Mick Hartley

A new treat from Starbucks. Douglas Murray has the exciting details:

Starbucks have come up with this particular tooth-rotter in the name of something they present sweetly. Purchase a “mermaids cookie” and a full 50p will be given by Starbucks to the charity Mermaids. So sweet. So innocent. Or sickening. Depending what you know.

Well….what I know is that Mermaids are a transgender lobby group, who believe that giving puberty blockers to "gender-dysphoric" children is a fabulous idea, as it gives them “immense relief” and is “completely reversible”. They also lobby single-sex schools to implement trans-inclusive admission policies since, as they say, “trans girls are girls and trans boys are boys”.

Personally I view Mermaids as one of the most sinister charitable organisations in the UK. Starbucks simply says that the group supports “young transgender and gender diverse people and their families”. The undrinkable coffee chain claims that all those 50 pences will pay to support a helpline for such people. In fact everything that Mermaids pushes is deeply controversial and with implications which need to be properly interrogated. […]

Then there is 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. Something which is presented by Mermaids as though it is not just a right but a doozy. Think you’d like to become a girl? Why not give it a go? Vice versa? No problem!

Whatever societal madness future historians work out encouraged this fiasco, the most striking aspect of it is that on this matter, as on so many others, the adults all appear to have left the room. People do not question the new orthodoxy. If someone says that certain children should be given puberty blockers so that they can transition into approximations of the opposite sex who are we to question it? […]

It will be interesting to see in the months and indeed years ahead who wins stand-offs such as this one. 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.