ICO threatens Gender Clinic with court over Mermaids involvement .

[MrsOvertonsWindow]

The Telegraph is reporting that the ICO has threatened GIDs with court action for denying that they have records about their involvement with Mermaids. A courageous parent who was concerned about the inappropriate influence Mermaids had on GIDs issued some FOIs. The Trust claimed that it "did not hold" emails or minutes of meetings .

Mermaids previously accidentally published emails between Susie Green from Mermaids & Tavistock staff that led to the ICO fining Mermaids for a data breach. In the light of this, the ICO doesn't believe the Trust's denials and has ruled that “on the balance of probabilities” they do have relevant emails. It's a criminal offence to hide, alter or delete information requested via an FOI and it looks as if the ICO are prepared to throw the book at them

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/04/30/tavistock-nhs-gender-clinic-threatened-court-action/

I'm wondering how all these admitting and revelations will affect the outcome of the charity commissions statutory investigation 🤔

Admittions not admitting

twitter.com/tribunaltweets/status/1569646282867712001?s=46&t=WHoOZ_3Kv5G6-FyQuvE0LQ

The chair says over and over that they do not give medical advice.

BB - just to be absolutely clear, I am not a medical doctor.
KM - obviously
BB - the Cass Review is not in MM area. We do not do medical stuff, we don't treat

BB - we don't give medical advice, we provide information about the NHS clinical pathway. If that changes we will change our advice.

BB - I reiterate - we do not provide health care advice,

BB - we don't give health care advice, and I would expect that given the difficulty in this area, any charity would be very careful in focusing on this area and would need deep specialism.

so what part of the service specification were mermaids involved in?

This specification sets out the deliverables for a highly specialised service for Gender Identity Development (GID) for children and adolescents up to their 18th birthday and is for individuals who need support around their gender identity.
The service is commissioned to provide specialist assessment, consultation and care for children and young people, including psychological support and physical treatments, to help reduce the distressing feelings of a mismatch between their natal (assigned) sex and their gender identity. The service will also provide support to the family or carers of clients.
The psychological element of the service is a Tier 4 mental health service which will support children and young people to understand their gender identity.
See here for a description of tiers of mental health care: http://www.icptoolkit.org/child_and_adolescent_pathways/about_icps/camh_service_tiers.aspx** Once accepted into the service, individuals are referred to as ‘clients’.

She sat on two advisory panels about research into the provision for children. She drafted questionnaires. She had a hotline to Polly Carmichael, which she is totally upfront about, despite the chair saying they only met once a year.

The decision to deny, deny, deny at the tribunal, doesn't appear to be something that Susie Green is even aware of.

It's hardly surprising that a charity that apparently can't tell a boy from a girl can't tell its arse from its elbow!

I can see why they didn’t put her on the witness stand.

I'd like to know who made the choice of witnesses and why. Surely as CEO Susie absolutely should have been on the witness stand.

It would also be good to know who was involved in making the decision and signing off this expensive and damaging court case.

Presumably CEO might have had a casting vote? Even if it wasn't CEO's bright idea in the first place.

It's a shame she wasn't subpoenaed.

I do wonder how much upper level staff and board members were oblivious to the true extent of how much all of this was pushed/led by one person in their charity?

Maybe they honestly weren't aware of how many pies she had her finger wedged firmly in.

Everything, one way or another, seems to come from one person pushing her world view onto others to justify what she was doing to her child.

@Datun her role at CAB Leeds was rather less grand than "IT consultant". She looked after their IT systems - hardware, licensing, network, backups, helped staff with printer, PC and MS Office problems, that sort of stuff. So she will have had a good general basic knowledge of PCs, Local Area Network and so on. She wasn’t even a manager as claimed in her LinkedIn profile - she had no-one to manage.

It's quite extraordinary.

She genuinely thinks that because she had a charity for 'trans children', that this gives her the expertise to advise about their treatment.

Whereas a lot of people think there is no such thing as a trans child.

Personally, I think it's rather diabolical to go into schools and tell children that they have such a thing as a gender identity, convince them that their clothing and toy choice means it's the wrong one, and then set yourself up as an expert on how to treat them for the distress it causes.

She absolutely needs to be held accountable.

It’s founder syndrome dialled up to 11!

I work within the charity sector and it was very well known outside of mermaids so I can’t see how they wouldn’t have known. Apart from anything SG quite clearly can’t keep anything to themselves so I’m sure she would have been boasting to all & sundry about who she’d been hob nobbing with

and if the trustees didn’t know then they were utterly derelict in their duty.

It is in this capacity as a subject matter expert that I have been invited to represent other parents and their children by various bodies including the Tavistock. As noted above, I also supported WPATH (the World Professional Association of Transgender Health) in their development of the 8th edition of the Standards of Care.
~Susie Green 26/05/23

Fucking hell. She's finally on the record. From her lengthy Mermaids CEO period.

Apart from anything SG quite clearly can’t keep anything to themselves so I’m sure she would have been boasting to all & sundry about who she’d been hob nobbing with

Well she regularly tweeted pictures of herself with Adrian Harrop and the Webberlies.

Ok in her defence (can't believe I'm saying this) being invited to consult with the Tavi isn't so big a problem imho.

What concerns me is how much weight that consultation had on informing policy/treatment - and that's on the Tavi.

As is what consultation the Tavi did with groups who took an opposing view to Mermaids for balance.

Regardless of what she says, her experience does not make her an expert.

Certainly not in any medical sense.

An advocate for affirmative care, but expert no.

I don't imagine the mother of a child with cancer for example would class themselves as an expert in oncology on par with leading experts in the field.

The problem with SG is she thinks she has expertise when instead she has experience that is biased by her own circumstances and a jeopardy of getting it wrong means doubling down is the only option.

As much as we can point at SG, I think my concern is far more directed to Polly Carmichael if it's demonstrated she allowed SG to have undue influence over Tavi protocols and practice.

Sorry to add.

The thing that make me cringe is the ongoing narrative that affirmative care is considered "best practice" globally.

Bit hard to argue that when so many countries are rolling back on this (Uk, Sweden, France, Finland and even some US states).

SG didn't found Mermaids, but she does seem to have been responsible for the very rapid expansion in its activities and income of the last few years and she was the first CEO. Maybe now she's left/been sacked she doesn't care what happens to the charity any more? She's with genius Dr W now, who tweeted in response to the British Cycling decision to restrict the women's category to females only that she couldn't see why we shouldn't just have mixed sex categories for everything. Not the sharpest tool in the box - either of them.

The Tavistock is totally to blame for not being rigorous in keeping their data and studying it. They have totally failed a lot of young patients and their families. To work in a niche field and have absolutely no interest into finding out why teenage female referrals suddenly went up over 5000%, when predominantly your patients had been pre-pubescent boys, is incomprehensible. The limited study they did do shows autistic, looked after children and those suffering from trauma are over represented in their patients - again they take that at face value and don’t seem to look any deeper.

However, these emails from the Tavistock will show how involved Mermaids were in, not only treatment pathways, but also individual cases. How powerful a charity they are - how much they lobby. S Green has admitted now that she did everything she’s accusing LGBA of.

To work in a niche field and have absolutely no interest into finding out why teenage female referrals suddenly went up over 5000%, when predominantly your patients had been pre-pubescent boys, is incomprehensible.

Couldn't agree more. Why on earth didn't this ring alarm bells left, right and centre - in the Royal College of Psychiatrists, ditto GPs, the British Psychological Society, the Department of Health, the Department of Education, social work bodies? Why on earth did they all just nod along and accept this massive social and medical change without asking why it was happening, and what was the evidence base for the new affirmation approach?

“You made Polly cry” was a common rebuke for clinicians attempting to raise concerns.

…Polly who was STILL Director of GIDS last time I looked.

She has experience...because she took the toys away from her probably gay child until he said he was a girl to get them back again.

No one forced GIDS to be involved with lobby groups. No one forced lobby groups to be involved with GIDS. It all needs to be properly dissected with the facts made public, and then whatever is appropriate needs to happen next: sanctions, sackings, criminal charges, or nothing, whatever is found or not found needs the appropriate response.

People who outsourced their critical thinking to stonewall after the release of the Nolan podcast deserve to be sacked.
And, possibly, jailed.

He might have realised he was gay as he went through puberty. He might also have just been a toddler who liked dolls and had no interest in rugby or whatever stereotypically male stuff his Dad and Mum expected their firstborn to be interested in, purely because he was male. He wasn't given the chance to come to terms with any of that. So many of these little boys must hear from a very early age 'Put that down! That's a girl's toy. What are you, a CISSY?' To a toddler still trying to make sense of the world, I can well believe that a logical response to this is 'I like the dolls. Only girls are supposed to like dolls. I wish I was a girl. Maybe I am a girl really ...' Now, for some reason, when toddlers announce that they are cats or dinosaurs, nobody takes that seriously. When a toddler says 'I am a girl, really I am, now can I play with the doll?' suddenly it's off to the gender clinic. Poor wee mites.

Now, for some reason, when toddlers announce that they are cats or dinosaurs, nobody takes that seriously. When a toddler says 'I am a girl, really I am, now can I play with the doll?' suddenly it's off to the gender clinic. Poor wee mites.

Sexism.

Boys demean themselves by playing with girls toys. And girls aren't fulfilling their patriarchal role if they 'act like a boy'.

it's not natural, innit.