This guy was lecturing on children having sexual desire and adults desiring children. Ability / lawfulness of the concept of consent is strangely absent.
He is then advocating about how children should be free to do what they want because they know their own minds better than their parents and, if parents are at odds with them, thinks children should go and do these things behind their backs anyway with Mermaids helping enable this.
This is in the context of it being found that a Mermaids forum moderator was telling children to meet up on discord (sharing personal contact details without warning) away from Mermaids, as long as they didn't mention mermaids (to remove responsibility and liability from mermaids). Discord is already regarded as a particularly unsafe environment for children to the point that safeguarding warnings about the level of grooming and fostering abuse on the platform have been raised.
As a trustee, this guy has oversight on safeguarding, yet his personal opinion is that barriers which enable safeguarding should not be applicable to children identifying as trans. He has ideas about consent which are deeply worrying. And it looks as if the charity have been failing to meet basic standards and expectations on safeguarding - because they don't match the charities ideological beliefs - for sometime.
It is like there has been a marriage between the charity and private individuals who have common ground over lower or non exist ant standards of safeguarding because they 'have a difference of opinion' on what safeguarding is to the rest of the country and the law.
Except this is an area you can't have a difference of opinion. Safeguarding isn't optional. If you don't do it, it opens up kids to abuse.
This is the entire point. There is an institutional level of absence of safeguarding going on. Its attracting people who don't like safeguarding. People who don't like safeguarding will have pretty nefarious and self serving reasons to hold that opinion. None of which centre on the best interests and well being of the children concerned.
Over and over again ideology, the reputation of the institution and the attitude and agenda of the staff is put before children. The job of the trustees is to centre on the children's safety first, because if they haven't got that they cant do anything else as they are at risk.
We should not need to spell this out. Whatabouttery on responsibility for safeguarding is unacceptable on every level. You safeguard FIRST and then review whether your steps have been fair and proportionate because your first duty is to prevent harm.
At no point do Mermaids have a proper, public discussion on the concept of consent because the underlying belief is that all children from the age of 0 upwards have the capacity to express themselves fully as much as any adult. And people are surprised when this is getting the attention of people with a pro-paedo agenda?
Give over. That's just ignorant willful blindness to a level that's not believable. People know. But it doesn't suit their own adult moral agenda. It's an inconvenient truth that gets in the way of them signalling their virtue on inclusivity.
Fuck off should the single and only response to trying to normalise or sanitise this and make safeguarding as optional into a debate.