Mick Hartley: Trouble at Mermaids

Matters are not going well for the trans charity:

A trustee of the transgender charity Mermaids resigned last night after it emerged that he had spoken at a conference hosted by an organisation that promotes services to paedophiles.

Dr Jacob Breslow was a graduate student in gender research at the London School of Economics when he gave a presentation at an event for the US-based B4U-ACT in 2011.

According to its website, B4U-ACT promotes services and resources “for self-identified individuals . . . who are sexually attracted to children and desire such assistance”.

Breslow’s presentation appeared to be a critique of how paedophiles were understood.

Records show that the academic, who is now assistant professor of gender and sexuality at LSE, became a trustee of Mermaids, a transgender youth support charity, in July this year.

More at Reduxx:

A trustee who sat on the board of a trans activist children’s charity has resigned following revelations he spoke at a conference held by an organization founded by a convicted child rapist.

Dr. Jacob Breslow became a trustee for trouble-plagued trans charity Mermaids in July of 2022. Breslow is an Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality at the London School of Economics’ Department of Gender Studies.

On October 3, Breslow resigned after it began to circulate that he had a disturbing history of ostensibly pro-pedophile sentiment, including having spoken at a symposium held by B4U-Act — a charity founded in 2003 by convicted child rapist Michael Melsheimer....

From Breslaw's website:

My primary area of research is on contemporary U.S. social justice movements, and the ways in which the idea of childhood operates within and against them. Specifically, this work interrogates and thinks with Black Lives Matter, transfeminism, queer youth activism, and anti-deportation movements.

My book, published in 2021 with the University of Minnesota Press, is titled Ambivalent Childhoods: Speculative Futures and the Psychic Life of the Child. It interrogates these movements through four psychoanalytic processes and analytics: disavowal, desire, projection, and dream-work. Doing so, it establishes a new way of conceptualizing the usefulness of the “psychic life of the child” for enduring the complexities of the ongoing present. Ambivalent Childhoods is a forward-thinking and intersectional exploration of how childhood affects activism, national belonging, and the violence transacted against queer, trans, and racialized people.

So there you go.

This comes at a time when Mermaids finds itself the subject of a Charity Commission investigation following claims that it was handing out chest binders to children as young as 13 and 14 behind the backs of their parents.

Update: more on this at Glinner's.