Another Mermaid statement: about Good Morning Britain and Caroline Farrow

[ItsAllGoingToBeFine]

Apparently Farrow will be on GMB tomorrow.

There are some interesting bits in this statement:

Jackie is, of course, deeply upset by the reference to her as being mutilated, castrated and sterilised.

Jackie is also distressed at the assertion that this was something that was somehow done ‘to her’. The only people deliberately doing anything 'to her' are the online trolls using the most abusive language about her. She would like the online abuse to stop.

At 16, she undertook extensive psychological assessment from independent experts before she was cleared for, and undertook, gender reassignment surgery. Her competency and full knowledge of all the implications was clear.

At 25 she still considers that surgery, for her, was lifesaving, and is distressed at the implication that she was not capable and mature enough to make this decision.

I'm horrified at the profoundly ingrained ideas about toys and clothes. It's scandalously unhinged and uninformed.

Kids can become distressed/obsessed with really quite mild behaviour from authority figures.

My friend's son refused to use public loos for years because he was fleetingly embarrassed by a teacher at primary school.

Jackie Green received message after message that their sex was wrong. Over and over.

It's blisteringly obvious.

And deeply worrying that Susie Green still doesn't see it.

This is the problem that so many trans rights activists have with Mumsnet StephsCaddy

Lots of us have had experience of 4 year olds. And the narrative doesn't sit right.

(Caro noticed from your tweets you've picked up on the tweeter language too. I've pondered it further since, and it really does feel a deliberate attempt to 'other' you and paint you in similar light to 'the shooter' language. It's a little dim, and glad you're pointing it out)

She made her name and her charity by trading on the plight of Jackie.

She put Jackie in the spotlight herself. There have been documentaries and a drama based on the story. Jackie has been on 'This Morning' talking about being a Beauthy Queen (sic)

And yet today, the spotlight is all too, too much. It's not as if the Greens themselves haven't broadcast the details far and wide themselves! Do me a favour.

The CEO of a children's charity can expect to be scrutinised closely. She can expect to be judged too. Appealing for the spotlight to be turned off now, because it doesn't suit, is not a good look.

Mermaids statement reworked:

Can the discussion about trans children please now become less toxic and abusive hidden behind twee language, evasive, affirmative of dangerous and regressive ideology, less supportive of a politicing by grown, middle-aged men who need to validate their fetishisation of the other sex by putting confused children on a pedestal and saying 'we're all the same, transwomen are women'

Let's just have a discussion about children who feel trapped by society's current gender stereotyped boxes of what makes a woman and man.

Let's reduce the need for medication and increase the need and campaign for the acceptance of all humans living outside the gender stereotypes.

(Oh. No, that doesn't work for the Mermaids model though, does it?)

I know someone who suffered a life changing injury in their 20s. She is remarkably upbeat and positive about life despite her never being able to independently function again.

It draws parallels to Jackie Green in my mind - life now is this. They can either go mad with regret and anger; or live life as best they can, trying to find happiness and peace with where they are now, regardless of what caused it.

Someone's asked me why 16 year olds can give informed consent to pregnancy and all the life changing risks/consequences that it entails but can't give consent to surgery. I'm too tired to unpick this.

This is such a sad story. I don't blame SG for being defensive. If I was her, I don't think I could own up to what she did either. I think SG was a victim of gender stereotypes, homophobia, and "wrong Place, wrong time". I do feel for her.

However, I feel worse for the children of today who are being told that it's possible to change sex, or be born in the wrong body, or be neither male nor female. They are being told this by SG's charity. And that is unforgivable.

Someone's asked me why 16 year olds can give informed consent to pregnancy and all the life changing risks/consequences that it entails but can't give consent to surgery

1. Pregnancy: a natural, quintessentially female biological function. The body returns to what it was pre-pregnancy; all the time being female.
2. Unnecessary surgeries and on-going medication ; an unnatural process to appease the deluded in their persistence that they can 'change' sex. The surgically-altered body will never be the same again after mutilation but the biological reality is it remains the born sex.

I hope no one minds but I’m reposting a post here from another thread. I’ve not read this interview with SG before, it is so utterly shocking and shows how ignorant SG is re child development, that it needs to be published far and wide.

R0wantrees

“2105 Interview with Susie Green for Day Nurseries

(extract)
“I first realised Jackie was different when she was 18 months old,” says her mum Susie Green.

"Although she was my first child, I had lots of nephews and nieces and Jackie just didn’t seem to behave like them.

“She’d go into my wardrobe, put on dresses and she even put my bra on at 18 months.

“The nursery staff were telling me Jackie was different when she went there at two and a half years old.”

Cross-dressing in the dressing up box

At nursery Jackie never played with the boys, always took a female role in the games played and would treat the soft toys like babies or pretend to have tea with them.

“She couldn’t wait to get into the dressing up box. She’d come out as Snow White with a jumper on her head and the arms trailing down to make it look like she had long hair.” (continues)

www.daynurseries.co.uk/news/article.cfm/id/1571947/Transgender-children-How-nurseries-can-support-those-with-gender-identity-issues”

Someone's asked me why 16 year olds can give informed consent to pregnancy and all the life changing risks/consequences that it entails

There is no legal provision to consent to pregnancy. You can't withdraw or withhold consent from pregnancy. Legally, 16 year olds can consent to certain activities such as sex and some medical treatments. The court would determine, in the case of a disagreement between the child and parent with PR over a medical procedure, whether the child was competent and whether the consequences would be proportionate to the procedure.
So a court would likely judge a child could have an abortion against their parents wishes, or cancer treatment. But a judge wouldn't agree a child could have a cosmetic procedure or a body modification.
The question is, does castration and creation of a neovagina cavity come under cosmetic or not? I would argue yes, absolutely. Jackie didn't need a vagina like cavity at age 16, there was no reason Jackie couldn't wait until 18. I suppose Susie green would argue that it was a mental health treatment or something and therefore necessary

I mean what the fuck is someone who understands so little about a child development, doing in charge of a children’s charity!

Everybody fucks up with their first child. SG fucked up more than most.

She should’ve gone on the freedom program and left her shitbag of a husband, not had 3 more kids with him and mutilated the first

4 year old little girls trying to chuck themselves out of windows because they want to be boys?

a) Really?

b) if yes, really, then how can anyone say these children haven't got severe mental illnesses? There is this huge contradiction between 'just be your authentic self', draping everything in a rainbow, tacking T on the end of LGB, putting trans forward as just like being gay, and then saying that these children are so mentally ill that at 4 years old they will kill themselves if we don't let them 'transition'. You cant really have it both ways.

the suicide card is like a get out of jail free card..all other bets are off if you can hold people over a barrel with the ultimate threat of death.

I've lost people to suicide and find the very cynical, deliberate misrepresentation of suicide stats to further a cause, deeply disrespectful and also very dangerous.

My DD preferred throwing her dollies across the room to 'nurturing' them. Memorably, she also enjoyed dismembering them with her Bob the Builder toolkit. I see now she was a boy all along, and I got it all wrong by allowing her to play with 'boys' toys and think that was natural and fun.

I just can't get my head around the thinking...

Most of all I feel sorry for Jackie and those like Jackie. My Ds is 15 now and so impossibly young to go through something like that - let alone having been on blockers and hormones already 😢

Caro is being hammered because she called things as they are, and those things look shocking because they are shocking.

Yes, I think the weapomising of suicide is one of the most distasteful things about this whole movement. And all the TRAs, even the high profile ones do it.

And the thing that pisses me off is that the exact same people also say 'don't you dare call being trans a mental illness, that's what homophobes used to say about being gay' because they are also weaponising the homophobia of the past to coerce normal, liberal minded people into having to believe that humans can change sex and that men who say they are women should be able to take women's protections and rights.

Argh, just fuck off!

She was born 18 years ago with all the physical characteristics of a boy and her parents named her Jack, but from being a toddler she acted like a girl. She always wanted to wear girls’ clothes and play with girls’ toys.

I was my parents' first child and also "different".

By that reasoning I must be trans: I was born with female genitalia and given a female name. When I was a toddler I never played with dolls but preferred my brother's trucks and army men. I always wanted to wear trousers and cried when my parents put me in dresses.

Turns out that I was "different" because I am: I have autism.

How in the world I grew up to be a heterosexual woman, ie adult human female, goodness knows.

Thank God my parents didn't decide to have my genitals mutilated to turn me into a version of something the thought I should be.

4 year old little girls trying to chuck themselves out of windows because they want to be boys

I call bullshit. If that happened, it was not because the child was "mis-gendered".

Why cant they accept that most people think what was done to Jackie was wrong at worst, misguided at best. There is no way 18m olds dressing up is a sign of anything.

Someone's asked me why 16 year olds can give informed consent to pregnancy and all the life changing risks/consequences that it entails

As someone who once was a pregnant (to term) 15/16 year old I would argue they can't give informed consent in reality. I had no real understanding of the reality and the long term repercussions- if I had I might have made different choices.

This is why we educate young teens and try to prevent teen pregnancy and why medical transition, something which is even more seriously life changing, should also be viewed with a slant towards prevention in the very young and immature.

Medical transition is not something that can accidentally happen in the same way pregnancy can so there is no good reason for it to be pushed for under 18s (and the suicide stats they love to quote don't hold water).

At 15 (which was when the operation must have been arranged and all the psychological testing going by SG's account of it actually happening on Jackie's 16th birthday) Jackie was not, in law, considered mature enough to:
Drive
Marry
Serve in the armed forces
Vote
Consent to sex
Smoke
Buy a knife
Leave full time education

I hope, I really do hope, that Jackie genuinely feels this was the right decision. But I'm still horrified.

Why is Piers being such an arse to Caroline?

He’s an arse to everyone!

They hardly let her get a word in edgeways.

They certainly didn’t want her talking about the cold hard realities of surgery. What was she trying to say about ending up with no bowel?