Mermaids: What you need to know

The UK charity Mermaids has been hitting headlines recently, particularly after an MP called for a police investigation into the charity, but the vast majority of people are unaware of the charity’s history, the scandals in which it has been involved and the influence it has had.

Mermaids is probably the world's biggest organisation devoted solely to ‘supporting’ children who are confused about their gender. The charity was established in 1995 simply as a support group and helpline for parents of children who suffered from gender dysphoria. In its formative years, it seemed untouched by gender ideology - for example, it stated on its website as recently as 2009 that most children who believe they are transgender will grow out of it and become gay adults.

One of the parents who contacted Mermaids in its early years was an IT consultant from Leeds named Susie Green. Green had an infant son whose gender-nonconformity was creating tension within the family.

Motivated by like-minded parents, Green decided that the child was actually a girl. The boy was encouraged to wear girls' clothing and changed his name from Jack to Jackie, which Green claimed led to positive results. In 2007, aged 12, the boy was taken to the USA to purchase a prescription of puberty blockers. A year later he was placed on cross-sex hormones. In 2011, for the boy's 16th birthday, Green took him to Thailand to have his penis cut and remoulded to resemble female genitalia (a procedure that is now illegal there). At about the same time as the Thailand trip, Green became a trustee of Mermaids and its chair. In 2016, she became its CEO.

Green gave a TED talk in 2017 outlining much of the above - here it is with analysis from women's rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen. There is also the infamous BBC documentary in which she laughed about the size of her son’s hormone-withered penis before the operation.

Today, Mermaids is a completely different organisation from what was originally established. It has developed into an influential ‘LGBTQ+ charity’ which, its website now claims, “supports transgender, non-binary and gender-diverse children and young people until their 20th birthday, as well as their families and professionals involved in their care.” It does this via an affirmation model that tells children they are, when it comes to gender (but only gender), whatever they say they are. 

Mermaids also works to ‘make change’ in government policy, aiming to alter the law to enable people who identify as transgender to change their legal gender immediately, by self-declaration alone, rather than through a process involving doctors and therapists. Its recommendations to the government have included; the right of children to take legal action, without parental consent, against schools which do not refer to them by their chosen names and pronouns; the provision of ‘cross sex’ hormones for children under 16; and the fast-tracking of appointments and physical interventions for pubescent young people.

There is no evidence base for these goals. It is impossible to change sex, and there is no proof that transgenderism is a real condition and not just a manifestation of mental distress. There is long-term evidence that shows that the physical transitioning of a person causes mental and physical harm. Mermaids is led by a woman who drugged and then mutilated her child because she and her husband worried he might be gay. Yet rather than reject this homophobia, Mermaids has been supported by just about every single cultural institution that deals with children, making it a powerful lobby group.

Some of the charity’s funding has come from the UK government’s Department for Education, which in turn resulted in Mermaids running training sessions for schools. After receiving this training, one school sent a parent a letter informing her that her child had changed sex. Another parent noted a sharp rise in pupils at her child’s school identifying as transgender. Secret recordings of the sessions have revealed incorrect advice, particularly surrounding the safety and reversibility of puberty blockers. Astonishingly, the publisher of a pre-university law exam textbook agreed to censor a section on a freedom of speech ruling because Mermaids said it was offensive.

Other sources of revenue have come from well-publicised donations. Some of the biggest public-facing companies that operate in Britain, such as Tesco, Amazon and Wagamama, have given money, while the UK’s National Lottery has granted the charity half a million pounds at a time when respite centres for children with special needs were going bust. Even nurseries for toddlers have been fundraising for the charity.

Other charities for vulnerable children, such as the NSPCC, Childline, Prince’s Trust and the National Autistic Society have all signposted to Mermaids.

The UK's health service, the NHS, had a close working relationship with Mermaids since at least 2010, when it introduced puberty blockers to treat children following lobbying by the charity, while Public Health England has also recommended the organisation.

Like many workplaces, the UK’s police force has also received training from the charity. In one of these training sessions, an image of a slide was shared online, leading to ridicule, as it stated that gender identity is a spectrum from Barbie to GI Joe, with women wearing caps and effeminate men in the middle.

Inevitably, given this institutional capture, the police began to target Green’s critics. In 2018 the aforementioned Kellie-Jay Keen was questioned by officers who’d travelled 250 miles, at Green’s request, to ask her about referring to the Thailand surgery as ‘castration’ on Twitter. Broadcaster Caroline Farrow was also interviewed under caution for tweeting about Green.

With the exception of a small number of newspapers, the mainstream media in the UK has been uncritically supportive of Mermaids. The BBC initially provided links to the charity on its website and ran stories that were little more than PR. Television network ITV produced a gushing drama showcasing Susie Green’s life. When Mermaids contacted it over a story of a person regretting their gender surgery, Sky News changed the article to include the unevidenced claim that “most gender reassignment surgeries are positive”.

Support for Mermaids has come from famous individuals as well as organisations. Numerous celebrities, from Eddie Redmayne to Jameela Jamil have promoted the charity, while politicians from members of the UK parliament to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have tweeted their support, the latter appearing on a Twitch stream in 2019 in which a gamer played Donkey Kong 64 for more than 57 hours to raise more than $347,000 for the charity.

Meanwhile, the charity was embroiled in scandal after scandal.

Probably the first time Mermaids received critical press attention was in 2017, when a High Court judge took the almost unprecedented step of banning the charity from having any contact with a family, after a boy’s mother, who was convinced her child was transgender, was found to have caused the boy “significant emotional harm” by “developing a belief structure which she imposed upon her child”. This was despite repeated warnings from social services over the welfare of the child and concerns raised by his school. The father was given full custody of the child, who then desisted.

When one newspaper probed Mermaids’ website following the ruling, it found an advert for “same-day cross-sex hormones” for children. It asked the charity for a comment on the advert and received no response – but the advert was quickly removed.

For many years, the doctor Mermaids recommended on its website was Helen Webberley. That stopped in 2018 when she was convicted of running an unregistered medical agency. The agency sold hormones and puberty blockers to children, and at least one child, Jayden Lowe, took her own life while on Webberley’s drugs.

Despite this, Webberley found a loophole and her practice, GenderGP, was still able to run – and was promoted on a forum that Mermaids operated on its website. The site also has a ‘get me out of here’ button, which will immediately close it down if the child using it fears their parents have seen the content – something normally only associated with domestic violence shelters. In 2022, Webberley was suspended from practising for putting patients at ‘unwarranted risk of harm’.

The controversies continued. There was Susie Green’s behaviour on social media which included the repeated use of debunked or unproven suicide statistics to justify her work; then the charity was fined £25,000 for allowing 780 pages of confidential emails with its users to be viewable online; a conference for child psychiatrists was cancelled at Mermaids’ request because at least one of the speakers was ‘gender critical’; its website featured inappropriate images, such as an adult male dressed as a sexualised girl, sitting on a bed touching an 11-year-old child; an Oxford professor said the university’s reputation was at risk because a study into puberty blockers had been hijacked by the charity; and it was revealed that children were being given legal advice via the charity on how to officially change their names without their parents’ knowledge.

At last, the scandals became too big to ignore. Firstly, its relationship with the NHS, and in particular the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), the organisation that introduced puberty blockers in 2010, began to disintegrate when 35 GIDS staff members resigned between 2016 and 2019. Former clinicians revealed they were under pressure to affirm the ‘gender identity’ of very vulnerable children who had experienced abuse and family trauma. Two clinicians are reported to have said ‘there was a dark joke among staff that “there would be no gay people left”’.

This led to a review of GIDS in 2020 which was published this year, concluding that the service was ‘neither safe nor viable’ and should be closed down. Susie Green response was to express concern that mental health treatment would be prioritised over medical intervention. One law firm, however, responded in a different way - by saying it would be pursuing legal action against GIDS for rushing children onto a medical pathway with life-changing effects, and said it expected more than 1,000 families to join the case.

As this was happening, Mermaids took unprecedented legal action against another charity – the LGB Alliance, which focuses on lesbian, gay and bisexual people – to have its charitable status removed by the UK’s Charity Commission, claiming it ‘seeks to undo the work on trans rights’. This led to increased scrutiny from the press. A Daily Telegraph reporter posed as a child and contacted Mermaids to say she wanted to compress her chest but her parents would not allow it. Mermaids, without asking any questions about the child’s underlying illnesses or mental health, agreed to send a ‘breast binder’ to her at a different address so her parents would not know about it. The paper found the charity was also advising children to lie to medical professionals to obtain drugs and was giving information on puberty blockers that contradicted official medical advice.

Ironically, this resulted in the announcement of a Charity Commission investigation into Mermaids, and has led at least one NHS region to advise medical staff to no longer work with the charity. The National Lottery announced a ‘pause’ on its funding and the Department for Education removed it from its school resources.

Then came Mermaids’ latest and probably most lethal scandal. In July it appointed a professor of gender studies at the London School of Economics, Jacob Breslow, as one of its trustees. In 2011 Breslow spoke at a conference organised by B4U-Act, a paedophile advocacy group set up two years earlier by a convicted child rapist, on 'Pedophilia, Minor-Attracted Persons (MAPs), and the DSM: Issues and Controversies.' The stated purpose of the symposium was to lobby the American Psychiatric Association for changes to the diagnostic definition of paedophilia in order to 'reduce stigma' against 'MAPs'. In his lecture, Breslow promoted the concept of treating paedophilia as a sexual orientation, also the goal of B4U-Act.

Ceri Black, a Twitter user, contacted Breslow about this, causing him to immediately delete his Twitter account and resign as Mermaids' trustee. Mermaids, unusually, released a statement saying he should never have been appointed, but the damage was done. What followed was a drip-feed of information about Breslow's writings over several years, including statements in which he appeared to admit that he is sexually attracted to children and his appreciation of Destroyer magazine, created by Karl Andersson. Stories also emerged about other Mermaids employees and their links to either serious crimes or sexually disturbing comments.

Mermaids, like transgender ideology and Queer Theory, constantly shifts language so that nobody can ever be confident that they have grasped a concept. For example, it has issued guidance stating that the toys and clothing children are attracted to has no bearing on their gender, but at the same time, one of its senior employees said that 'trans children' use toys and clothing to tell the world what gender they are; Mermaids has said that children should be permanently medicated because gender identity is fixed from a young age but it has also showcased people who say their gender identity can change several times per day; it has suggested that a child can be born in the wrong body and stated that no child is born in the wrong body; it has produced slides that have stated that almost every subjective mental health issue a child has is a potential sign of gender dysphoria.

Mermaids has embraced the doctrines of Queer Theory in its approach to biological sex, which one of their trustees, a doctor, recently suggested is “just a concept”, and that there is a need to affirm children in their ‘trans identity’ since they have capacity at a very young age and “shouldn’t be denied the right to make decisions about their own bodies”

It should have been obvious to those running Mermaids for the last 10 to 15 years that this argument is one shared by those who would sexually abuse children.

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If you feel concerned about Mermaids, please report them to the Charity Commission, citing what issues you have with the charity, including supporting evidence. The best way to reach them is via this link.