From Biggs:
"A crucial role was played by organizations that campaign for the transgendering of children: the Gender Identity Research and Education Society (GIRES) and Mermaids. GIRES organized a symposium in London in 2005 to develop “guidelines for endocrinological intervention”. Additional funding came from Mermaids, two medical charities—Nuffield Foundation and King’s Fund—and the Servite Sisters Charitable Trust Fund. This brought together the creators of the Dutch protocol, American clinicians like Norman Spack in Boston, and key British figures such as Domenico Di Ceglie, the Director of GIDS, and Polly Carmichael and Russell Viner, both at Great Ormond Street Hospital. (The latter two would lead the 2011 experiment.)
Some of the participants vigorously lobbied for the Dutch protocol. Veronica Sharp from Mermaids “described users’ and parents’ views of the available treatments, and the anguish they may experience when hormone blocking is delayed” (GIRES 2005). The symposium ended with agreement to push for amendments to guidance from bodies like BSPED, and to conduct collaborative research between London, Amsterdam, and Boston. There was another meeting in Amsterdam in the following year, but the collaboration did not eventuate.
International developments did enable parents to circumvent the NHS. GIRES (2006) warned that “those who can in any way afford to do so have to consider taking their children to the USA”. The first was Susie Green, who later became the chief executive of Mermaids. In 2007 she took her son Jackie, aged 12, to Boston, to purchase a prescription for GnRHa from Spack; the drug was supplied by an online Canadian pharmacy (Sun, 19 October 2011). A presentation at Mermaids, presumably by Green, instructed parents in this medical tourism (Mermaids 2007). Spack treated a further seven British children over the next few years (Times, 22 January 2012).
By 2008, GIRES was more strident in criticizing British clinicians. One of its founders, Terry Reed, denounced them as “transphobic”:
They are hoping that during puberty the natural hormones themselves will act on the brain to ‘cure’ these trans teenagers. What we do know is what happens if you don’t offer hormone blockers. You are stuck with unwanted secondary sex characteristics in the long term and in the short term these teenagers end up suicidal. (Guardian, 14 August 2008)
Reed was clearly drawing on the experience of her own child, who transitioned two decades before."