www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mermaids-uk-charity-ban-as-boy-forced-to-live-as-girl-dvx3j99cn?shareToken
A taxpayer-funded transgender charity has been banned by the High Court from any contact with a family after the mother, who was being advised by the group, forced her seven-year-old son to live as a girl.
The latest accounts for Mermaids UK, published last week, reveal it has been granted £35,000 by the Department for Education (DfE) and a total of £138,000 by the national lottery’s Awards for All fund and the BBC’s Children in Need appeal.
It can also be revealed that until last week Mermaids was advertising “same day” cross-sex hormone treatment for children. NHS guidelines do not allow the treatment, which causes irreversible bodily changes and can compromise fertility, for anyone under 16.
In a court case, reported last year, Mr Justice Hayden removed the seven-year-old child, known as “J”, from his mother after finding she had caused him “significant emotional harm” and “pressed [him] into a gender identification that had far more to do with his mother’s needs and little, if anything, to do with his own”.
Social services had declined to act against the woman, saying she had “appropriately taken on board support from . . . Mermaids”. However, the judge accused social workers of “summarily disregarding” many concerns expressed by police and healthcare professionals about J because they “did not wish to appear to be challenging an emerging orthodoxy in such a high-profile issue”.
J was home-schooled and was dressed in girls’ clothes, the judgment found. After being removed from his mother, sent to live with his father and sent to school, he had “assert[ed] his own masculine gender” and lived life as a boy.
At the time, Mermaids attacked the “horrific decision”, insisted J wanted to be a girl and said there was “no evidence at all to support this judge’s views”.
Yet in separate Facebook posts it has now emerged that the charity admitted it had been “ordered to have nothing to do with this child following their removal”.
Until last Friday the youth section of the Mermaids website featured a message from Dr Birgit Möller, a Hamburg-based doctor, offering fast-track trans-sex hormone treatment for children. “If the families are interested we would set up a long evaluation appointment at our clinic (3-4 hours) and afterwards an appointment with the endocrinologist [hormone specialist],” Möller wrote. “In case of an indication for hormone treatment he would prescribe it the same day.”
The message was removed after The Sunday Times asked Mermaids about it.
Stephanie Davies-Arai, founder of Transgender Trend, a website for parents questioning the diagnosis and treatment of children as transgender, said: “I am concerned that Mermaids is indoctrinating children, scaring parents into thinking that [gender] transition is the only way and intimidating professionals.”
The DfE said it did not fund Mermaids directly but as one of 13 “partner” groups in an anti-bullying alliance.
Mermaids claimed last night that it was not the subject of the court order and that it was the family that had been ordered to have no contact with it.