Why on earth is anybody still supporting Mermaids?

Why on earth is anybody still supporting Mermaids?

Systematic Institutional Failures

I’ve been shocked about a lot of things over the last few days. The things that were already public knowledge about Mermaids are shocking enough; the sixteenth birthday penis removal holiday; the data breach; the suicide baiting; the lifelong medicalisation of teenagers, many of whom are autistic, lesbian or gay; the links to disgraced doctor, Webberley; the judge who barred Mermaids from contacting a child whose mother was forcing him into transition; the sending of breast binders to children without parental knowledge or consent; the mixed age forums and events (13-19 anybody?); the admission that not only were senior Mermaids staff not any kind of experts, they had not even read the Cass review; the list of serious institutional failings goes on and on.

Perhaps the most shocking is their invitation to Jacob Breslow to sit on their board of trustees. Breslow is a man who has not only produced an enthusiastic, pseudo intellectual defence of noncery, in plain sight, for more than a decade, but who has admitted on his blog and in his book to harbouring sexual desires for children.

Who knows why such a man would want to be a trustee of a children’s charity with a history of failures? It is a mystery for sure! But he’s not my target. I don’t care about him. He doesn’t appear to have children, and nobody is going to ask him to babysit in the near future, at least not after these revelations. He’s discredited, maybe forever. Let him go lick his wounds and worry about what the LSE investigation will find.

Mermaids Whistle Blower When?

My target now is Mermaids. This is a children’s charity which either failed to perform the most basic safeguarding checks on one of their trustees, or they knew exactly who they were asking to sit on their board and didn’t care. Either way, they have proven themselves utterly incapable of even the most basic safeguarding of children. They have a controversial agenda; they should therefore be the absolute leading lights in their field when it comes to safeguarding. They should be absolutely above board, ship shape, the image of propriety. Instead, after a litany of failures, they are inviting a man to be a trustee who is not even hiding in the shadows. Breslow has been absolutely open about who he is and what his interests are. The question isn’t, then, “why did he want to work at Mermaids?” but rather, “why did Mermaids want him to work for them?

The history of their other trustees has been, incredibly, deleted from the internet by Mermaids. It is still, however, archived by various intrepid twitter users. Looking at it, the thing that strikes me is how quickly so many of the trustees leave. They are, in fact, often out the door as soon as they are in. Is this common in UK charities? Did they have a reason to leave? Were they rats deserting a sinking ship, when they realised what was really going on over at Mermaids, behind the rhetoric and the fundraisers and the glossy smiles?

And tantalisingly, will any of them blow the whistle in the coming days? Will anybody else be brave enough to come out and say, as one twitter user did today, that their closing their helplines might well be something akin to paper shredding; is is one possible explanation; Mermaids may not want journalists calling them to find out the extent of their malpractice, by posing as concerned parents.

It has been alleged this morning by a couple of different sources that one of the reasons the helplines have been closed is that volunteers are running for the hills. I don’t know whether this is factual or not, but it would be unsurprising to me if this were true; who would want to be associated with an organisation like Mermaids, after recent revelations? Certainly not me.

If I found myself in their shoes, working for an organisation that had invited such a man, I would run faster than Forrest Gump, kicking off my Mermaids Brand Ideological Leg Braces as I went. In fact, I would have run long ago. As I ran, I would gather every single bit of damning evidence from inside that organisation that I bloody well could, and I would shout it from the rooftops to anybody who will listen the second I got out.

I have everything crossed for a Mermaids whistle-blower. Everything.

One Bad Apple?

And before you think “that’s a bit strong,” or “you can’t generalise from one nonce apologist who slipped through the net,” nothing in the world will convince me that this is just a Breslow problem. Don’t bother trying to tell me that this is the only time that Mermaids have failed at safeguarding or doing even the most basic of checks. Even one such failure is appalling. This isn’t a case of “We did the proper checks and he turned out to be a wrongun.” This is, “he admitted who he was on his blog and you invited him anyway.” You don’t need to ask how many more failures like that there are before you decide that the whole apple barrel is rotten to the core.

An analogy would be that you are a restaurant, and you find that you have inadvertently served a meal to one of your diners, and they have found a bit of turd in it. You don’t fish the turd out, say sorry to the diner, and expect them to finish the rest of the plate. And this isn’t just one turd, on one plate; Mermaids have left behind them an absolute litany of serious failures. To stretch the analogy, turds have been found in the starters, main and desert. Truth be told, I wouldn’t even drink the water in that place, no matter how much Koolaid they pour into it.

The people telling me not to engage in “purity politics” or “cancel culture” regarding my defence of little children against noncery might as well tell me to go eat at the restaurant serving shit on the side of every meal. There is a time for purity. There are some things that cannot be tolerated. There are some people who should not be allowed in public life, and who should certainly be allowed nowhere near children. Those people are not, as the other side would have it, women and men speaking out in favour of LGB youth, safeguarding, women’s spaces and women’s sports, but those individuals speaking out in favour of self-confessed nonces, and those who harbour them.

Why defend Mermaids now?

So, and this is the question that I have been increasingly asking myself, why on earth are people still coming out in defence of Mermaids? Why are there actual humans running round twitter claiming that all the noise is just a campaign of intolerable abuse by evil terfs determined to undermine a good organisation? Psychologising the opposition in court is often unhelpful; you shouldn’t care about what sort of person they are, but about what points of law you can hold them to based on what they do. But I’m a social scientist first, and I find it utterly fascinating how somebody can wake up in the morning and think “Hmmm, I wonder what I’ll do today. I know! I’ll take to twitter to defend an organisation who’s been caught harbouring a man who’s admitted to sexual desires for children and made his last decade of academic work about “problematising” childhood.”

Have they read nothing at all in the last few days? Do they think it’s all made up? Hysterical old women, shouting on ideological grounds? I don’t think so. You would find out the truth before you spoke up in favour of an organisation that had been accused of inviting the fox into the hen coop, no?

Complicity

I think part of it is the statistically “normal” response to finding out that somebody “on your side” is, at best, an enthusiastic apologist for child sexual abuse. Many people, almost everybody in fact, even when faced with an abused child in their personal life, will do anything in their power not to have to deal with it. I was that abused child. I know. Everybody in my life knew, or half knew, what was happening to me. Nobody did anything. Psychologically, it is easier for an adult to call a “bad kid” a liar, than it is to accept that as an adult, you have not only let the wolf in the door, but shared a bed with him, broken bread with him, and turned a blind eye whilst he tucks into your kids.

That may be part of it for those who are still coming out on social media to back Mermaids. They talk about “vital work” and “intolerable abuse” and how “trans kids” are going to suffer because of this, as if all the things that are coming to light are just “malicious stuff and nonsense,” as one adult said to me when I tried to disclose. They cannot accept that an organisation they have supported is actually, shit at a whole bunch of things they need to be good at, because to accept such a thing would be to admit complicity in evil. That, psychologically, is a very hard thing to do. And having once admitted it to oneself, saying it in public requires almost Herculean effort. It is more than most people can manage.

Being a Mermaids supporter who realises they are wrong must be, in some ways, an even more difficult experience than the one I’ve just described. These individuals have a record of trashing, abusing and threatening those on this side of the argument. Head Girl doing Best Acting in School Play, Emma Watson has vocally and openly betrayed J K Rowling, the woman on whose back she has built her success. How can she backtrack from that?

In the morality tale of our opponents in this argument, Mermaids, Stonewall and their ilk are the “goodies,” and “terfs” are the baddies. We are not to be trusted; they can do no wrong. This kind of “black and white” thinking is perhaps ideologically driven. It may also be driven by personality factors, but I’m not qualified to comment further on that. It permeates trans ideology, and it makes it almost impossible to listen to anybody on the other side of the divide in good faith. Even the term “terf” reminds me of the idea of the “suppressive person” in Scientology. Both are against the “church,” and are therefore “fair game,” and (perhaps most importantly), if you listen to them, you’re fair game too.

Courage

J K Rowling sometimes casts Dumbledore as the voice of wisdom. He was wise, I suppose, but he was also a complicated, closed up, tricksy old man. Either way, Rowling has Dumbledore tell young Neville that “it takes a great deal of courage to stand up to your enemies, but even more to stand up to your friends.” Obviously, as a Slytherin, that whole “one million points to Gryffindor” fiasco still sticks in my gullet (that cup was ours goddammit) but Dumbledore was right. It takes extra courage to stand up to your friends when you have watched them in purity spirals, shaming and witch hunting and casting out your other friends, over and over and over. Nobody wants to invite that on themselves. The same way that almost nobody who leaves Scientology wants to make a fuss like Leah Rimini; Nicole Kidman got out, but she did it quietly. I do not blame her for that.

I can understand, then, why most of the great and the good on the other side are taking the path of least resistance, hunkering down, and waiting for this to blow over. Even the fox killer is suspiciously silent. Perhaps he is shocked, possibly even as shocked as I am, but doesn’t want to come out and say so, and be labelled a “terf.” Actually, come to think of it, perhaps he’s embarrassed at being such a terrible lawyer that he helped Mermaids initiate legal action against the LGB Alliance, which then drew this all down on their heads. If it weren’t for the urgency in doing everything in my power to stop these absolute ghouls having any more access to children, I would take a moment to enjoy the delicious irony of them being hoist by their own petard. Perhaps, when it’s all over, I’ll find the schadenfreude. Not yet. It’s all too horrible, and there are still children at risk. I’ll celebrate, with a kind of savage, grief laden joy, when we win.

Look, okay. I get it. Most people in the world aren’t particularly brave. They just want to live their lives, work their jobs, run their businesses, raise their families, have a bit of craic. Don’t all of us want that, when the chips are down? I, for one, would much rather be spending time with my friends and family, stitching my new dress, designing my next knitting project, binge watching Netflix in a huge blanket, going for walks by the sea. I’d rather be sitting with my dogs at the fire pit, or looking at the stars. I would rather do any of those things than go to the High Court in Belfast to defend myself against spurious claims of libel, or spend my time thinking about childhood sexual abuse and what happened to Suzie Green’s child, and thousands of other children. Wouldn’t anybody?

When courage is required, most people, nearly all people, turn their faces away, hide their head, wait for it to blow over. I can understand it. I’m not heaping scorn on ordinary people who don’t have room in their lives to speak out. It’s just normal. I’m not even really heaping scorn on the celebrities, businesses and so on that have supported Mermaids and are now choosing to stay silent. I understand why they don’t want to come out and draw ire. I understand why they want it all just to blow over. That’s not complicated psychology. It’s just normal. It’s exactly the same behaviour in the playground, when somebody challenges a bully, and does so effectively, the bully’s acolytes just fade away. Often, they become friends with the person they were previously actively bullying. Most people just want a quiet life. I can’t blame them for that.

But what about those people who are coming out, even still, talking about us terrible terfs, calling us for all sorts? What about those people who feel so emboldened by their ideology that they can ignore flat out admissions, by a trustee of a children’s charity, of a sexual interest in children? What on earth is going on in their heads? Are they so uncaring of public opinion, and so loyal to an organisation, that they are unafraid of being tarred with the same brush for defending them? Do they just not believe it? Is it loyalty or friendship that’s driving them?

These people (I say people, they are mostly men), talk as if all this is just a little mistake on Mermaid’s behalf that can be overlooked. I wrote about it in my pinned thread on twitter. “He does loads for the community, avert your eyes.” The argument seems to be, “yes, Mermaids may have sent an invitation to the fox to come to the hen house, but it is an intolerable injustice to chickens to suggest that that Mermaids are not excellent chicken keepers. In fact, not letting Mermaids look after chickens is poultry-phobic in the extreme.”

We are truly through the looking glass. I cannot fathom how much pure arrogance it takes not only to forgive the sins of David yourself, but to demand everybody else does so, immediately, without any evidence of contrition, repentance, or change, and to sacrifice the little children, the child of Bathsheba, to suffer even unto death, so David can remain on the throne.

Little Children

I was one of those little children who suffered. I could write about this in the abstract, but it wouldn’t feel honest, or brave, or true. Safeguarding isn’t an abstract thing. It’s not a set of principles. Safeguarding, in the real world, often bears personal costs, and when it goes wrong, and adults will not bear those costs, children suffer. I’m never going to share anything on any platform that sickos can wank to. But I’m going to share enough to illustrate the following principle: child molesters want two things, and two things only. They want access to children to abuse, and they want cover for their crimes.

When I was a young teenager, I went on a weekend away, for a sports event. There were four male sports coaches and a small group of children. The night before the final, one of those coaches took me to the hotel bar, gave me alcohol, and dragged me to his room, where he beat me and raped me. I was “rescued” by the other coaches, who burst in, threw a sheet around me and dragged me out, berating me for my “behaviour” all down the corridor. I was covered in shame. I just wanted my clothes.

After the trip, the other coaches explained my injuries to my father in a way that resulted in him grounding me. I was sitting there with bruises, burns and a black eye. I was so dissociated that if I had seen a psychiatrist, I believe they would have diagnosed me with some form of psychological break from reality. The days and weeks following the incident are a black hole in my memory. They’re just gone. To this day, I only have brief, fractured images of what happened, and I’m almost grateful for that. I thank my clever brain for not letting my hurt heart remember, keeping me safe.

Somehow, in the weeks I spent dissociated, a narrative developed. It went like this: “Ceri had an incredible sporting opportunity, but didn’t take it, and got drunk and acted out instead.” Even without what my parents were telling me, even without their punishment, I felt utterly complicit. I drank the drink, I staggered back with him. I didn’t have it in me to think otherwise, let alone to argue. I believed it. I believed utterly that I was a bad kid, that it was my fault. There was no adult in my life who behaved in any way that would suggest otherwise. I know now that it was not my fault, but it is still hard to know that every single adult in my life either directly blamed me, or kept their silence and turned a blind eye.  

Access, Cover, Complicity

One thing that has really helped me in recovering from that, and all the other horrible shit that happened to me, is to understand what drove those men to cover for their colleague, what drove my father to ground me for it, and what drove my mother to go along. It took me years to fathom it. If somebody brought me a child, any child in the condition I was in, and tried to justify it to me… let’s just say that nobody had better try it. To put it as mildly as I can, I would do everything in my power to protect that child, and make sure no other children could be harmed. Let’s leave it at that. I could not, for years, understand why anybody would do different. But I have done a lot of reading and research and I think I do, now, grasp why those coaches and my parents did what they did. The horrible truth is this: it boils down to access, cover and, in my mother’s case, complicity.

I found out, in adulthood, that at least three of those four coaches who took me away on that trip has a sexual interest in children. One has been convicted of a serious offence (the man who raped me), another has been convicted of a lesser offence, and another one has had accusations made which were then “no crimed” by the police. Those men found a way to cover for their friend, and put the blame on me, because they knew themselves that they might need the same kind of cover later. My mother went along with it, because it was easier to label me a bad kid than it was to stand up to her husband, or to admit with whom she had shared a bed for twenty years. I was blamed for it instead. It was easier. I was voiceless, and powerless, and blaming me cost nothing.  

Now, to be very clear, I’m not making any accusations of any specific Mermaids defender here here. And I don’t have the data to back this up, it is a feeling only. I’m not an expert on safeguarding. I say this only as a survivor, and a mother. But I say, in full voice, to all those currently still defending Mermaids, I believe that you have a reason to do so. If you are out calling people who raise safeguarding concerns “terfs” and other slurs, and blaming and shaming them, and calling them liars, it is because you have reason to do so. You are not defending a vital service for children. You are advertising that you think that inviting foxes to the hen house is not an act of heinous evil, but par for the course. A moral good, even. Sure, chickens love being eaten. If they didn’t like being eaten, they shouldn’t be so delicious. Or so “sweet and tasty,” as Mermaids’ website puts it.

I can understand and forgive those who just want to put their head in the sand. That’s just human. Wait til it’s safe, then admit it privately. Pretend you were always against it. Okay. Your friends will probably forgive and forget, and you don’t need you to apologise. You’re probably not important enough, even in your immediate friendship circle, for it to make any difference anyway.  Go on. Binge your Netflix. Eat your take away. Whatever. You’re nothing and nobody to me. Not even craven enough to bother calling a coward.

But if you are out defending Mermaids today, you are in favour of enthusiastic defences of noncery. You are in favour of data breaches and sixteenth birthday penis removal holidays. You are in favour of parental alienation. You are in favour of telling lies to children and making them into life long medical patients without good reason. You have taken your stand against the safeguarding of little children, and for those who would do them harm. You have chosen on which hill you will die, which side of history you are on, and you are my enemy.