Mermaids enjoyed a ‘special relationship’ with NHS England’s notorious Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), documents from 2014 to 2018 have revealed.
The Tavistock clinic found the ‘missing dossier’ after the Information Commissioner’s Office threatened it with possible court action for failing to disclose correspondence it had with the scandal-hit Mermaids group.
Among more than 300 pages of correspondence are email exchanges between former head of Mermaids Susie Green and the clinic’s director Dr Polly Carmichael.
Direct line
According to the Sunday Telegraph, the documents show Green’s involvement in a ‘task force’ responsible for redrafting GIDS’ “service specification” at a time when Mermaids was lobbying the clinic to make sex-swap drugs available to 14-year-olds.
Green, despite lacking any formal medical training, sent children to the Tavistock in cases “unsupported by their GPs” – in one instance where the GP had “consistently refused to refer”.
When staff at the clinic rejected a referral by Green, she contacted Dr Carmichael to ask why her ‘professional status’ had been questioned and demanded “a level of urgency” be applied to “dealing with this issue”.
Green was also involved in a chain of correspondence in which fellow trans activist Bernard Reed urged GIDS to “speed up” the process for switching children from puberty blockers to sex-swap hormones.
‘Ideologically captured’
Responding to the revelations, Stephanie Davies-Arai, the Director of the campaign group Transgender Trend, said: “The Tavistock were really in thrall to these activists. They were ideologically captured.”
Green, who is now fundraising for rogue clinic GenderGP to enable young people to access its ‘gender-affirming’ services, claimed that her involvement with GIDS was “not a secret”.
In 2010, Green evaded UK restrictions by taking her 16-year-old son to Thailand for full sex-change surgery.
Scandal
Mermaids’ ‘governance and management’ is currently under investigation by the Charity Commission, after it emerged the group had been sending chest binders to girls as young as 13 without their parents’ knowledge.
In October, Dr Jacob Breslow resigned as a trustee of Mermaids after attention was brought to a paper he delivered in 2011 that attempted to normalise sexual acts with children.
In the same month, it was also revealed the group employed a man who had posed for highly sexualised photographs and posted them online.
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