Controversial transgender activist group Mermaids has exposed the personal details of vulnerable children in a huge data breach.
More than 1,000 pages of confidential emails from 2016 and 2017 were available online for anyone to read.
Names, telephone numbers, addresses, and deeply intimate details of children’s mental state and medical history were revealed, along with comments and questions from worried parents.
‘Fundamental breach’
The Sunday Times uncovered the emails, sent confidentially to Mermaids CEO Susie Green.
She had posted them in an online group, which stated that its “archives are visible to everyone”.
One mother, whose child was named, said: “I don’t think there could be a more fundamental breach of his right to privacy.”
Another parent said: “I have lost all trust in Mermaids. I don’t see how Susie can keep her job.”
Deep concerns
In addition to external emails revealing children’s details, internal emails were reported to include trustees’ doubts about Green’s leadership.
Minutes from one board meeting said trustees “expressed deep concern about not being kept informed or consulted with”, and “felt communication was not good”.
Other emails contained alarming revelations about residential weekends for children and parents, which provided a platform for young people to show off their mastectomy scars and also included a talk about genital surgery.
Concerns were also raised about alcohol-related incidents at “every recent residential”. Some trustees “felt strongly that children were being put at risk”.
Controversy
Mermaids regularly courts controversy, most notably for its campaign for the NHS to give infertility-causing cross-sex hormones to children.
Green also says that preventing children from taking these drugs is causing children to become suicidal, saying 48 per cent of trans young people attempt suicide.
The NHS’s only gender clinic for children says the true rate is less than one per cent.
‘Pernicious pseudoscience’
In recent months, Mermaids has increasingly faced criticism over its messaging.
In February, training given by the group to Merseyside police was ridiculed online. Its presentation featured a sliding scale depicting the ‘gender spectrum’, with Barbie at one end, and a GI Joe at the other.
The training was described as unscientific, and a waste of police time.
A few weeks earlier, Mermaids came in for criticism for a 90-minute training lecture given to thousands of teachers, health workers, police and politicians, for spreading “pernicious” pseudoscience.