Forgot to mention – JL at Glinner's substack has done a great writeup of rogdmum's 2020 complaint to the Charity Commission about Mermaids (
grahamlinehan.substack.com,
archive.ph). To be clear, the Charity Commission did nothing with the complaint.
I've featured the thread but a post actually explaining what the fuck this is and what happened would be really nice.
Thanks! Quick summary:
Mermaids is a UK charity for "trans children" and has a fairly long history of the usual gender bollocks -
if your son likes playing with dolls he's actually a girl and that sort of thing. (Its CEO, Susie Green,
chopped her son's cock off at 16 for exactly this reason. She had to go to Thailand because doing that to children is illegal in the UK, and has since been made illegal in Thailand.)
Recently it was revealed that one of the charity's trustees, Jacob Breslow, is a pedophile. He
gave a speech to a conference held by pro-pedo group B4U-Act about 10 years ago, but after that was reported it soon became apparent from his published work (he's an academic) that
he is himself a raving nonce. Breslow resigned, and it's not clear whether Mermaids didn't do any due diligence before appointing him, or they knew and thought it was totally fine.
The Charity Commission is now investigating Mermaids for this.
If that weren't enough, over the weekend people discovered that Mermaids Digital Engagement Officer Darren Mew had
posed in a sexually suggestive manner in a schoolgirl's skirt and posted a photo to his public Instagram account, with the caption "Sorry I can't hear you. I'm just out here living my fantasy". Not long after
that people found that he had posed naked for a gay porn magazine,
showing his arse and erect penis. Mew appears to have
either resigned or been fired by Mermaids sometime in the past 48 hours. (To be clear: if you searched for "Darren Mew" on Twitter you would find the pornographic collage attached to his name. Since deleted.)
The most recent news (from today) is that the Charity Commission investigation has prompted the UK's Department of Education (responsible for schools in England) to
remove Mermaids from a list of "wellbeing resources".