UK Charity Watchdog Announces Investigation Into Children’s Transgender Organisation

General view of the LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, intersex, asexual, and agender) flag outside a bookshop during UK Pride Month 2021 in London on June 1, 2021. Edward Smith/Getty Images

The Charity Commission has opened a statutory inquiry into Mermaids to identify concerns about its governance and management after a series of scandals involving the children’s organisation.

Leading LGBTQ+ charity Mermaids, which promotes transgenderism in gender-dysphoric children, is facing an investigation after regulator the Charity Commission announced it is opening a statutory inquiry.

This was due to newly identified issues about the charity’s governance and management.

The news follows the departure of the chief executive of Mermaids, Susie Green, who quit the charity after six years in her post, the organisation announced on Nov. 25. An interim CEO will be appointed shortly.

In 2009, Green took her son to Thailand to undergo full gender reassignment surgery in Thailand, on the child’s sixteenth birthday. In the UK, surgery is only available from the age of 18.

Serious Systemic Failing

“The Commission will investigate the regulatory issues to determine whether they indicate serious systemic failing in the charity’s governance and management. The trustees have fully cooperated with the regulator’s case, but their response has not provided the necessary reassurance or satisfied the Commission at this stage,” the Charity Commission wrote on Dec. 2.

The regulator will seek to determine whether the charity’s governance is appropriate in relation to the activities the charity carries out, which involve vulnerable children and young people, as well as their families.

“For over half a decade concerned parents have been sounding the alarm about Mermaids, and indeed Green’s own well-known history as a mother who took her child for a sex reassignment operation at just 16,” Jo Bartosch, writer and campaigner for the rights of women & girls, told The Epoch Times in an email.

“Finally, the Charity Commission has stepped up and is doing its job. But questions remain about why Mermaids avoided scrutiny for so long. It will be interesting to see if any of the other celebrities or corporations who championed the charity when it was on the up will continue to offer their support now,” said Bartosch.

The charity has been at the centre of a series of scandals.

An October investigation in The Telegraph alleged that the charity sent chest-flattening devices to children as young as 13 and 14 against their parents’ wishes or behind their parents’ backs.

A breast-binder is a body brace device for girls who want to flatten their breasts to appear male.

Top British pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass, who wrote the interim Cass Review, on the now-closed transgender clinic for minors, Tavistock, said that binding processes used to conceal the breasts of those suffering from gender dysphoria were “painful, and potentially harmful.”

The investigation also claimed that staff with no medical training were found to have given advice to users as young as 13 and that puberty-blocking drugs were being promoted as “safe and totally reversible.”

After the publication of the story, the Charity Commission received and assessed a number of complaints about Mermaids.

Jacob Breslow

A few days after it was revealed that a trustee who sat on Mermaids’ board quit after it emerged that he spoke at a conference for an organisation that was founded by a convicted child rapist.

Jacob Breslow, associate professor of gender and sexuality at the London School of Economics, gave a talk to U.S.-based B4U-ACT in 2011. B4U-ACT was co-founded by Michael Melsheimer, a paedophile and convicted sex offender.

The administration, governance, and management of the charity by the trustees including its leadership and culture will be examined.

This will be to see whether the trustees have complied with and fulfilled their duties and responsibilities as trustees under charity law, in particular whether they had sufficient oversight of the charity’s activities and compliance with its policies and procedures and in line with its charitable objects.

The watchdog will also examine whether there has been any misconduct and/or mismanagement by the trustees.

“The charity has an unwavering commitment to safeguarding which is, and always will be, our top priority. We will continue to cooperate fully, openly, and with complete transparency with the Charity Commission as its inquiry gets underway,” wrote Mermaids in a statement.

On Nov. 24, it posted on Crowdfunder about an “anti-trans agenda” and that “our staff are being threatened and funders intimidated as part of a cynical, coordinated attack on the trans community.”

“Anti-trans campaigners are using social media to coordinate complaints about Mermaids en masse to the Charity Commission and putting pressure on local authorities to remove our resources and services from their websites,” it wrote.

Gender-Diversity Training

Mermaids is a children’s charity that supports “gender variant and transgender youth.”

It also provides gender-diversity training in many places such as the NHS, schools, social services, children and adolescent mental health services, police, and uniformed services, as well as other charity and corporate clients.

The charity has been handed grants from the National Lottery and taxpayer funds. Many celebrities and politicians have endorsed the organisation.

In October The National Lottery froze future funds to the LGBTQ+ charity.

The Epoch Times contacted Mermaids for comment.