Change of CEO at mermaids…

[backaftera2yearbreak]

mermaidsuk.org.uk/news/susie-green-leaves-mermaids/

Yes.

Well well well.

This is all extremely interesting and I am positively itching to know what went on behind the scenes, because I can only imagine it’s been a bloodbath. No way Susie walked without an extremely compelling reason, or list of reasons because this has been her entire life’s work.

I’ve watched Mermaids and Susie over the years as they have driven themselves further and further into extremism and I’ve long predicted that they’d run out of road sooner or later. I hope they have now.

I’m curious about whether the true believers will fight for Susie, or if they will be happy to get her under that bus while they career ever onwards towards…wherever it is that they’re going. I suspect the latter, which is going to hurt- Susie will count on a great many people as being her friends and allies in this, and I suspect will be disappointed in the level of loyalty she gets.

What I would like to see now is Mermaids reversing to pre 2015 Mermaids, which advocated watchful waiting and meaningful support to children suffering distress about their gender. I think it will be very revealing of what the proportion is within the organisation of genuine clients versus activists- are people involved because they want support for their kids, or are they on a political crusade? If the former prevail, and I really hope they do, then they absolutely must use this as an opportunity to draw a line, get the organisation on a sound, professional footing with all the safeguarding and operational issues ironed out, and face the future as completely different outfit from the personal crusade Green had made it.

If the latter are in the ascendant, I think what we will see is an explosion of outrage (“transphobes and fascists have ruined our beautiful organisation because they want OUR KIDS DEAD”), followed by more doubling down, a change of trustees, more resignations, a series of scandals and Mermaids ceasing to exist as it explodes in acrimony and ignominy.

To be more constructive, if there are parents of gender confused youth reading here, would Bayswater provide a suitable alternative for support? Genspect? Transgender Trend? I’m not completely up to date, but it would perhaps be helpful.

Susie Green as a scapegoat is hard to pin on her completely.

Susie Green went on tv about her own family and had a drama made about her.

That means an awful lot of people bought into the idea and didn't see a problem with the homophobic crap Susie Green peddled. Really? Is that going to work? If any of the possible issues speculated about on this thread play out how does that stand up? "Oh we were fooled by Susie Green" doesn't really stand up to scrutiny anymore than Susie Green saying she couldn't possibly vet Breslow.

If Susie Green is a scapegoat then there's a lot of very willfully blind people around her who still end up with egg on faces.

The phrase "Better to have a living daughter than a dead son." is largely modelled on the experience of Susie Green. If Susie Green goes, what happens to that? This is the problem in the uk. Susie Green is so integral to how the movement and transitioning of children has played out. Her influence and leadership of Mermaids isn't insignificant.

I find it hard to believe that it's purely a damage limitation exercise after all these incidents when they've stood by Green for so long. Green has gone because even Mermaids could no longer stand by Green. Their hand was forced somehow imo. Others are getting scared by the liability issues. That's way bigger than Susie Green and the buck doesn't stop with her.

The retrospective look into why Susie Green was so fawned over is not pretty. The scent of conversion hangs in the air like an Iranian ghost. And the LGB Alliance are unlikely to merely let that one drop. Especially if the legals start to line up in the LGB Alliance's favour.

Susie Green made a point of telling parents to bypass safeguarding. Mermaids then signposted to others who did the same. No one said anything and Susie Green was glorified for doing so. Those who glorified Green are going to reverse ferret pretty quick if it heads south, but I do think the storm is bigger than that because of how public Green was and how personal a mission Mermaids became.

Susie Green was a lynch pin who others built the house of cards around. The mantras centre on Green. Take out Green and bigger questions start to be asked about how a single woman became so influential so quickly without someone asking the right questions. The word cult has to crop up at some point as does the point about a culture of silencing and fear. Green did not have the power alone to create that...

I'm tempted to contact my MP (Sobel, he of the "women shouldn't have single-sex prisons or hospital wards") to see what he thinks now.

Susie will count on a great many people as being her friends and allies in this, and I suspect will be disappointed in the level of loyalty she gets

Thats going to get interesting. A woman so determined and anti authority to take her kid abroad does not strike me as one to go quietly if she feels betrayed.

It would not surprise me if she lashed out at others somehow. Unless this turns out to be rooted closer to home.

Susie Green could only go as far as she did if there is a much more widespread homophobic landscape just below the surface than we'd like to admit to.

Thats ultimately the elephant in the room for Mermaids. It promoted conversion and turned a blind eye to childhood trauma and lack of ability of children to comprehend complex feelings that left them vulnerable.

I think the word kindness needs to be thrown out completely as a word to aspire to. It should be replaced with the word 'appropriate'.

I hope people are treated appropriately for their situation. I hope they are appropriately supported. I hope they are appropriately advised.

The implications of the change in a single word are significant. It changes the underlying wisdom.

Mermaids have a massive issue with its allies in this context. It has to move on from all the mantras and social media silencing campaigns. The scandals engulfing it aren't helped by their hangers on. If parents and children are caught in the middle of a war between an incoming new regime at Mermaids and activists who hate the new ethos it's going to be messy too. Especially if legal issues arise.

Its worth pointing out the degree to which certain politicians and political parties have got themselves into this mess too - and how far removed their position actually is from public opinion (which will shift even more away from party lines if we do indeed have a full blown scandal in which the gay trojan horse is lit up like a bonfire).

I'm not entirely sure how TWAW survives contact with reality and how politicians who uttered it, manage to continue to defend it.

Great post RedToothBrush
‘Appropriately* is the perfect word.

I can't find this Guardian interview anywhere, does anyone have a link?

The Telegraph:

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/11/26/mermaids-chief-susie-green-steps-six-years/

It's the byline that does it:

"Chief executive of Mermaids, Susie Green, has left the transgender children’s charity after six years that have included public scrutiny"

Then this is the second paragraph:

"Announcing the decision, the charity thanked Ms Green for “building Mermaids into the organisation it is today”."

These two points bear repeating - there has been public scrutiny of Mermaids and it's not just been recent. Green has changed the organisation into what it is today. This captures what many of us have been saying - look into this, don't take it as read that all is well, and (now) don't assume it'll be different.

After setting out their own recent investigation, the article goes on:

"In recent months, the charity has also found itself under intense public scrutiny for other controversies.

One of which was the charity's decision to launch an appeal against the Charity Commission’s awarding of charitable status to LGB Alliance, which has been critical of “gender ideology’’.
The case is understood to be the first time one charity has tried to strip the legal status away from another.
Founded in 1995 and headquartered in Leeds, with an office in London, Mermaids has about 44 staff members and 110 volunteers.
Prior to her appointment as CEO in 2016, Ms Green worked as an IT manager for Citizens Advice from 2002 to 2015.
Ms Green has previously spoken about taking her child to the US in 2017 for puberty blockers when they were aged 12, oestrogen aged 13, and to Thailand for surgery on their sixteenth birthday."

There is a quote from the Charity Commission:

"Reacting to the news Ms Green had stepped down, a Charity Commission spokeswoman said: “Mermaids’ trustees have informed us today about the departure of the charity’s CEO. The charity remains subject to a compliance case.”"

This one, I think, @bloomtoperish. www.theguardian.com/society/2022/nov/17/mermaids-why-has-the-trans-charity-been-in-the-news

Much as I despise SG, Mermaids are having a giraffe, if they think they can get away with scape-goating her, then moving on. She was very, very vocal about what she was doing. There's no way the Board can pretend they didn't know.

Ms Green has previously spoken about taking her child to the US in 2017 for puberty blockers when they were aged 12, oestrogen aged 13, and to Thailand for surgery on their sixteenth birthday.

Interesting use of pronouns. I don't think I've seen this before in a UK paper.

It was Dr. Spack of Boston Children’s Hospital who’s medical pathway that Susie Green followed for her son - puberty blockers at 13, cross sex hormones at 14 and then surgery at 16.
It is his pathway that she went on to evangelise and embed in the UK medical establishment.
I hope the pushback against her discredits him as well.

In SG's case the phrase better to have a living daughter... is an emotional manipulation which is totally inaccurate. She spelled out very very clearly in that TED talk that for her husband and her, it was better to have a transdaughter than a gay son. It's not even implied, she appears to have no awareness of how she is implicating herself. In light of the laws on FGM I truly am amazed that her actions have not been investigated. Let's hope that changes.

Mermaids problem is well surmised by Sarah Ditum's comment in response to this Guardian Article

www.theguardian.com/society/2022/nov/25/head-of-trans-children-charity-mermaids-resigns-after-six-years?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Sarah Ditum at SarahDitum
Hard to tell from this article why Susie Green has left Mermaids, because there is just an embarrassment of possible reasons. And it doesn't even mention the charity's association with a struck-off doctor, or medically transitioning her underage child

This isn't going to be able to be confined to Susie Green. The problem runs so deep and throughout everything to do with Mermaids and everything it's touched and influenced because of how many people enabled it.

Hopefully Mermaids will fall - and quickly. The extreme safeguarding scandals cannot continue without consequences. What also needs exposure is the extent of government complicity via funding and policy that pushes schools, children's services & health in the direction of all these self invested lobby groups - Stonewall, Gendered Intelligence, GIRES, Global Butterflies etc. Millions of £ of taxpayers money diverted to fund these organisations trying to transition children via dubious means.

What I would like to see now is Mermaids reversing to pre 2015 Mermaids, which advocated watchful waiting and meaningful support to children suffering distress about their gender.

I can't imagine how this would work. Presumably everyone who works for that organisation is a full-on (children-know-who-they-are) trans activist. There have been no whistle-blowers afaik. Wouldn't a more reasonable CEO just be perceived as a TERF not only by staff but also by the "community" as a whole?

The trouble is that FGM laws apply to girls, not boys. Extraordinary as it may seem, it appears not to be illegal to take your son abroad to have his genitals removed.

Kucinghitam please try and get an answer from Alex Sobel…so far no replies that have in any way answered any questions.

I'd like to think so too, but I don't expect it. I would think a lot of the doctors and psychologists who've been heavily involved in this will move on to something else or retire. Their patients and families have probably signed all sorts of stuff that can now be produced to say they gave 'informed consent' and so there is no legal liability.

Waking up to this news and I reminded of this.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8931847/Kids-Company-founder-tells-court-neurological-condition-means-avoided-director-charity.html

The media who spun the lies (I'm looking at you The Guardian, this won't absolve your of responsibility now), the celebrities and politicians with their unfailing support and promotion, the donations (just a few weeks ago Stacey Dooley and Kevin Clift donated their game show winnings to Mermaids) the multiple lies and abuse from Mermaids (of trust, of children, of parents seeking help), let none of it be forgotten. None of it.

I suspect the funding is what will do it for Mermaids, in particular the Lottery. But the issue goes much deeper, they've only ever been one quite small part of the racket.

The trouble is that FGM laws apply to girls, not boys. Extraordinary as it may seem, it appears not to be illegal to take your son abroad to have his genitals removed

It may not be a specific criminal offence, but it's most certainly unlawful to remove a child's healthy body parts, whatever their sex.

In practice, it would have been difficult to prosecute SG, as the child was 16 (generally considered to have capacity to consent to medical procedures) and because it happened abroad. But it's still extraordinary that SG got away with boasting publicly about it.

But it's still extraordinary that SG got away with boasting publicly about it.

Perhaps just a lacuna? Nobody had thought to specifically legislate for the removal of 16 year old male children's genitals because there hadn't seemed any need before then.

I think it is important to note that the only way Mermaids was able to grow into the leviathan it did was because the key figure in the charity was a middle-aged mother.

Had the front face of Mermaids been anyone else, the strangeness of the message would have been noticed far earlier. No one would have accepted a middle-aged father arguing for this level of psychosexual medical and surgical intervention in children. He would have been shut down from the off. Likewise, anyone without children would not have worked, nor anyone younger.

It had to be a middle-aged mother with a trans child. That's the only figure with enough societal preconceptual armour to be able to slip past the glaringly obvious safe guarding and grooming issues.

And this is the problem for Mermaids. Because of the nature of the subject, it only works if the key voices are non-trans parents.