Mick Hartley

According to a whistle-blower who's spoken to the Telegraph, CEO Susie Green was kicked out of Mermaids because, as well as being useless, she was….astonishingly…. not trans enough.

The Mermaids boss was forced out amid a staff revolt including complaints that she was not transgender, The Telegraph can disclose, as a statutory inquiry is opened into the scandal-hit trans charity.

Susie Green suddenly stood down last week as chief executive of the embattled group after six years, with no interim boss in place and the move shrouded in secrecy.

A whistleblower has revealed disarray and anger within the charity’s Leeds and London offices.

The boss faced a staff backlash over her “incapable” leadership, culminating in a “nail in the coffin” report that trustees received last week.

The internal audit, launched earlier this year by the Social Justice Collective (SJC), a diversity group, is understood to be highly critical of Ms Green’s handling of complaints of racism, safeguarding, the vetting of trustees and her “shoving her head in the sand”.

The charity, the UK’s largest for trans children, has received taxpayer funding and runs training in the NHS, schools and police forces, as well as online forums for gender-distressed children.

While campaigners have long raised concerns about the group’s “unfettered access to children” and support of gender-affirming healthcare, those inside it have never spoken out until now.

Shocked staff were hauled into an “emergency meeting” on Friday with Dr Belinda Bell, the chair of trustees, and told Ms Green was gone and her replacement “needs strong EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion) experience, ideally lived experience”, with some staff believing this means being transgender.

The group has endured an exodus of staff, with “upset” among some junior transgender staff who alleged they were “treated like children” by Ms Green and their complaints “fell on deaf ears”.

It is understood that some staff felt it insufficient that Ms Green, a former IT manager, was leading a trans charity but not transgender herself. They felt her only link was her child, Jackie Green, who had a gender reassignment operation at the age of 16.

"Gender reassignment" meaning he had his bits cut off – after years on puberty blockers which meant there wasn't that much to cut off anyway. Wasn't that good enough?

Far from seeing the light, it seems, the Mermaids staff are digging in and digging down.