In October I noted that the UK trans charity Mermaids was having a very bad couple of weeks. First, there was a story that the taxpayer-funded charity had been sending breast-binders to kids as young as 13 even when their parents opposed it. Shortly after that the Charity Commission, which regulates charities in the UK, announced it would launch an investigation. “Concerns have been raised with us about Mermaids’ approach to safeguarding young people. We have opened a regulatory compliance case and have written to the trustees,” the Commission said.

All of that would have been bad enough but then Mermaids was hit with a real PR disaster. It turned out that one of the group’s trustees, Dr. Jacob Breslow, had previously spoken at a pro-pedophilia conference. His remarks to the group included the use of the phrase “minor-attracted-person” instead of pedophile.

Things don’t seem to be improving much at Mermaids. Last week, the group’s longtime leader stepped down:

The chief executive of the transgender children’s charity Mermaids has resigned, the organisation has said.

Susie Green’s departure after six years was announced in a statement on the charity’s website, but no explanation was given about what was behind the move.

Chair of trustees Belinda Bell said: “The trustees are very grateful to Susie for everything she has done over the last six years to support trans, non-binary and gender-diverse young people and their families, and to build Mermaids into the organisation it is today.

“We wish her all the best for the future.”

I don’t have any inside information on why Green stepped down but it might be connected to this announcement today. The Charity Commission is upgrading its investigation of the group to look into it’s “governance and management.”

The Charity Commission has escalated its investigations into Mermaids, the regulatory body announced on Friday, responding to “newly identified issues” about the governance and management of the transgender children’s charity.

A statutory inquiry has been opened after an earlier lower-level regulatory compliance case launched in September in response to safeguarding allegations.

The commission will investigate whether there is “serious systemic failing” in Mermaids’ governance and management. The trustees have cooperated fully, but the regulator said their response had “not provided the necessary reassurance or satisfied the commission at this stage”.

Investigators will assess whether the charity’s governance is appropriate in relation to the activities it carries out, which involve vulnerable children and young people. They will also look at the “management of the charity by trustees including its leadership and culture”, whether there has been any misconduct or mismanagement by the trustees, and whether they have fulfilled their responsibilities under charity law…

The commission said in its annual report that it had concluded 5,324 regulatory action cases in 2021-22. Forty-five were statutory inquiries, which it describes as its “most serious type of regulatory engagement”. It issued 12 official warnings and disqualified 14 trustees as a result.

So the ax hasn’t fallen yet but the upgrading of this means it’s possible Mermaids could lose its charity status. Indeed, half of the cases raised to this level in the past year have ended that way.

A columnist for the Guardian wrote a piece about former Mermaids leader Susie Green this week which is pretty enlightening:

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…

Mermaids has been endorsed by the Be Kind brigade, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jameela Jamil and Emma Watson, accrued a slew of corporate sponsors and been awarded £500,000 by the National Lottery. Progressive newspapers advise readers to contact the service should they have any concerns about their child.

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.

There’s a lot more but the point is that even her own story of how she started down this path is open to interpretation. Her son was effeminate and attracted to dolls. At age 4 he told his mother he was a girl and that god had made a mistake. Maybe he was just going to be a gay man, not a trans woman? We don’t know because Susie Green didn’t give Jack a chance to really grow up before medicalizing his transition in permanent fashion. As the article concludes, “There is a fine line between using your parenting experience to help others, and validating your parenting choices by encouraging others to do the same.”