Mermaids training hospital staff!

[nothingcomestonothing]

I work in a large NHS hospital. I've just seen our all-staff email bulletin, advertising this:

LGBT+ inclusive diversity sessions :Staff involved in the education of non-medical staff are invited to attend a gender identity and gender diversity training course delivered by Mermaids. We have many people who we interact with daily who consider themselves to be on the trans/non-binary spectrum and it is important that we are able to adapt our teaching to be as inclusive and diverse as our workforce and our Trust aims around equality, diversity and inclusion.

Can anyone give me some quick links to explain why Mermaids are not an appropriate source for this training please? I can't search stuff up easily at work.

Mermaids are a children's gender charity. Is this paediatrics?

Send them details of how they interact with kids (there was some seriously dodgy advice by an online ‘advisers’ that a mum
Posted online).

They purely affirm, and have moved away from their early ‘wait and watch’ mentality.

They lobby, they misrepresent, they are not good faith players.

Is someone going to cross check:

• the advice with actual law,
• the Equality Act and how their advice works in balance with the other 8 protected characteristics,
• the exact qualifications of the speaker to advise on policy and practice in a hospital, and on policy that impacts other people as well as TQ+ people
• the compatibility with safeguarding practice and policy
• and when is the training from FPFW providing the impacts and issues for women and women's rights? These being 50% of patients.
• Issues of hospital staff showing a specific political alliance when they have a duty of impartiality and equality to ALL patients

Go, and record it.

Yep. Attend and record it. Then we can raise merry hell over the inevitable lies and untruths that they will have told.

Thanks all, I'm composing an email to the director with responsibility for learning and development - who helpfully is also the director with responsibility for equality, diversity and inclusion . The only contact given in the course info is a radiographer, who knows how he/she/they come into this remit. What worries me the most is that this is a course for those responsible for training others, so Mermaids agenda gets cascaded down to way more than the attendees.

Unfortunately I can't attend the training as a) my manager is all too aware of how I feel about gender ideology and would know I had motives and b) it's already full .

Was suggesting going and a record so you can belatedly challenge it with facts and there's no get-out for the hospital. Will any of this be circulated another way? If so, use that to do a fact-check.

If you want a copy of the complaint I sent to the Charities Commission re the Mermaids Youth Forum, send me a DM with your email address. It covers a lot of frightening medical discussion which I suspect would put any hospital off using Mermaids.

The Cass interim report is illuminating about these sorts of practices.

rogdmum I've messaged you, thanks.

I'm also going to attach the SSA letter re Mermaids - it's addressed to schools but has plenty of examples of their flawed training - and the Interim Cass report too, thanks for that idea

Does anyone remember the teacher "training" they delivered?

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3454658-recording-of-mermaids-training

As a PP said, some of the stuff in the interim Cass report could be useful here - what the report sees as having a strong evidence base Vs what Mermaids say.

May be worth approaching it on a reputational / litigation risk if people act on this training?

Thanks all, I'm pulling my thoughts together to email tomorrow. I hope it makes a difference - the hospital seems so hopelessly captured.

@nothingcomestonothing

Thanks all, I'm pulling my thoughts together to email tomorrow. I hope it makes a difference - the hospital seems so hopelessly captured.

Even if they ignore your letter/email, it will be on record. I left an utterly captured organisation a while ago but copied my correspondence with senior managers over several years to a colleague who was part of group planning to fight on from within. It upends any claim of plausible deniability when the shit inevitably hits the fan. Make sure you BCC a copy to a non-work email address in case you ever need to fall back on it.

It isn’t truly captured as long as there is a resistance

It's done, I'm a bit scared now but I couldn't do nothing. I'll update if/when I get a response (hopefully not a disciplinary!). Thanks vipers

Well done OP, that's genuinely brave and stunning. I think the interim Cass report provides a lot of support to challenge the excesses of gender identity ideology in a healthcare setting.

I think of no one says anything or puts up a challenge it’s just going to trundle on as is. The person signing this off won’t be bothered to do their own research and will take the word of whoever has been charged/volunteered to set it up (and how many of these have an agenda?)

In the light of this gaslighting cover up I wouldn't want an gender ideological organisation like Mermaids anywhere near training hospital staff.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4507790-Hospital-told-police-patient-not-raped-because-attacker-transgender