Mermaids and the evolving understanding of gender identity.

[ItsAllGoingToBeFine]

Given recent events, I thought it would be interesting to trawl the Wayback Machine and see how the organisation has developed over time with regards to diagnosing children as transgender.

What is Gender Dysphoria?

2009
Gender Identity Disorders in infancy, childhood and adolescence are complex and have varied causes: in the majority of cases the eventual outcome will be homosexuality or bisexuality, but often there will be a heterosexual outcome as some gender issues can be caused by a bereavement, a dysfunctional family life, or (rarely) by abuse. Only a small proportion of cases will result in a transsexual outcome
<a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20090307015630/www.mermaidsuk.org.uk/gidca.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">web.archive.org/web/20090307015630/www.mermaidsuk.org.uk/gidca.html

2010
Gender dyphoria, also known as Gender Identity Disorder, applies to someone who is unhappy with their biological sex and who wishes to belong to the other one.

Gender Identity is the sense of belief that "I am male" or "I am female". A child becomes aware of its gender identity before or around the age of five years, in many cases as early as 2 or 3 years of age. In most people their gender identity is the same as their sex, i.e. a woman or girl feels she is female and a man or boy feels he is male, but in a few people their gender identity and their sex do not match, and this can cause problems.

Gender Identity Issues vary considerably, some may be transient in nature, and some may not. They may arise when a child exhibits cross-gender behaviour to some degree or other. Some may be boys who prefer to take the female role or vice versa; others may have a compulsion to play with toys mostly used by the other sex (for instance, a boy who predominantly plays with dolls or a girl who always plays with action men and 'army toys'). Some children may only feel comfortable when playing with peers of the other physical sex, or may cross-dress from time to time.

Some children may be unhappy about their own biological sex and either wish to belong to the other one, or feel that they actually do; some adolescents may experience a crisis over a problem of gender identity or sexual orientation, or both. These situations can lead to considerable concern and distress for all those involved.
<a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20100718215911/www.mermaidsuk.org.uk/New%20Mermaids/whatisgid.htm" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">web.archive.org/web/20100718215911/www.mermaidsuk.org.uk/New%20Mermaids/whatisgid.htm

2012
For example, your daughter may say that she wants to be a boy, or your son may identify himself as a girl. Or perhaps you are worried about your child's cross gender behaviour, but they won't discuss it with you, and instead are isolated and withdrawn.

Or it may be you, as a young person, and you feel that your body is wrong, and that you should have been a girl if you were born a boy, or a boy if you were born a girl.
(Added to 2010 description)
<a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20121109215055/mermaidsuk.org.uk/index.php/what-is-gender-dysphoria" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">web.archive.org/web/20121109215055/mermaidsuk.org.uk/index.php/what-is-gender-dysphoria

They seem to have removed their page about gender dysphoria sometime after 2016. However, we can glean some information about how to diagnose children from their parent testimonials

2019
"Kelly"
“From the age of two we started to notice that Evie didn’t quite fit in. I thought that my son was going to be gay, but it became apparent that there was something more than that.

“Evie always wanted to play with dolls, and never had any interest in traditional boys toys, like cars or dinosaurs. We had an older son and the two could not have been more different.

“Evie loved bracelets and constantly wanted to wear one, and when I bought the children Guess Who? to play she unclipped all the female faces and put them in a handbag to carry around with her.

“Evie would look longingly at other little girls who were wearing dresses or skirts, and every time I picked her up from the childminder she would be have raided the dressing up box for a princess costume. She would come to the door to meet me in a sparkly pink dress and a tiara with a big smile on her face.

“At other children’s houses she would love putting on the princess outfits, and would have a meltdown when she had to take them off as it was time to leave.
<a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190301090129/www.mermaidsuk.org.uk/parents-voices.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">web.archive.org/web/20190301090129/www.mermaidsuk.org.uk/parents-voices.html

"Denise"
“We didn’t notice Sally having any particular problems or issues as she was growing up, but her primary school was very small and the classes were mixed together in infants, so there was no real distinction between boys and girls or age groups.

“But looking back I can see there were pointers. Sally always wanted to play with the dressing up box, and she always wanted to be a princess. She always wanted long hair too.
<a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190301090129/www.mermaidsuk.org.uk/parents-voices.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">web.archive.org/web/20190301090129/www.mermaidsuk.org.uk/parents-voices.html

I wonder if there is a word for the condition of 'feeling like being born in the wrong body.' Surely, that would be helpful for the discourse Mermaids is now engaging in...

@deepwatersolo

I wonder if there is a word for the condition of 'feeling like being born in the wrong body.' Surely, that would be helpful for the discourse Mermaids is now engaging in...

Like a medical term? Hmmmnnn....

I wonder if there is a word for the condition of 'feeling like being born in the wrong body.' Surely, that would be helpful for the discourse Mermaids is now engaging in

Well, I’d call it dysphoria. You know, like anorexia or bulimia - other bodily dysphorias.

Oh, but that would mean that transgender would be a mental health issue, and -as I’ve just heard Lisa Nandy say on Any Questions (iPlayer) to suggest that would be demeaning.

Because there’s nothing like a good bit of ableism thrown into this whole debate.

Another thing I have always thought about is that even if you are a woman with a mans brain or vice versa that doesn’t mean that you should have to change your sex or even that that is a good idea.

The neuroscientist Simon Baron Cohen said that there is such a thing as male and female brains and that people with autism have an extreme male brain’. I personally think that is a pile of bollocks. Even if you were to prove to me that I do I fact have a male brain what would be the point of me having a sex change? Why can’t society just accept that someone can be female but have no interest in girly things?

So we've gone from:

Gender dysphoria is a crippling MH condition; its sufferers are called "trans"

to

Trans people don't have a crippling MH condition; gender dysphoria is nothing to do with being "trans"

So wtf is "trans" if it's not a person being treated for that particular mental health condition?

Do the TRA actually give a single shiny shite about people with gender dysphoria? Or do they only care about the people with gender dysphoria who also identify as trans?

The straightforward arithmetic says that there are perhaps several thousand people with gender dysphoria, in a meaningful sense according to what it was supposed to mean, and several hundred thousand transgender people without it so I'd say the focus is very much on those who also simply identify as trans for whatever reason.

Looks like the Guardian missed the memo (sorry if it's been posted already)

twitter.com/guardian/status/1309866584735875072

Little Girl Review-tender film about a girl born in a boy's body.

deepwatersolo I missed this report first time round and the content is familiar to anyone on here but it's interesting how close the 5 recommendations of 3 months ago (on p88) are to what the gov has announced. Maybe coming from a Think Tank rather than a women's group made it more palatable to some in power?
www.civitas.org.uk/press/transgender-ideology-leaving-a-corrosive-impact-on-society-new-book-finds-optimism-in-scrapping-of-gender-recognition-reforms/

@yourhairiswinterfire

Looks like the Guardian missed the memo (sorry if it's been posted already)

twitter.com/guardian/status/1309866584735875072

Little Girl Review-tender film about a girl born in a boy's body.

Oh dear oh dear oh dear oh

nauticant your straightforward arithmetic may be missing something - the fact that there are two strands to dysphoria. It's not necessarily about wanting the body of the opposite sex; certainly the old transsexuals' accounts made it clear their issue was an inability to make peace with their maleness.

What's going on with the explosion of trans identities in girls and young women is their disconnection from their being female. The majority don't want male bodies per se, they want bodies that aren't female.

If it's characterised as "wanting the body of the opposite sex" you leave the door open to the less savoury motivations, while excluding all those women and girls developing dissociative disorders who nevertheless don't wish to be male.

If it's characterised as "not wanting the body of this sex" then we're able to analyse what's going on without the gender-euphorics clouding the issue. Because the gender-euphorics clearly do enjoy the body they have.

I read all of this and keep coming back to the question ‘who benefits from a whole swathe of children/young people being emotionally damaged and divorced from their physicality’ and there is no answer I can think of that is remotely positive.

I sincerely hope the NHS puts enough resources into good mental health services to try and offset the damage already done and try to mitigate how much more vulnerable to exploitation those affected will have been made.

“Evie” could be my son. I don’t get why any of those things are gender related

But then I don’t believe in gender stereotypes.

For the record he is very happy in his body whilst enjoying all things sparkly.

The neuroscientist Simon Baron Cohen said that there is such a thing as male and female brains and that people with autism have an extreme male brain’

And the neuroscientist Professor Sophie Scott says there’s almost no difference bin the physiology of brains from either sex.

But you know, she’s a woman and therefore probably a witch. And doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

@ItalianHat

The neuroscientist Simon Baron Cohen said that there is such a thing as male and female brains and that people with autism have an extreme male brain’

And the neuroscientist Professor Sophie Scott says there’s almost no difference bin the physiology of brains from either sex.

I know there is a lot of neuroscientists who agree with her. I agree with her and I am not a neuroscientist.But people were definitely saying there were male brains and female brains and that you can be a man with a female brain and all that associated bollocks so the we never said that brigade are gaslighting.

Benjamin Butterworth was so shocked at Beverley Jackson saying she didn’t believe someone could be born in the wrong body he gasped and cried “bigotry!”

The neuroscientist Simon Baron Cohen said that there is such a thing as male and female brains and that people with autism have an extreme male brain’

I have had some professional contact with Simon Baron Cohen. He is very nice as a person, but he is a total loon as regards his theories. He believes that women are cognitively inferior to men - he wouldn't put it like that, but that is the upshot of his theories about the brain and sex. He is very much an outlier amongst neuroscientists in this regard. It's also worth remembering that he was part of the Wakefield MMR scandal - it is not his fault that Wakefield faked the results, but most scientists were very wary of the Wakefield data for a host of reasons. The fact that Baron Cohen was taken in suggests that he is just not a very good scientist.

Mermaids wrote and deleted within the hour apparently. I am staggered that their "change of heart" might not have been sincere.

twitter.com/SophiaSmith222/status/1310135992586829825

There needs to be an official detailed enquiry into Mermaids to find out:

1. What they were telling parents and children
2. What advice/training they were giving schools, the Police, etc.
3. What they are now advising and what the differences are
4. What qualifications any of them doing the training and handing out advice have to do so
5. The provable basis on which they are basing their claims and advice
6. Why they chose to deliberately misrepresent the Equality Act
7. Who in Government or within the Civil Service signed off on allowing them to offer training to schools and other publicly funded organisations such as the Police and NHS

The whole thing is an unholy mess and needs to be forensically looked into.

I agree, it’s quite hard to find out what exactly their involvement was. They received a grant for schools’ training but are now saying they didn’t train any students. So they were delivering training to teachers then?

Did they train the cps? Cos the cps then did that guidence that teachers had to deliver that told girls that accosting males in the toilet was a hate crime?

Yes Siameasy they trained the teachers not the children directly. Teachers were trained to look for signs children might be trans

Incidentally despite being a children’s charity, mermaids training page makes it clear they go into Companies and train staff on understanding trans issues

So, what happens to the wrong puberty demands if there's no such thing as born in the wrong body?

We do know this claim is a vital cornerstone holding up transgender ideology. Very many non-homosexual males who transition later in life retcon their childhoods to underline their claims to being born in the wrong body, pointing to children suffering from gender dysphoria to legitimise their claims. (Regardless of the fact that almost all children who suffer it desist in the end.)

It's also why the trans community's stance on medical treatment is so incongruous. Children must be transitioned medically and as soon as possible, because this holds up that vital cornerstone, but adults must not be expected to transition medically because the numbers of those comfortable with their sexed bodies far outnumber the transsexuals who are so unhappy with their bodies they do feel the need to transition medically. Children serve an important purpose in aid of the ideology - they legitimise the narratives of late transitioners, they shore up public support, their exclusion from opposite sex provisions is easier to attack as unkind and they make resistance so much more difficult. Because who wants to be accused of being cruel to children by opposing the ideology and its demands.

And in all of that, the need of these vulnerable children to be protected from iatrogenic harm has been ignored. That is the principle that underlies the watchful waiting approach. That there be no avoidable harm to the children suffering from gender dysphoria by medically transitioning the large numbers who would naturally desist.

HPFA - that facebook post from Mermaids is extraordinary, to say the least.