Susie Green & Mermaids UK - "Trans Kid Support Charity", Susie had her underage kid get GRS

[teriyakiburns]

It appears they also made Alex believe that his being gay was related to being a paedophile

They share that level of belief with certain other groups they'd probably not want to associate with. If this horseshoe was any more extreme, it'd be a circle.

 

[Positron]

In addition to ROGD, we need a seperate category called Iatrogenic Gender Dysphoria. I strongly suspect NHS is getting kickbacks from shady entities.

At least Alex's mom found a private practitioner who has enough courage to treat the boy's real problem.

 

[Morethanabitfoolish]

They share that level of belief with certain other groups they'd probably not want to associate with. If this horseshoe was any more extreme, it'd be a circle.

It's one of the biggest reasons I want Mermaids destroyed, everything they've touched torn down, everyone affiliated with them ruined and the ground salted hard. Because that is STILL going to be a better situation for anyone in the UK who gets treated for gender dysphoria than what they have fostered.

I do believe it's a genuine condition (anyone who thinks that's too impossible consider some of the other insane conditions humans end up with) but it is getting frighteningly over-diagnosed, the wrong treatment (affirmation only) provided, and is ruining the lives of a lot of people that are either gay, bi or just going through awkward childhood shit. Mermaids are a hinderance towards any sort of suitable support and their ruination is going to be a necessary part of any sort of reform since at this juncture they are too closely associated with the issue in this country.

 

[gobbles]

On the basis of other KiwiS’ reports on the Time to Wait book, I started reading it.

Do we have any more information on how Susie Green ingratiated herself with the staff at GIDS or the staff involved?

It sounds like the initial head of the service, de Ceglie, was skeptical of parent-advocacy groups and tried to diplomatically push back without tanking reputation. He was a true believer in trans children, but under his guidance they saw like 20-50 kids a year; he seems like more of a Ken Zucker type.

Then, he retired ca. 2010, and his replacement Polly Carmichael exponentially accelerated use of the Dutch protocol while consistently lowering entry barriers like mandated therapy. I mean, she was having direct email conversations about treatment protocols with Susie Green. I’ve never heard of such a thing outside of civilly or criminally liable actions.

 

[GenociderSyo]

On the basis of other KiwiS’ reports on the Time to Wait book, I started reading it.

Do we have any more information on how Susie Green ingratiated herself with the staff at GIDS or the staff involved?

They have not named her specifically yet in the parts I'm up to but they do state that the higher ups in mermaids aka here were very hands on demanding things and that Carmicheal pretty much gave into their every demand and whim.

 

[gobbles]

They have not named her specifically yet in the parts I'm up to but they do state that the higher ups in mermaids aka here were very hands on demanding things and that Carmicheal pretty much gave into their every demand and whim.

Yeah, I’m currently on mobile so I can’t do too much of a deep dive but, when I have time, I’ll see what I can find about some of the staff involved who basically completely ignored the previous clinical approach.

Names: Polly Carmichael (head of GIDS), Russell Viner (“researcher” with the worst designed study I’ve ever heard), Sarah Davidson (head clinician).

I’m looking forward to hearing what you guys think as you read.

 

[GenociderSyo]

Yeah, I’m currently on mobile so I can’t do too much of a deep dive but, when I have time, I’ll see what I can find about some of the staff involved who basically completely ignored the previous clinical approach.

Names: Polly Carmichael (head of GIDS), Russell Viner (“researcher” with the worst designed study I’ve ever heard), Sarah Davidson (head clinician).

I’m looking forward to hearing what you guys think as you read.

Yea I'm outline what I find out its honestly a ton of shit that was going on.

 

[Hongourable Madisha]

I'm about 100 pages in and Susie Green's mentioned, as is her taking her kid to Thailand for SRS on his 16th birthday.

 

[Geranium]

Do we have any more information on how Susie Green ingratiated herself with the staff at GIDS or the staff involved?

(Phoneposting, apologies for being vague) If you go back a little bit in this thread there’s a post by @teriyakiburns which notes the closeness of GIDS and the parents’ group, Mermaids, going back to the 1990s.

This is my speculation, but the way I think of this is: there is an existing parents group, which largely reflects the beliefs at the time; not gung-ho about medical transition, and allowing for children to “grow out of it”, but also not opposed to the idea that some children are innately transsexual (to use the terminology of the time).

There is increasing visibility of “trans” issues in society, not least the process leading up to the passage of the Gender Recognition Act 2004. This is exemplified by the lobby group Press for Change (largely defunct now), with it insisting that some people just “are trans”. At this point, the primary example of a “trans person” is Haley Cropper on Coronation Street. (For non-Britbongs, Haley was portrayed incredibly sympathetically, and the writers were greatly influenced by contemporary trans activists. Haley, an MtF, was also played by a woman.)

Around this time, in the mid-2000s, a homophobic couple in Leeds decide they don’t like the stereotypically feminine behaviour of their son. The mother reaches out to Mermaids and is reassured that their son is actually a girl.

This mother, Susie Green, is hell bent on turning her son into “her daughter” and seeks out the most experimental treatment available (puberty blockers prescribed by a US doctor). Meanwhile, Green becomes increasingly involved in Mermaids — making it her life’s mission to ensure that gender non-conforming children can be given drugs to make them appear somewhat like the opposite sex, reconciling the body to society’s stereotypes.

In the broader culture, there is increasing acceptance of people who “are trans”. Haley is still the wallflower in Coro, people are getting Gender Recognition Certificates, Stephen Whittle (an FTM leading Press for Change) is being given a medal by the Queen. When Susie Green’s son is 16, she has his penis removed and replaced with (I speculate) a hole leading to a section of colon. The red-top press in Britain celebrate this, somewhat as a curiosity, but not unsympathetically. Online, there are Tumblr posts aplenty about how “transgender people” have different brains to “cisgender people” and, like the gays, they were “born this way”.

The Tavistock, meanwhile, is going through changes. The number of referrals is increasingly steadily, but not yet explosively. Concerns raised in the mid-2000s by psychiatric nurse Sue Evans are swept under the rug, as is a report by Dr David Taylor. They keep going, in touch with their colleagues in the Netherlands and the US who are using new medicines to ensure that ”transgender children“ don’t go through the “wrong puberty”. After all, this is their duty, to alleviate the distress at these children’s unfortunate biology.

The parents are still heavily involved, taking kids on residential trips, showing the young patients that a wonderful life as the opposite sex awaits them. The GIDS clinicians are often present, working hand in hand. Sometimes the parents ask for techniques that seem a bit… of a stretch. But colleagues in the US and the Netherlands are doing it, and they say it helps relieve the distress of the children who — they know by now — are just born this way.

---

Sorry for the novella, but I think it’s a mistake to read too much separation into GIDS and Mermaids. At the beginning there were very few kids, very few clinicians, and things just progressed from there.

One way of seeing it is the “old boys” networks that grow out of Oxbridge; these people spend their formative years working very closely together, have the same views, end up in the same field. It shouldn’t be a surprise that they have a close relationship.

 

[Swole McPole]

I've been working on a post about the Tavistock book for a thread and considering its so connected to Mermaids I thought I would post it here as well. I'm only 18% into the book and already its insane the shit that was going on there.

I'm in the middle of it at the moment as well. What's surprising to me is how much internal pushback the leadership of the organisation got from the staff. I think about twenty percent of them were whistleblowers.

Do we have any more information on how Susie Green ingratiated herself with the staff at GIDS or the staff involved?

One of the big issues of the New Labour transformation of the NHS was the involvement in all NHS services of 'service user representation'. Because service providers had no idea how to make this work, it would happen in a couple of ways. Some services would cherry pick their favourite patients. (Generally the nice middle class ones who weren't going to cause any problems.) Others would set up 'service user groups'. But a third way was where activists would set up a 'patient advocacy' group or project. There was a political imperative from government that NHS services would engage with these people/groups -- and the better organized often had the ear of Labour politicians or were active in the party.

This was visible all over the NHS in the first decade of this century -- but where I'm most familiar with it was in drug treatment and mental health services. All too often, in those places it would turn into the lunatics literally taking over the asylum. But they always had enablers on the staff team -- generally SJW types who felt that by allying themselves with patient concerns, they were striking a blow for... I'm not sure exactly what -- social justice, I suppose. My experience of those people was that they tended to exacerbate people's problems rather doing what they were paid for, ie helping to solve them.

Mermaids was just another of these groups, but they were less chaotic and more focused than your average gang of drug addicts or lunatics, so they were much better at articulating their agenda and pushing it whereever and whenever they could. According to the Hannah Barnes book, what Mermaids thought or felt about an issue appears to have dominated the thinking of the executive team at the Tavistock for many years, and while they claim they didn't get their way in respect of everything, there's a significant portion of the staff team who felt that they did.

 

[Geranium]

Here are excerpts from a couple of interviews Hannah Barnes has done, specifically about the role of Mermaids at GIDS.

104 — No Time to Think with Hannah Barnes: The Downfall of GIDS at the Tavistock - Gender: A Wider Lens Podcast (archive). Starts at about 01:01:54 in the full recording.

[00:00:00] Stella O’Malley: Susie Green and her presence. She’s like, she was like a presence throughout the book and I was dying to know what you thought about her? She’s just like this omnipresent, at one point you actually say the word omnipresent, Susie Green, who phoned up at one point to kind of discuss some clients, um, basically didn’t get on puberty blockers and should have, so her, her, her, impact. Was she very good friends with Polly Carmichael what was going down?

[00:00:32] Sasha Ayad: Just for, for listeners who dunno who Susie Green (crosstalk) is, sorry, can, can you explain Hannah, just for context who is Susie Green and, and why would it be perhaps odd that she was so involved with the Tavistock?

[00:00:47] Hannah Barnes: Susie Green was until very recently the the head of a charity called Mermaids, which works with gender nonconforming and transgender young people and their families. It’s been going for over 25 years, and Mermaids as a charity was really interesting because, they grew up with GIDS. So it started as a group of parents whose children were all being seen by GIDS in the ’90s

[00:01:16] and to start with, they had a really positive relationship and sort of the outlooks of both mermaids and GIDS itself were quite similar. So, um, you know, some of their early writings sort of said that only the minority or of young people who have gender distress and chil in childhood would, would, would probably transition as adults.

[00:01:35] Um, there can be loads of complicating factors and different ways into someone’s gender related distress and, and probably different outcomes as well. So they started off and those people that were there in the early years found them actually, you know, really positive to work with. And, and, and certainly in Domenico de Ceglie’s writings in the early 2000s, um, and the ’90s it was, you know, all, all, all very positive.

[00:01:58] Um, Mermaids were involved along with another group called GIRES in, in really pushing for GIDS to, bring in puberty blockers at younger ages. Um, um, but, but although so were other clinicians and so were endocrinologists. So I think it’s really too simplistic to say it was all pressure from these groups and that’s why they did it.

[00:02:18] But they were part of it. And then over time, um, so, so Polly Carmichael would’ve known Susie Green since the early 2000s when she herself joined GIDS because all GIDS members went to the AGM and, and Polly Carmichael and Domenico de Ceglie would, would go to quite regular meetings. I, I have no idea if they’re friends or not, but they, you know, I, I wouldn’t feel at all comfortable saying that, but they, they, they, you know, they knew each other for a long time.

[00:02:45] Um, In a professional setting at least. And over time, Mermaids’ influence at GIDS was certainly felt by everyone that worked there. You know, one, one clinician based in Leeds just said we were answering to Mermaids, and Anastassis Spiliadis explains that, you know, on occasion, I don’t know how often it happened, but it certainly happened more than once, Susie Green would request that a young person and their family’s clinicians be changed because they weren’t getting what they wanted. And, and he says that that was, um, you know, accepted and, and those clinicians were changed. Now GIDS absolutely dispute that any clinical decisions were influenced by Mermaids.

[00:03:37] But what we do know is that, that she, she, you know, she, she, she would write, she felt perfectly comfortable writing directly to Polly Carmichael and making those requests. We know that she, she wrote to Polly Carmichael. There was a big email leak of, um, Mermaids emails. Um, and she wrote to, to other very senior board, she wrote to the chief executive and the chair of the trust as well.

[00:04:01] And there’s, there’s an email with another board member saying, oh, Susie, we should think about, oh, you know, we’d really like your input on our website so that they’re, they’re, they’re consistent both the GIDS website and the Mermaids website. Now, it might be that that’s not unusual to, you know, patient groups, but clinicians felt that, you know, even if Mermaids were not in the building, which they were sometimes in the waiting room, that they were in, they were in the room with them because so, such was the, such was the influence.

[00:04:31] And I think, I think it’s more subtle than, you know, I’ve had this so many times over the last few weeks or, you know, it was all about Mermaids, and they’re running the show. I think it’s much more subtle than that because, you know, they didn’t get everything that they. You know, for, for years they, they lobbied to have the age of cross-sex hormones lowered to much lower.

[00:04:50] I mean, it, it is just under 16. You there, there’s evidence of sort of 15 years and eight months and stuff going on. But, but you know, they wanted much younger ages and they never got that. But I think it was more subtle, I think. I think they were , they were present in, in clinicians’ minds. And also I think it probably stopped GIDS changing direction.

[00:05:10] Like the, the, the sort of, I don’t know, the fear, if you like, of Mermaids. When, when they could have. And, and maybe it explains why there was such a reluctance to put things on paper that we discussed earlier as well because of the way, um, that, that certain groups might react. Yeah. And, and, but, but I mean, the, the relationship started to sour probably from about sort of 2018-19 onwards.

[00:05:32] So they’re not, they’re not in influential now, and they’re, they’re highly critical of GIDS. They, they think they’re too conservative, so .

[00:05:37] Sasha Ayad: Yeah. But I mean, I think to, to Stella’s point earlier, um, about like what is the model being used within the GIDS service, if they were closely aligned in any way with Mermaids.

[00:05:50] The Mermaids perspective is that early intervention is good. I mean, maybe in the early years they were a little more nuanced as as you’re describing. But where Mermaids came to stand was that early intervention is good, child led, give the child the interventions they feel is best. And there was really very little scrutiny of these kinds of medical interventions from Mermaids’ perspective.

[00:06:13] So if they were in some ways kind of like intertwined, with Tavistock at any level, I can imagine that at least indicates something about the theoretical background that the Tavistock might have been using.

Blocked and Reported, Episode 155: Hannah Barnes On The Collapse Of One Of The Most Important Youth Gender Clinics In The World (no archive of the page as it's for subscribers only until some point later today). Starts at about 52:44 in the full recording.

[00:00:00] Jesse Singal: One of the sub-controversies at GIDS that sort of mirrored some stuff going on in the States was the role of, um, of Mermaids. Could you, could you just talk about that a little bit?

[00:00:09] Hannah Barnes: Sure. So Mermaids had this really quite unique relationship with GIDS in that, it sort of, they grew up together, that it came out of GIDS.

[00:00:18] It was a group of parents whose young, whose children were all being seen and assessed by the service in the 1990s. And in those early days they got on very well. And the … view of Mermaids was very similar really to the view of the founder of GIDS Domenico de Ceglie, in that there was an acknowledgement that some young people might arrive at their gender difficulties through very different ways, and that for many it would resolve. Um, for some it wouldn’t and they would grow up to transition as adults. Um, and they were very, very similar. Over time as we went into the 2000s, Mermaids became much more vocal about pushing the service to introduce blockers at younger ages.

[00:01:04] Um, and they weren’t the only group that was very active. The other one was GIRES, the Gender Identity Research and Education Society. And both of those were really active in the 2000s of, of lobbying effective-, essentially to, to lower the age at which blockers could be given. And they stayed really quite active in the early 2010s as well.

[00:01:24] Members of the GIDS team attended every single Mermaids annual meeting, and Domenico de Ceglie was actually a patron of the charity as well. That’s, that’s how close they were. Now, as time went on, clinicians tell me that, the influence of Mermaids was just, felt all the time that even though they weren’t in the room, if you like, when they were assessing kids, they were, they may as well have been. They, their, their presence could be felt everywhere. And indeed, actually they did accompany some families to their appointments and they’d sit in the, the waiting room.

[00:02:02] But again, it’s one of those parts of the story that is a bit more subtle and nuanced than, than people want to believe.

[00:02:09] You know, there’s, there are some who want to believe Mermaids were running the show and they changed the practices and made it much more affirmative. Now, they certainly did have an influence.

[00:02:19] So for example, they might complain on occasion that a young person wasn’t being referred to endocrinology and that young person’s clinicians would be switched. Um, And often to clinicians who would be more open to, to making that referral.

[00:02:36] Jesse Singal: The, is there evidence that they would be switched solely on the basis of an activist group’s complaint, or is that an oversimplification?

[00:02:43] Hannah Barnes: Uh, well, certainly, I mean, one of the clinicians I spoke to, Anastassis Spiliadis, said that he was on the receiving end of one of those complaints, and that is exactly what happened.

[00:02:50] And he’s gone on the record to say that. Now, I’m not implying that it happened often, but it certainly,

[00:02:55] Jesse Singal: but it, but it’s, it’s striking because it does come across as, um, interference in basically a medical decision by an activist group.

[00:03:03] Hannah Barnes: That’s what it appears to be. Now, GIDS would say that, so GIDS acknowledge that during a certain point in its history, Mermaids was very active, but they deny that they influenced clinical decisions, so that that is their view.

[00:03:17] Now, another clinician said that Mermaids were, you know, "we were answering to Mermaids", but they didn’t get everything they wanted. So for years they lobbied to reduce the age of cross-sex hormones, and that that didn’t really happen. There was a slight fudge. So it used to be, I believe, sort of a hard 16, and then it came down a little bit, but it, it was really only, you know, 15 and quite a lot.

[00:03:37] Um, but I think the, the influence and the was was perhaps more subtle in, in, in terms of, of how it played out in that, the fear of backlash or criticism, intense criticism from Mermaids, clinicians tell me, kind of potentially explains why GIDS didn’t change direction on a number of occasions, when it could have, why it didn’t commit things to writing, when new information came available, in case they might be criticised.

[00:04:09] And, you know, that’s really important too. And I think, you know, I didn’t find that loads of the staff at GIDS were ideological. They weren’t ideologues. But I think where ideology did influence the service was in not being able to hold an appropriate boundary, if you like, with, with these groups.

[00:04:29] And in later years there was another one called Gendered Intelligence, which was a trans-led group. And, and, and GIDS still sends families and young people to them and advises them to go to them and there are links to them on their website. So I think it was kind of, the boundary wasn’t held between clinical practice and interest groups and that prevented them perhaps from, you know, as we discussed earlier, you know, reflecting on the evidence base, um, perhaps rethinking the idea of really only offering one treatment pathway, which was a referral for, for blockers.

Edit: Also the Guardian finally published a review of Time to Think, written by Gaby Hinsliff. Time to Think by Hannah Barnes review – inside Britain’s only clinic for trans children | Society books | The Guardian (archive)

 

[Otterly]

The whole argument is predicated on the clearly nonsensical lie you can just skip puberty and do it later. Considering the vast majority of minors with gender dysphoria grow out of it, the precautionary principle would require not doing something that permanently and deliberately harms the majority, especially when it is based on lies anyway and there's no real evidence outcomes are generally good.

I’ve been asked what the window is to restart puberty and I genuinely don’t know. This idea is pushed that they’re a pause button and you can happily stop and resume puberty later as needed. I am not sure that’s even true - what is the window for puberty? How long can a ‘pause’ last? It’s not even a pause of course much of it is irreparable but how long do you have to go through puberty? I assume there’s a window for ot like every other developmental process we have. If you don’t speak to a child in the crucial first few years they will not develop language later no matter what. The window closes
Then I realise that asking this question ten years ago would have been met with absolute horror at such experimentation on children and I saddened and disturbed at how far that Overton window has shifted
Puberty blockers create childlike minds and bodies in individuals over the age of consent. Who wants that? We all know who
@GenociderSyo are you aware of the tabistocks history in general? They are into some shady stuff

 

[Sinner's Sandwich]

This idea is pushed that they’re a pause button and you can happily stop and resume puberty later as needed. I am not sure that’s even true

It's not. Even the doctors at Tavistock came to this conclusion...YEARS AGO! That's right Ladys and Gentlemen, they already knew of horrible these puberty blocking drugs where. I'm reading the Hannah Barnes book and it's really fucking disturbing. Also the book shows what a fucking monster Susie Greene is. What she did to these young people is unimaginable. She really needs to go to prison. She was the one who stopped Tavistock from warning about the side effects of puberty blockers and Polly Charmichael - head of GIDS was her henchwoman.

Hell, Tavistock members even joked about how there would be no gay people anymore because they were aware that they are sterilizing lgb kids. Again: THESE PEOPLE HAVE KNOWN THIS FOR YEARS. Every day they were commiting crimes against humanity.

 

[Morethanabitfoolish]

@Geranium Not just a review from the Guardian but a borderline reasonable one. Of course the journalist then goes on to try to deny the Isle of Man drag queen teaching sex ed story so it looks like a stopped clock twice a day situation.

 

[gobbles]

Polly Charmichael - head of Tavistock was her henchwoman

I think Polly Carmichael was specifically head of GIDS; the Tavistock head was one of the Pauls—Paul Jenkins?

In any case, Polly Carmichael is completely spineless, self-serving, and amoral. The suppression of dissent and information across all levels of the Tavistock is astounding.

I have to wonder if “the data doesn’t exist” is a complete lie. Powerlevel: I know physicians involved with research. When they’re writing new research, their first step is ALWAYS to pull relevant charts from previous years. I believe in the US a physician has to keep a copy of the chart for 7-10 years?

How do they pull the charts? A secretary literally digs into the stacks and looks for relevant codes or keywords. Then, either the physician refreshes his memory and continues with new work, or the secretary calls the patient to ask for participation.

It’s hard, but it’s a very do-able process. And, shit, these guys have thousands of cases. For some of the years, GIDS referred less than 200.

 

[Sinner's Sandwich]

think Polly Carmichael was specifically head of GIDS; the Tavistock head was one of the Pauls—Paul Jenkins?

My bad. But Jenkins is also an evil asshole who didn't give a shit about concerned staff. I highly recommend this book. GIDS and Tavistock was run by monsters.

 

[Geranium]

I have to wonder if “the data doesn’t exist” is a complete lie.

Well, part of this is that we know that GIDS (in particular, probably the same for most gender doctors) had appalling record-keeping, with wildly different levels of information on patients‘ records. (This was mentioned by the judges in the Keira Bell High Court ruling.)

Then there’s the lack of long-term information: no follow-up with patients, and a natural reluctance on the part of detransitioners to go back to the people they feel have harmed them.

And lastly, retrospective studies (this is what happened to the patients we treated) generally offer much poorer evidence than prospective studies (we will treat this group of patients in exactly this way, and record exactly this information, over this length of time, and assess the difference in exactly these measures).

 

[Timothy Troon]

I’ve been asked what the window is to restart puberty and I genuinely don’t know. This idea is pushed that they’re a pause button and you can happily stop and resume puberty later as needed. I am not sure that’s even true - what is the window for puberty? How long can a ‘pause’ last? It’s not even a pause of course much of it is irreparable but how long do you have to go through puberty? I assume there’s a window for ot like every other developmental process we have. If you don’t speak to a child in the crucial first few years they will not develop language later no matter what. The window closes
Then I realise that asking this question ten years ago would have been met with absolute horror at such experimentation on children and I saddened and disturbed at how far that Overton window has shifted
Puberty blockers create childlike minds and bodies in individuals over the age of consent. Who wants that? We all know who
@GenociderSyo are you aware of the tabistocks history in general? They are into some shady stuff

If puberty is “paused” at say 10 yrs till 13yrs old for example , then you will have a 13yr old with the sexual/physical/mental development of a 10yr old ? Do Troons think puberty just fast forwards to catch up or something?

 

[Chickenpolar]

Archive of the philosophytube tweet, which was in response to a BMJ piece about the tone of the debate on gender medicine.

Imagine mutilating your child not because you think they have an illness, but on a whim.

 

[Geranium]

Susie Green attended the funeral of murdered trans-identified schoolboy Brett / Brianna Ghey.

@green_susie100, tweet 1636045227520671751 (archive)

Susie Green (@green_susie100) · Mar 15, 2023 · 4:42 PM UTC
The grief and pain being experienced by her family and friends is simply unimaginable. The part that broke me was when her friend stood and sobbed her way through her speech. Rest in peace Brianna

And has jumped on the genocide train:

@green_susie100, tweet 1635321954227077120 (archive)

Susie Green (@green_susie100) · Mar 13, 2023 · 4:48 PM UTC
Please read! Superb snark, but the baseline? Genocide. Erasure of trans people. Step up people. Please