CEO Mermaids (2015 – 2022)
Mermaids: leading children up the trans path
JO BARTOSCH – 3 July 2022 – Spiked Online
With the air of an evangelical preacher, Susie Green paces across the stage in her Dr Martens. She is explaining to the Ted X audience how her son Jack became her daughter Jackie.
Green is a former IT consultant and CEO of Mermaids, a charity that advertises itself as supporting ‘gender-variant children, young people and their families’. The story of Jack’s transition to Jackie is frequently told by Green to promote the charity. In the four years since she took the helm, Mermaids has shot to prominence, forming partnerships with Starbucks and gaining the support of media megastars including Prince Harry, actor Jameela Jamil and US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But questions about the influence of Mermaids on clinical bodies, its response to critics and the science behind the ‘born in the wrong body’ approach have begun to tarnish Mermaids’ highly polished image.
Winner of a ‘National Diversity Award’ and one of the few ‘straight allies’ to appear on the Pride Power List of 2017, Green is the very image of a supportive mother. She says she initially thought she ‘had a very sensitive, quite effeminate little boy who was probably gay’. She recalls how, as a boy, Jack was made to feel shame about his preference for the ‘girly’ toys and clothes by his father, at one point asking his grandmother ‘can you buy me Barbie Rapunzel, but can you hide it because if mummy and daddy find it they’re going to take it away’…
HEALTHCARE INFLUENCE
What is WPATH and what are their guidelines?
CLINICAL ADVISORY NETWORK – SEX & GENDER (CAN-SG)
… WPATH Standards of Care are written and developed by self-appointed experts in the field, and do not use the best standards of examining evidence and writing recommendations, which introduces a high risk of bias. These professionals are themselves interested and invested in the various medical interventions that they recommend, and in demonstrating their own authority. Such risks of bias are by no means unique to transgender health and have been noted in many other areas of medicine. Furthermore, some of the authors of the WPATH Standards of Care may be informed more by political campaigning, rather than bringing experience as healthcare professionals, academics in relevant fields or guideline methodologists. For example, Susie Green of the UK Charity Mermaids has no clinical background, but is helping to write the WPATH chapter on paediatric gender dysphoria for SOCv8. Senior healthcare professionals who are WPATH members have allegedly expressed concerns regarding the influence of activism on clinical practice in transgender health (Shrier, 2021)…
Should Mermaids be permitted to influence UK public policy on ‘trans kids’?
ARTEMISIA – 21 October 2017 – 4th Wave Now
Mermaids is a UK charity. Its aims are ‘to relieve the mental and emotional stress of all persons aged 19 years and under who are in any manner affected by gender identity issues, and their families, and to advance public education in the same’.
The organisation began a number of years ago as a support group for parents, and it still maintains an online forum. It also undertakes casework, training, advocacy and political campaigning.
In interviews with the press, its Chief Executive Officer, Susie Green, has described her experiences as the perplexed mother of a small boy who was drawn to ‘girly dresses and dolls’ rather than ‘’trucks and football’. When Jackie was nine, permission was obtained for him to wear girls’ clothes to school.
At twelve, his mother took him to the United States for a consultation with Dr Norman Spack, an endocrinologist at Boston Children’s Hospital. Dr Spack prescribed a puberty-blocking hormone, a treatment that at that time was banned in Britain for any child younger than sixteen.
Later, when Jackie was thirteen, Spack put him on estrogen: again, a highly controversial approach. Current policy in the NHS prohibits the prescription of cross-sex hormones to children younger than about 16.
In recent years, under Susie Green’s leadership, Mermaids has pressed insistently, disregarding the concerns of clinicians, for cross-sex hormones to be prescribed to younger children.,,
Mermaids’ useful idiots
HADLEY FREEMAN – 29 November 2022 – Unherd
It’s incredibly easy to criticise Susie Green, the influential and, as of Friday, ex-CEO of Mermaids. But I’d like to say this in her defence: she never lied about who she was….
From her early interviews in 2012, when her trans daughter, Jackie, then 19, became a Miss England finalist, Green, then an IT-manager, was utterly open about how she first knew her child was trans: “As a toddler, Jackie always headed for the dolls in toy shops.” And if a four-year-old looking at dolls weren’t evidence enough that this child should be committed to a lifetime of medicalisation, Green added, “[Jackie] loathed having her hair cut.” Green put Jack — as he was then known — on puberty-blockers and flew him to Thailand for a sex change operation when he was 16, making him the youngest person in the world to undergo that surgery….
… Since 2017, I regularly asked editors at the newspaper where I worked if I could write about Mermaids in general and Green specifically, because it was so obvious that something was very wrong here. The answer, always, was no, but the reasons given were fuzzy: it wouldn’t be right in that section, they couldn’t see the news peg, it felt too niche. A more likely reason was one articulated to me with some passion on social media any time I tweeted anything sceptical about Green or Mermaids: to question either was to wish trans children would die. Doubt the charity, hate the cause, in other words. Weirdly, this attitude seems to hold true only for charities connected to trans issues: no one, as far as I know, screamed that The Times hates starving people when they investigated Oxfam in 2018 about allegations that some of its workers paid for sex….
Susie Green, under-18 SRS, and Thai law
ARTEMISIA – 24 April 2019 – 4th Wave Now
Susie Green is the Chief Executive Officer of Mermaids, a UK charity noted for its advocacy for the off-label use of gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) agonists to disrupt the normal progress of puberty in children labelled ‘trans’. Mrs Green has also indicated her support for removing age-related restrictions on surgical procedures intended to make the bodies of trans-identified people conform better, superficially, to the sex to which they wish that they belonged. At present under the National Health Service irreversible gender-related surgery is only available to patients eighteen and older. This is in accordance with international standards of care.
Recently Mrs Green tweeted her approval of a statement by a US specialist in genital surgery who argues that ‘surgery should be allowed based on competency’ — that is, ability to give informed consent to treatment — rather than ‘age of majority’….
Where did it all go wrong for trans charity Mermaids?
JULIE BINDEL – 27 November 2022 – The Spectator
Farewell Susie Green, the CEO of Mermaids, a charity that describes itself as supporting ‘trans, non-binary and gender-variant children, young people and their families’.
Green resigned rather abruptly on Friday, and the statement from its chair was short and to the point. An interim CEO will be appointed in due course.
Mermaids has found itself under scrutiny after deciding to bring a case against the LGB Alliance, the only UK-based organisation that focuses exclusively on same-sex attracted people. Mermaids claims it was not, in fact, established to support lesbians, gay men and bisexuals — but rather to discredit and disband trans charities like itself. The outrageous claims and questions by Mermaids witnesses and counsel during the tribunal, such as asking if lesbians can have penises, and suggesting that the term ‘same sex attraction’ is ‘exclusionary’, has led to many individuals asking hard questions about the organisation.
Green, who has spoken of taking her own teenage child to Thailand for surgery, led Mermaids into battle with the LGB Alliance by challenging its charitable status…
