So that's why Susie Green left

[DistantVworp]

Charity commission launches formal inquiry into Mermaids:
twitter.com/SexMattersOrg/status/1598666394610147329?s=20&t=x_Supvwk6lHkKBR7a-ESSw

About bloody time!

Yes mermaids commissioned an EDI report from a Stonewall adjacent company who look for racism. As mermaids is very white (unsurprisingly given how vastly over represented middle class kids are in trans identifying young people), I think they got a big ticking off for not being ethnically diverse.

For a group of people who pride themselves on wokery, I can imagine this is a multiple support dog situation. Perhaps they couldn't all fit into a single gender neutral toilet to read the report.

I'm confused....

What sort of "safe space" was required to read such a report?

Does that imply that the staff themselves will find the contents upsetting?

As per posts above though, if MM commissioned this directly, there is no obligation for them to publish it.

What is interesting given the timeline is that it's probable the report was commissioned to alleviate the concerns of the charity commission and clearly (despite the carefully chosen authors) failed to do so.

I am also drawn to the fact that these whistleblowers are extremely vested in their own well-being and self interest yet have nothing to say about the impact on their service users.

This links back to conversation earlier in the thread about charities engaging staff directly impacted/bought into the cause yet without any professional experience or qualifications relevant to the subject matter.

The lack of focus on the very people it is the charities stated mandate to support is actually very chilling.

Rather staff being "very upset and outraged that our well-being is being used as an excuse to bury the report", they should be expressing deep concern for their service users that the issues raised in it are not being dealt with openly and transparently.

Mermaids staff are going to The Telegraph^^ of all places to say their piece? Literally does not compute. The plot really does thicken.

Indeed! It just gets more batshit by the day.

All good points Bread, and with all that in mind it's still incredibly curious why anyone there would have gone to the Telegraph, though.

Citing media reports and an “unacceptable risk” to the authors, Mat Maddocks, a Mermaids trustee, wrote in the email that “our first priority is the well-being of our staff and given these events it isn’t possible to create the safe spaces for processing the report that are vital”.

Safe spaces for processing the report and unacceptable risk to the authors suggest it’s not exactly about protecting the mermaids staff from being upset.

‘the well-being of our staff’ could well be an awareness that the culture within mermaids is such that they will react poorly and do stupid things because they blame the authors (for not being trans and not ‘getting it’). It may be that the report itself explains this risk in detail.

All speculation. But what we know indicates it won’t be pretty.

i wonder if the consultants picked up on dubious trans race related leanings, tbh. Or just oppression olympics stuff that utterly dismisses racism. And the obvious fact that this is a group who do not respond we to feedback that is not very enthusiastically affirmative. So many possibilities for what kinds of information it’s impossible to create a space where the mermaids staff will listen, hear and think reasonably about those kinds of findings.

@WolverineBlueyy Id hazard a guess that the thought process could have hand something like this:

1. the telegraph is awful and out to get us
2. its all susie’s fault.
3. The telegraph have it in for susie personally. That’s why they’re saying bad things about mermaids
4. they need to know that we think she’s crap too now. She’s not trans.
5. we want to take down susie
6. they’ll help us tell the world how awful she is
7. then people will stop criticising mermaids.

With a side helping of never having read the telegraph at all. Never mind it’s mermaids coverage.

I wonder if a journalist reached out to penis art bloke. Perhaps money changed hands and/or introductions were made?

Can't wait for the report to leak. With all the infighting it won't be long.

Doubt we will see it if it's only in the hands of the trustees.

They have too much liability to leak it.

My guess is IF they have used the report in some capacity to respond to the charity commission, the output of that investigation will shed light on the issues raised.

I disagree.

The language suggests to me that the staff are a significant issue of concern.

No necessarily through fault of their own perhaps, but lacking in experience/training/safeguarding/lack of process/procedures/vetting/being mid-managed etc

The comment reads to me as if the trustees fear the staff reaction. That can't be just because the report says SG was a crap CEO and without her everything and everyone is just dandy.

If SG was as hands off as has been implied by the job description for her replacement re: a wholesale review of management/process/procedures and practice then it's not surprising that MM staff might have been operating "sub optimally" (yes I'm being careful) for some time, with a level of autonomy and influence over day to day engagement with service users that when reviewed could make very hard reading indeed.

" On a side note, when scrolling through the Switch Black Friday offers one game was « Hentai fun » or something like that, had hentai in the title, with a little anime picture. Looked fun and was dirt cheap ( like £2), and I really worry that the unsuspecting could end up letting kids buy it. The info line was « easy to play one-handed » 🤢 just hanging out in a list with Lego Marvel and Kirby… "

And to think it's not that many years since someone was put on the sex offenders register for downloading hentai!
How times change!

A wee boy of 2 has just killed himself in North Carolina with his father’s gun. They’ve actually laws on how you’re to store your gun, so he’s facing charges, which many adults who negligence leads to a child (in the 11-14 age group almost 40% of accidental shootings happen at a friend’s home) dying do not. Presumably a lot of such deaths in the 5-11 category - most, even - would be recorded as accidental deaths rather than suicide though…

This 2017 paper from the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine discusses the Prevention of Pediatric Pharmaceutical Poisonings - something that was on the rise in the US at the time of writing & publication (I’ve not checked current stats). Again, doubtless some will be ruled accidental, but…

Presumably those very tragic deaths recorded as suicide were of children already known to have mental health problems; & possibly they’d even expressed suicidal thoughts previously.

Good to know who was involved in Girlguiding’s carpet-brushing exercise in… 2020, I think it was? After asking the Membership if they’d experienced any form of discrimination they were of course flooded with responses (& that was the people who’d not been driven away by it, obviously) - they interviewed a handful of volunteers further & published a rubbish apology that made it quite clear they didn’t want to hear any more about it. Centred apologising to those who’d (allegedly 🤨) experienced transphobia over the volunteers who’d been brave enough to come forwards about decades of ableism, ageism, classism, racism, religious discrimination, sectarianism (which they rolled up with the former, obviously), & sexism [at joint events with the Scouts].

@mirah2

I don't know if it is the same now but it used to be the norm for babies in Hong Kong used to be given a Chinese and an English name.

Names can be a powerful thing, and they do reflect culture and values.

I'm reading the post dealing more directly with the issue, not ready to vcomment on those yet.

The language suggests to me that the staff are a significant issue of concern.

No necessarily through fault of their own perhaps, but lacking in experience/training/safeguarding/lack of process/procedures/vetting/being mid-managed etc

I think I was trying to say something similar.

The issue is both that the staff are a problem (raised in the report) and the trustees realise they are going to react very poorly to any criticism. The wording suggests the problem is ‘processing’ (which likely means reading it, thinking about the findings and not going on twitter making death threats and trying to incite hatred against the authors).

The staff probably imagine it was all susie’s doing and can’t imagine that their behaviour attitudes and the values embedded within the organisation might be a problem. The organisation culture likely recruits from particular groups and then fails to train them appropriately. Or encourages a widespread dismissal of safeguarding concerns or EDI issues that aren’t related to gender identity.

There are so many things the SJC might have found.

I don’t think they are worried about staff reaction at all. I think that following Friday’s report in the Telegraph, they know they have a whistleblower so if they release the report to staff, it will get leaked to the Telegraph. The safe space stuff is just their convenient bog standard language they use to hide behind anything.

The hypocrisy of insinuating the staff is not sufficiently robust enough to process the report and concerns are about their safe guarding - what about the bloody children this organization has been merrily advising and mentoring down the path to surgery and all the rest of it. Heads should roll.

Actually I'm not sure I mean hypocrisy, I'm struggling for words here. The contrast between the concern for the shit staff they've recruited and the poor children and adolescents they've been 'advising'. Grrrr.

If they’re not worried about the staff, that’s probably yet more evidence that the trustees are unfit to be trustees.

Let’s face it, they should be worried about the staff of an organisation that has been doing the things we already know mermaids has.

TheYummyPatler true. But I am just so cross that an organisation has been so badly run with poor structure, inadequate staff bonkers strategy and the very real effects this has had on children. Life altering in some cases. It's hard to feel anything for anyone associated with the organisation. They've all had a hand in this. They all need to face the blinkin' music.

They should be considering that they have been recruiting staff who will put transitioning above all else (and affirmation for all that entails, including the use of drugs and devices that cause bodily damage).

And who view anything but enthusiastic affirmation as ‘literal violence’ that causes suicide. They must know the organisation culture further encourages this thinking - with potentially dreadful effects for the children and young people they purport to help.

They should be concerned for and about their staff.

I think anger is the right response.

I do think mermaids has probably let the staff down alongside everyone else. It’s just another layer of dangerous incompetence within the organisation. Not the worst part of the mermaids story, but still not good at all.

I agree.

They have created a zealot culture in that affirming only treatment should be pushed. Not hiring staff that are nuetral and not personally invested as well is dangerous because it creates the issues that we have seen. The zealous pursuit of one treatment path and the actions that are very poor safeguarding.

Their chair gave false evidence in the Charity Commission court case so either deliberately lied or is too disconnected to know.

God it’s the shitshow that never stops giving isn’t it?? No safe space? Surely they can just get a drag queen in to read it to them or something? I’m sure stonewall can lead them some support badgers to help.

In all seriousness I imagine the trustees are terrified they will find the organisation up for multiple claims of discrimination from the staff and expend huge amounts of time, energy and money trying (and potentially failing) to defend themselves. It seems to be a hugely toxic mix of staff who don’t understand the difference between an organisation that exists to support young trans people as a whole and an organisation that exists to support them personally as a young trans person. Throw in the fact that they’ve always seen themselves as atop the oppression Olympics pyramid as the most special and most deserving and I suspect the SJC have now challenged that and that the whole organisation seems to have no ability to reflect or learn and it’s all a total bonfire

no wonder most trustees didn’t stay long. Most people with any nous could see what a shit show it was.

and so the eternal question remains. How was this deeply dysfunctional organisation led by someone with next to no CEO experience able to garner so much reach, influence, and money?? I know many charities operating around deeply unfashionable causes work incredibly good CEOs who would kill to have got even a tenth of the meetings with ministers or private sector sponsorship mermaids got

t's still incredibly curious why anyone there would have gone to the Telegraph, though.

Maybe it’s just because they’re all posh and privileged and it’s the only paper they know!?

How was this deeply dysfunctional organisation led by someone with next to no CEO experience able to garner so much reach, influence, and money??

I think the answer to that is just because so many politicians and organisations are desperate to show how right-on and inclusive they are and prioritise that above coherent critical thought. And the motivation for that is entirely selfish. It’s about looking good and woke-washing and latching on to the trendy cause of the day. Not actually caring about inclusivity - or they would care about the harms to other groups.