Coffee giant Starbucks has come under fire for its new partnership with highly controversial transgender ideology activists.
Customers who buy a mermaid-shaped biscuit will see 50p of the £1.89 cost go to the Mermaids organisation, with Starbucks aiming to raise £100,000.
Commentator Douglas Murray, who is gay, said he believed Mermaids was “sinister” and suggested parents who objected to its ideology were right to be concerned.
Stereotype
Mermaids runs training sessions telling people that being ‘born in the wrong body’ is a defect which can be medically ‘fixed’.
At one event, the group showed police officers a ‘gender identity spectrum’, with a Barbie doll on one end and a G.I. Joe toy on the other. The content was met with derision online.
Money raised from the Starbucks sales will go towards spreading more information about transgenderism to young people.
‘Sinister’
Writing in The Telegraph about the partnership, Douglas Murray said: “I view Mermaids as one of the most sinister charitable organisations in the UK”.
He criticised the “lobbying that Mermaids puts out to persuade society at large that children who believe – or are encouraged to believe – that they are in the ‘wrong body’ should be helped to change sex”.
“The fact that multinationals like Starbucks can so easily jump on board with the agenda that Mermaids is pushing is just the latest demonstration of how fast this new orthodoxy is being accepted”, Murray wrote.
But he said “parents and others who object to this agenda are wrongly portrayed as backwards and bigoted”.
Same-sex marriage
Starbucks says it “welcomes you, whoever you are and whomever you want to be” and that it wants to ‘leverage its scale’ to support Mermaids.
In 2012, Starbucks said redefining marriage was one of its “core” values – prompting some to boycott the chain.