowed in a school, but I can see how it has happened now, sadly.

OleannasWimple
It reminds me of the satanic abuse allegations back in the late 80s / 1990s which resulted in children being removed from homes in dawn raids following allegations which subsequently proved to be false. Lots of professionals were drawn into this with training courses and conferences and subsequently after a major investigation which proved that the allegations were unfounded, significant damages were paid to a number of families. The NSPCC (who I have great admiration for) were caught up in it. This was in the days before the internet so it is easy to see how nowadays, specific ideas / beliefs can more easily gain greater traction and support.

Is there any lawyers or people knowledgable that can tell me whether someone who goes Abroad to performance and ilegal act (say buy sex with minors or forbidden surgery as in SG case) and comes back to UK and it is find out, would they be prosecuted? How does one go about alerting the authorities? Hiding in plain sight?

It seems appropriate to post a link to Heather Brunskelll-Evans' podcast here: www.feministcurrent.com/2018/03/18/podcast-heather-brunskell-evans-wants-talk-idea-trans-kids/
as well as as a link to the book review in The Journal of child Psychotherapy www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0075417X.2018.1435707?scroll=top&needAccess=true

Peaceloving - I think something has to be a crime in the UK in order for it to be tried here and the law to make provision for actions overseas to be tried here. IIRC there was a law change a while back to criminalise performing FGM on a girl taken from the UK; similarly to criminalise underage sex in places like Thailand. War crimes and terrorist activities can also be tried in the UK even if they took place overseas. Evidence is obviously the big difficulty in a successful prosecution

I wonder whether taking a 16 yo abroad for genital surgery would count as FGM under current laws? Would the parent of a MIT find themselves proferring the defence that the surgery had been conducted on their male child, so does not count as Female Genital Mutilation, even though the TRA narrative is that the child would have "always been a girl"

Watching with interest

@rowdywoman1 I was thinking the other day about the Satanic Panic and how it was allowed to come about in a large part through good intentions backed with theories that were not backed up by robust scientific evidence.

There’s an excellent book called Satan’s Silence on how Satanic Ritual Abuse cases swept America, and the parallels with the phenomenon of trans kids are quite chilling. I urge anyone with even a cursory interest in the subject of child protection to read it. It frightens me that we really have learnt nothing.

I worry that the narrative of Mermaids has shifted from challenging the idea that children have to display the very narrow gender characteristics that society has assigned to their sex, i.e. gender variance, to girl brain/boy brain theory, where if your personality doesn’t fit the role society expects you to play, the best solution is to physically change your body.

I’m sure there are some people whose body dysmorphia is so strong that physical transition is the best option. I find it horrifying that sterilising gay children so they can better fit our society’s gender stereotypes is becoming the ‘normal’ route though.

Interestingly, Mermaid’s own website links to articles like this one that are of the ‘gender variant’ rather than ‘boy brain/girl brain’ flavour.

I wonder whether Mermaids are aware of these tensions within their organisation, and what the original founders think of the direction it has taken.

Oh, and if you tell a boy that all the toys and clothes they love are ‘girls’ clothes, and if society only provides female-bodied examples of the sort of person you wish to be, then I’m pretty sure that such a boy would logically conclude they must be a girl.

I have watched the video. It is callled “transgender:a mother’s story”

I found it sad and thought provoking

I don’t think Mermaids should have such influence. No mother who has made these kind of decisions (rightly or wrongly) could ever hope to be objective about other people’s children. It’s not appropriate for Susie Green to have such a voice.

I also suspect that Susie Green did not see the “fashion” for young -people- identifying -as -trans coming. To be fair to her, it was probably the last thing she expected sad

I think we need to now push for Mermaids to be banned from going into schools.

Reading this thread is very upsetting.

There's no way SG should be able to influence vulnerable children in this way.

As the parent of a child with asd I do know it’s very hard when you feel no one is listening to you about your child’s situation.
Nevertheless I cannot begin to comprehend why this woman acted as she did and I can find no reason to excuse her. Still less do I excuse her for her strident attempts to influence schools, parents and other children.