Mick Hartley

Mermaids in the frame

After the fall of the Tavistock, will Mermaids be next?

Seriously. If this isn't the time for a no-holds barred journalistic dive into the totally amoral, ideologically bonkers racket that is Mermaids, I don't know what is. They held the Tavistock ransom for years. They are still going. They are crazy. Children's bodies are at stake. https://t.co/nl3MxprPT3

— Kathleen Stock (@Docstockk) July 28, 2022

Shay Woulahan at Reduxx:

Many blame Mermaids for putting pressure on NHS staff to prescribe puberty blockers and cross sex hormones to children with gender confusion....

Sue and Marcus Evans were two of multiple whistleblowers who raised concerns about Tavistock’s GIDS. In an interview, Marcus Evans, a Psychoanalyst and formerly a Consultant Psychotherapist and Associate Clinical Director of Adult and Adolescent Service at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, explained the close relationship between Mermaids and the clinic. Evans described the relationship as “unusually close” which “interfered with the ordinary clinical environment.”

One former clinician at Tavistock also said that the narrative from Mermaid was “everywhere [within the service],” continuing: “Mermaids are always saying this is a matter of life and death. ‘Would you rather an alive boy or a dead girl?'” ...

Dr. Marci Bowers, a leading sex reassignment surgeon, admitted that children who are put on puberty blockers and who later go on to cross sex hormones will never be able to achieve an orgasm as adults if they had not done so prior to starting their hormone treatment.

Hormone blocking treatment is also said to prevent a persons genitals from developing, leaving them with stunted sex organs. For boys, this makes future genital reassignment surgeries more complex, something the CEO of Mermaids, Susie Green admitted had affected her own son in a 2012 documentary.

“There wasn’t much there to work with,” Green said in reference to her son’s vaginoplasty.

Green had taken her son to America for “puberty blockers” before they were legal in the UK. When he was 16, she took him to Thailand for sex reassignment surgery due to it having been illegal in the United Kingdom for minors.

While Green insists her son’s transition was his choice, a Ted Talk Green gave in 2017 has some LGB activists concerned as she seemed to suggest her son had been put through a form of conversion therapy.

During the presentation, Green confessed that her now ex-husband had disciplined her son for playing with toys associated with girls as a toddler.

“Jack’s dad did not approve of our child’s effeminate behavior,” she explained, “Then all the “girl toys” or “girly toys” as such were taken away and put away, and Jack was made aware that this was not appropriate. And suddenly, a confident, happy little boy became quite quiet, withdrawn, very clingy, and tearful.” She continued. Shortly after, her son began to say he wanted to be a girl.

In other words her husband didn't like the effeminate ways of their son, so they put him on hormones, then took him to Thailand to be castrated. There could hardly be a clearer case of homophobia. Yet somehow this woman - and her organisation, Mermaids - have been almost universally lauded and allowed to influence government policy, most notably at the Tavistock. 

It is known that Green held regular meetings with GIDS senior management, and campaigned for puberty blockers to be prescribed, and for Mermaids to be advertised as a recommended resource on the GIDS website. Green was also listed as a contributor to the development of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s Standards of Care guidelines on children despite having no clinical qualifications. A two-part Reduxx investigation conducted in May found that the WPATH guidelines were also influenced by pedophilic castration fetishists.

As well as recommending medicalization to children and their families, Mermaids has also been found to have referred youth to a private healthcare service — GenderGP.

Dr. Michael Webberley of GenderGP was recently found guilty of recklessly prescribing puberty blockers and cross sex hormones to patients as young as 9....

Currently, Mermaids is in the process of suing the United Kingdom’s charity commission for awarding charitable status to LGB Alliance, an organization centered on advocating for the rights of same-sex attracted people.

Crowdsourcing the effort, Mermaids has raised over £73,000 to fund the legal campaign. LGB Alliance and Mermaids differ ideologically on their position about the correct pathway for children with gender dysphoria. LGB Alliance advocates have asserted that many gay people display gender nonconformity as youth. They state that medicalising children with gender dysphoria is a form of gay conversion therapy.

“It’s a scandal that the majority of young people referred to gender clinics and subsequently prescribed puberty blockers are same-sex attracted. This is homophobic in the extreme and must be tackled. There has been a 4,000% increase in the number of girls referred to clinics and we want the government to consider how social contagion, the influence of the pharma industry and homophobia is persuading children, many of them girls, that their same-sex attraction is a sign that they must ‘really’ be boys.” LGB Alliance state on their website as part of their “Gay teens aren’t sick” campaign. ...

With the closure of Tavistock’s gender identity service, Dr. Cass recommended the creation of a network of regional services to provide care and support, a recommendation accepted by the NHS.

Although many celebrate the news of the closure, others worry that political lobby groups like Mermaids will infiltrate and influence any new services established to treat children experiencing distress with their sex.

Nothing to see here

Former equalities minister Kemi Badenoch in the Sunday Times today - The Tavistock scandal shows the dangers of civil service groupthink:

When I became equalities minister in early 2020, the NHS gender identity service (GIDS) for young people was presented to me by government officials as a positive medical provision to support children. I was assured that was there “nothing to see here”, if anything, the Tavistock was getting unfair press. This was despite whistleblowers like Dr David Bell already raising concerns about practices at the clinic.

Children and their welfare should be a priority of any government. After receiving correspondence on the matter I decided to listen to every perspective on the issue of those experiencing gender distress to prepare future policy. I noticed officials seemed to be consulting the same people and previous ministers had created an LGBT advisory panel that was clearly suffering from groupthink.

I insisted on meeting campaigners on both sides of the debate: not just Stonewall but, to the horror of some officials, the LGB Alliance. I met clinicians and, most importantly, I asked to meet young people who had used the Tavistock’s services.

One such young person was Keira Bell. To my surprise, I was advised strongly and repeatedly by civil servants in the department that it would be “inappropriate” to speak to her. I overruled the advice. Along with other advisers across government I met Keira and listened to what she had to say. Her testimony was harrowing and brought many on the Zoom call to tears. Keira described how, after being put on puberty blockers at the age of 16, she was given testosterone shots at 17, before her breasts were cut off at 20. Worse was the casual indifference she described from the GIDS service to her continued post-surgery wellbeing.

And then there was the Labour Party.

I was astonished that in trying to help mostly gay children whose childhoods were being destroyed by experimental treatment, I was misrepresented by mischief-makers and their friends in certain media outlets as being anti-LGBT with slurs gleefully retweeted by Labour politicians such as Angela Rayner and Chris Bryant.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out now in the Labour ranks. It's a common complaint that no one really knows what Keir Starmer stands for, but on one issue he's made his views very plain: "trans women are women". Labour MP Rosie Duffield has been effectively ostracised within the party for her view that biological sex is real. It's hard to see how Starmer can now row back on this, having been so vocal in his support for the trans agenda. It's a clear vote loser, and a view that is more and more obviously on the wrong side of history, as well as being on the wrong side of science and of women's rights. The Tories have an open goal which they're not afraid to exploit - as here with Badenoch. And who can blame them.

Disappearing women

The BBC's 50;50 equality project to ensure fair representation for women is not quite what it seems. From the Telegraph:

The BBC is “disappearing women” by allowing a 50-50 quota for programme guests to be filled by those who self-identify as female, The Telegraph can reveal.

The 50:50 equality project was founded in 2017 by Ros Atkins, the BBC News presenter, and heavily promoted on the corporation's website to empower women.

It urges BBC editors to monitor the number of contributors on their programmes to gather data and set diversity benchmarks, with the aim of at least half being women.

But it has erupted in a trans row, as its methodology now says “content-makers monitor the gender identity of their contributors with the aim of featuring at least 50 per cent women – they do not monitor whether a contributor’s gender differs from their sex registered at birth".

It means trans women born as male will be counted as women, sparking a backlash from BBC staff who say the scheme has been hijacked by trans activists.

A senior BBC insider told The Telegraph: “The BBC has now ‘disappeared’ women as a sex class and instead monitors ‘gender identity’. It’s redefined a word which we all understand, without any public debate, and Ros Atkins has gone along with the change. 

“In this 50:50 monitoring, the BBC is still following ‘Stonewall law’ in failing to respect sex as as a protected characteristic. Sadly, the BBC still seems to be a deeply sexist organisation where these concerns raised by women are dismissed.”

The Telegraph understands that BBC staff have protested internally about the change.

Another staff member wrote this year that “50:50 doesn’t really know how many women have achieved representation (your stated goal) or men for that matter”, because its “clearly binary” data “depends on the producer’s conception of what gender is”. 

The staff member reminded bosses that the “trans women are women” stance pushed by trans lobby groups “is not shared by the majority of licence fee payers”. 

The furore coincides with the BBC paying Stonewall, the contentious trans charity, yearly fees for diversity training, until it quit last year. 

This newspaper revealed BBC radio staff were told of 150 genders and to build their “trans brand” by declaring their pronouns in training by Global Butterflies, another group, last year.

Do all 150 genders require equal air time? I think we should be told.

In the most recent 2021 report, Tim Davie, the BBC director-general, boasted of a “long-term cultural shift” after no BBC team taking part had fewer than 40 per cent women after three years of monitoring. 

But the insider pointed to a host of recent programmes in which women have not been represented, despite editors being told to discuss 50:50 data in regular meetings and share data across the BBC on a monthly basis. 

In a Jeremy Vine discussion about women’s sports on BBC Radio 2 in June, the voices on air were four men and three trans people with no women, the insider said.

In another example, two men and two trans women discussed women’s sport in an edition of Radio 4’s Moral Maze last June

The BBC was also forced to apologise for interviewing a transgender athlete who had boasted about knocking women out, in a Radio 4 Today women’s sport segment last month.

That would be trans MMA fighter Fallon "I love smacking up Terfs" Fox, asked for his views on the recent FINA ruling on transwomen in swimming. Not an obvious choice perhaps, but at least - according to the BBC - he's a woman. Another box ticked.

So beyond science or reason

Janice Turner in the Times:

Writing on this topic, I’ve often encountered facts so dangerous and beliefs so bizarre, so beyond science or reason, it’s been hard to convey their existence.

Listen, you say, British doctors are prescribing a drug used to chemically castrate rapists to halt puberty in children as young as 11. The drug isn’t even approved for child gender dysphoria. It reduces growth and bone density, sterilises and kills future libido. And, get this, we don’t know what it does to teenagers’ developing brains, or even if it works and they become happy, fulfilled trans adults. Because there’s no data, no long-term research.

It is hard to grasp the scale of the irresponsibility, but, god knows, it's not the first time that doctors have been guilty of getting carried away with the latest fad. [At the moment I'm reading Andrew Scull's Desperate Remedies, on the less-than-stellar history of psychiatry, from lobotomies, ECT, insulin therapy, and so on and on. The fads tended to mirror the latest (mis)understandings of how mental illnesses develop, just as now the Tavistock treatment has reflected the present-day cult of gender ideology and its birth in the postmodern delights of Queer Theory. Plus ça change.]

This week has revealed the power of sunlight when shone into dark places. There would be no Cass report if Keira Bell, who regretted her hasty transition when the gender identity development service (GIDS) at the Tavistock put her on blockers at 16 after just three appointments, hadn’t launched a judicial review. In the High Court, I heard incredulity in judges’ voices.

How could a 12-year-old consent to a drug which would prevent her bearing children? Why were patients’ other troubling issues — autism, depression, homophobic bullying, childhood trauma — not considered first? Why couldn’t the court see results of the Tavistock’s long-promised study of 44 patients on blockers? (It was slipped out a day after the High Court ruling, but since it followed children for just three years with no control group, it’s almost worthless.)

That Bell eventually lost on appeal didn’t matter. Because she had succeeded, at great personal cost, in bringing legal and public scrutiny to bear on a corrupted NHS service. She pushed the scandal of medicine driven not by evidence but by adult activist demands into newspapers and MPs’ in-trays. (Even then Kemi Badenoch, as equalities minister, had to battle cowardly colleagues and obstructive civil servants to launch the Cass inquiry.)

I still struggle to grasp why GIDS abhors research. If it cared about dysphoric children wouldn’t it want the best outcomes? If it had faith in its medical pathway, surely it wouldn’t mind testing its efficacy? Isn’t free and open discussion among fellow professionals the best way to improve treatment?

Yet GIDS clinicians who worried that hormones were prescribed too quickly, or to kids who’d simply turn out gay, were vilified, accused of transphobia, forced to conduct any thoughtful, gently questioning therapy in secret. Whistleblowers such as Marcus and Susan Evans were discredited, internal reports such as Dr David Bell’s were suppressed, while staff were blocked from contacting Sonia Appleby, the GIDS head of safeguarding, about their concerns for vulnerable patients.

Because the Tavistock, like so many in this current debate, were governed not by science but by ideology. 

Beaux Art beauties

The Upper West Side ca. 1906. "New York, N.Y. -- Broadway, north from 70th Street."

[Photo: Shorpy/Detroit Publishing Co.]

With the 72nd Street subway station straight ahead, the Ansonia Hotel on the left, and Dorilton apartment house on the right. Both the Ansonia and the Dorilton, amazingly, are still standing.

A Shorpy comment:

The Dorilton opened in 1902 and the Ansonia in 1904. Each was the vision of a single developer, not a partnership or corporation. Both apartments had over-the-top French Beaux Art ornamentation on the outside and luxurious amenities on the inside. From the start, the Dorilton had a better class of resident than the Ansonia, which initially attracted athletes, show people, and small-time criminals. By the mid-20th Century, both had deteriorated. The Ansonia was the worse off, sold at a bankruptcy auction in 1945 for $40,000. In the 1960s the Ansonia also became the location of the Continental Baths (Bette Midler and Barry Manilow began their careers there). Today the Dorilton is a co-op and the Ansonia is condominiums. Both have had extensive restoration work.

Treating all other complex problems through the prism of gender

Lucy Bannerman in the Times on the Tavistock closure:

The medical fates of so many vulnerable young people should never have been under the control of one single, controversial clinic. The monopoly of the Gender Identity Development Service, GIDS, over the treatment of children and young people who identify as transgender, has now been broken, thanks to these latest recommendations by Dr Hilary Cass. The full scale of the damage it has done may never be known.

For years, whistleblowers have been trying to raise the alarm that something had gone badly wrong at the north London clinic. Somehow, the word transgender had triggered a satellite service that operated beyond many of the standard NHS safety protocols.

That special treatment, as Dr Cass makes clear, led to those young people receiving worse care.

The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust’s service for children and young people grew out of a small clinic that was founded in 1994. It became an NHS-commissioned service in 2009 and in 2011, the new GIDS director, Dr Polly Carmichael, began its first “trial” of puberty blockers, a type of hormone therapy that literally halts the development of children as a way of treating their gender distress. Before any research was concluded on the long-term impact of these drugs on a child’s physical and psychological development, the clinic made the drugs more widely available in response to apparent increasing demand.

Over the past decade, the service has been overwhelmed by a sudden increase in the numbers of young people in distress over their gender.

No matter that a significant proportion of these new referrals were on the autism spectrum, or already suffering eating disorders, or were in care, or had complex histories of trauma or abuse — the GIDS leadership pursued an “affirmative” approach which critics said effectively treated a child’s declaration that they were born in the wrong body as sacrosanct and treated all their other complex problems through the prism of gender.

Its unique status as the NHS’s only gender identity clinic for young people in England (with a smaller satellite operation in Leeds) and its close relationship with transgender activist groups such as Mermaids and Gendered Intelligence, conferred upon the clinic a cult-like status among many children and their families who were desperate to get through its doors and secure referrals for the hormone therapies which many had come to believe would be the solutions to their problems. Carmichael, the GIDS director, even went on children’s television, appearing on a CBBC programme as “Dr Polly”, and effectively advertising the service.

Clinicians who questioned this approach were accused of being transphobic. Whistleblowers like Dr David Bell, a former staff governor; Keira Bell, who regretted her transition; Marcus Evans, a consultant, and his wife, Sue Evans, a mental health nurse, and Sonia Appleby, a child safeguarding expert, all tried to raise the alarm in a hostile environment. There began an exodus of experienced staff who left the service amid concerns that the clinic was sending young people down an experimental medical pathway towards irreversible cross-sex hormones — without their informed consent and without adequate exploration of other issues that might have been at the root of their unhappiness. Some of these children, the whistleblowers suspected, were in the process of realising they were gay, but they claimed the subject of sexuality was not adequately explored.

When my investigation highlighting these clinician’s concerns was published by this newspaper in 2019, protesters assembled outside The Times with placards, denouncing my “transphobic” report. Trolls on social media told me to “walk off a cliff.”

The trolls have been remarkably quiet today.

By moving the care of vulnerable, trans-identifying youngsters back into the NHS fold of mainstream children’s hospitals and shifting the focus away from interest groups obsessed with queer theory and back on to boring old things like evidence-based medicine and clinical research, Dr Cass has done these children and their families a great service.

Critically, she has also called for the appropriate services to monitor the long-term outcome of these patients. Arguably the most shocking part of GIDS was that, despite its supposedly pioneering approach in this brave new world of gender identity, it failed to keep accurate records of what happened to all these children it treated once they grew up.

The full impact of the GIDS experiment on their lives is yet to be known.

And a Times editorial:

The damage done is immeasurable. No one knows how years of ideological dogma, inappropriate treatment and a culpable failure to consider the overall mental welfare of the children treated by the Tavistock Clinic will affect the thousands referred to its Gender Identity Development Service. Yesterday the government thankfully brought the scandal to a swift halt. In the wake of a devastating report in March on the clinic’s reckless prescription of puberty blockers, ministers have shut it down altogether. Treatment of children questioning their gender identity will now be handled instead by established and respected regional children’s hospitals.

Disbanding the Tavistock is not before time. The once pioneering north London centre focusing on the psychiatric care of children has become an institute captured by a pernicious clique of “queer theory” trans activists, unwilling to question the reliance on puberty blockers, analyse the long-term effects of this untested treatment, or tolerate any dissenting opinion among staff. The Tavistock failed to collect data on puberty blockers for those under 16, refused to follow up the effects of its treatments and paid virtually no attention to other common factors such as autism, eating disorders or histories of trauma and abuse. It naively confused sexual orientation with gender identity, accepted at face value all declarations by children that they were born in the wrong body and treated all complex problems through the prism of gender.

Gender dysphoria is basically a social contagion which has in recent years mostly affected young girls. The Tavistock approach would be as though, to deal with teenage anorexia, the NHS had set up a clinic to help young girls starve themselves. On discharge no further records would be kept on the skeletal teens, so any subsequent medical problems - like, say, death - couldn't be blamed on the affirmative approach taken by the clinic. And any attempt to talk with the teens prior to the starvation treatment would be condemned by activists as anorexophobic "conversion therapy".

At the Anne Frank Trust

Last week I posted on a Jewish Chronicle story about the Anne Frank Trust hosting a speaker, Nasima Begum, who claimed that Israel is committing a "Holocaust" against the Palestinians ("unreserved apology" here). According to Felix Pope today in the JC, that's just the tip of the iceberg:

The JC can confirm that in recent years, the Anne Frank Trust has promoted other speakers with a history of incendiary statements about Israel and Jews, raising serious questions about the charity’s culture and governance.

In November 2021, during Anti-Bullying Week, the Trust ran an online discussion on the “power of kindness” featuring children’s book author Onjali Raúf.

In 2021, Ms Raúf shared a video of Jews dancing defiantly at the Western Wall on Jerusalem Day as fire burned amid clashes on Temple Mount, and made a comparison between this and atrocities that Jews endured in Nazi Germany.

She commented: “It makes me wonder on (sic) just how quickly some people can forget their own awful histories.

“I visited and paid homage to synagogues in Germany where Jewish peoples were forced to endure just such nights.” In March 2021, the Trust hosted an interactive online session entitled “what it takes to achieve an equal future”. The speaker was campaigner Iffat Shahnaz, who in 2014 had declared on Twitter her support for an arms embargo against Israel.

More recently, appearing in Ms Begum’s workshop to read a Black Lives Matter-inspired poem was Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, who goes by the moniker “The Brown Hijabi” and has performed alongside radical anti-Zionist rapper Lowkey.

Ms Manzoor-Khan has shared an image of Palestinian terrorist Leila Khaled – who hijacked a plane in 1969 and attempted to hijack another in 1970 – with the words “long live free Palestine”.

The activist added: “Palestine matters for all of us … because we are witnessing genocide.”

It gets worse:

For International Women’s Day (IWD) this year, the Anne Frank Trust promoted American novelist Alice Walker as a female icon, despite the fact that she has repeatedly endorsed the work of antisemitic conspiracy theorist David Icke.

In 2018, Ms Walker told the New York Times she kept Mr Icke’s And the Truth Shall Set You Free on her nightstand. Journalist Yair Rosenberg has described the book as “an unhinged antisemitic conspiracy tract written by one of Britain’s most notorious antisemites”.

An equalities plan provided by the Trust in 2020 discloses that just nine per cent of its employees identified their religion as Jewish, while 40 per cent were Christian. Fewer than half of its trustees are Jewish.

This is not necessarily a problem in itself. But tackling antisemitism no longer appears to be the charity’s top priority.

Other forms of racism are being prioritised, accompanied by trendy buzzwords such as “lived experience”.

In 2020, recruitment agency Peridot Partners posted online: “The Anne Frank Trust is looking for trustees as they embark on a new strategy targeted at young people with lived experience of prejudice.”

Astonishingly, it added: “The Trust is particularly keen to address anti-black racism as a priority.”

Critics say that all of this points to a cultural malaise at the charity, fearing that the organisation entrusted with Anne Frank’s legacy has lost its way.

A spokesperson from the Campaign Against Antisemitism said: “The Anne Frank Trust’s association with Nasima Begum could be shrugged off as a simple lapse in due diligence if it were a one-off incident. But it isn’t.

“Time after time, the Trust has platformed or boosted people with horrifying views about Jews. For any charity, let alone one charged with education against prejudice, this would be gravely concerning.

“For an organisation that purports to act in the name of a Jewish girl murdered by the Nazis because she was Jewish, it is scandalous."

The choice of guest speakers and causes would, I suppose, come across as unremarkable for politically active left-leaning charity groups, but...the Anne Frank Trust??

The Trust's response to today's JC article here.

The “progressive” resurgence of extreme gender stereotyping

Victoria Smith at The Critic - In defence of non-conforming kids:

Time was when you could write about having male children who played with dolls, wore dresses, imagined themselves as Elsa from Frozen, and no one would suspect this was a lead-in to you positioning your child as special and different, with you as the world’s most heroic parent, battling against a cruel, transphobic world. They’d just assume the obvious: that children are gender non-conforming because there are no clothes, objects, desires or feelings that are exclusive to boys or girls....

These were the days before the rise of the “trans child” narrative and with it, a “progressive” resurgence of extreme gender stereotyping. Over the past decade, it has become more and more impossible to avoid the imposition of gender norms masquerading as liberation. 

Today, not only do children face the usual pink and blue nonsense, but they’re presented with diagrams seeking to “explain” gender, not as a repressive social hierarchy, but as the thing that defines who you are and whether or not your sex has been “correctly assigned”. It’s the same old sexism, but claims to be its opposite....

The straightforward, feminist idea that sex-role stereotypes are harmful is now deemed old-fashioned. The stereotypes are fine; it’s your child’s body that might be wrong. This self-styled liberating message is the mirror image of the conservative belief that a child should deny their personality to match their sex; now a child should deny their sex to match their personality. As for those of us who argue that children should have to deny neither? We’re the ultimate baddies, feminazis and terfs, hated by left and right alike....

As ever, pointing out the Emperor is naked leads one to be accused of being a simpleton. The truth is this: organisations such as Stonewall, Mermaids and Girlguiding do not attack gender stereotypes when they share these parental narratives; they launder them.

The correct response to any child who believes the way they feel inside is incompatible with their sexed body, is to tell them it isn’t. Stonewall used to know this. I suspect they still do, but they’ve tied themselves to an ideology of which the concept of the “trans toddler” isn’t an absurd offshoot. It’s a necessary logical conclusion.

What angers me most, as one of those boring old mummies who doesn’t aspire to turn her children into frightened, dependent, over-medicalised unicorns, is the way in which the entire feminist challenge to gender normativity has been poisoned by these fake radicals. The lies and gaslighting of trans activists have made actual challenges to gender norms taboo.

It is astonishing how the whole conversation's been reversed. Instead of the obvious truth that sex is real and gender stereotypes are confining and need to be discarded, we're being told that sex isn't real after all, and bodies need to be irreversibly shaped and modified to fit gender stereotypes. And this is presented as somehow progressive and liberating. How on earth have so many people been taken in?

Being gender non-conforming isn’t a phase or a symptom of childish confusion. It’s yet more evidence that gender itself is the problem. Let’s make sure the muddled arguments of Mermaids and Stonewall don’t stop the rest of us fighting for real acceptance and real change. 

To judge by events from the past couple of days, the message is finally getting through.

Tavistock Clinic to close

Well then.

The NHS is shutting down its gender identity clinic for children after a review found that it failed vulnerable under-18s.

The gender identity service at Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust has been ordered to close by next spring.

It will be replaced by regional centres at existing children’s hospitals offering more “holistic care” with “strong links to mental health services”.

Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) clinic has been accused of rushing children into life-altering treatment on puberty blockers.

The paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass, who is leading a review of the service, issued a series of recommendations today for a radical overhaul of how the NHS treats young people who are questioning their gender identity.

She found that the Tavistock clinic was “not a safe or viable long-term option” and that other mental health issues were “overshadowed” when gender was raised by children referred to the clinic.

Cass, former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said the existing model of a sole provider for gender services should be scrapped as it failed to meet the holistic needs of distressed and vulnerable teenagers.

She said Tavistock should be replaced by regional centres with an “appropriate multi-professional workforce to enable them to provide an integrated model of care that manages the holistic needs of this population”.

Instead of rushing the poor confused teens onto puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy, they'll maybe - you know - just talk to them, and see what's going on. Which is what the trans activists have been trying to smear as "conversion therapy".

Th importance of Allison Bailey's court victory

Julie Bindel at UnHerd - How Allison Bailey crushed Stonewall:

Ever since Stonewall, formerly known as a gay rights organisation, decided to focus on trans rights at the expense of all others, anyone articulating a reasonable objection to this change of direction has been subject to abuse, threats, and even loss of livelihood. The charity’s activists have effectively forced big corporations, public bodies and independent employers to write policies on diversity and inclusion which put trans ideology above all else.

But the barrister and lesbian Allison Bailey may have put a stop to this. Yesterday’s ruling in her case Bailey v Stonewall and Garden Court Chambers found that she had been victimised and discriminated against by her employer for expressing gender critical beliefs. Such was the oppressiveness of Garden Court’s actions against her, she was awarded aggravated damages: £22,000. These are only granted where a discriminator’s actions are particularly unnecessary, high-handed or oppressive.

Bailey also sued Stonewall for inducing, instructing or causing some of GCC’s actions — she had accused the charity of “trans-extremism” — but she didn’t win that aspect of the case. As a result, Stonewall and its supporters, including Owen Jones and Pink News, are celebrating. In their blinkered view, she has lost. However, this is to disregard the consequences of interrogating the extreme ideology and methods perpetuated by Stonewall. Bailey’s tribunal has tracked the ideological trajectory of what was once the foremost activist for gay rights, and put the absurdity of its activism under the spotlight.

The message about Stonewall has been getting through for a while now, but never has it been so clearly articulated in a court of law.

It has long been known that Stonewall exerts undue influence and instills fear in so many institutions and workplaces when they step out of line on the trans ideology it promotes. This is one reason why it is difficult to take Stonewall seriously when it claims: “The case heard by the Employment Tribunal did not accurately reflect our intentions and our influence on organisations.”

Bailey spent all of her adult life fighting sexism and homophobia and was horrified when she first pushed back against the Stonewall dictats to find that women questioning the new orthodoxy were being labelled Terfs, bigots and fascists. She, too, found herself on the receiving end of death threats; it cost her enormously to stand up and fight. Regardless, Bailey, with Maya Forstater and other courageous truth tellers, has lifted the lid on institutions and individuals who should have known better.

Upon hearing the Tribunal decision Bailey said: “I did not win everything, but I won the most important thing: I have brought Stonewall’s methods into the public eye, and I have shown them for what they now are.”

Stonewall had become as impenetrable and unaccountable as its namesake. But Bailey made sure it was finally held to account and will no longer be able to act with impunity when it comes to peddling its trans ideology and misinterpretation of the law. Organisations that put “Stonewall Law” before Equality Law will now be aware that they could now be acting unlawfully. In removing Stonewall’s right to silence she exposed them for the immoral parasites they have become.

And Jo Bartosch at Spiked:

For years Stonewall has tried to claim that there is no clash between women’s rights and extreme ideology, that debate equals hate. Thanks to Bailey’s bravery in standing up to her bullying colleagues, her chambers and the might of Stonewall, the cracks in those arguments now stand exposed for all to see.