Mick Hartley

The murky behind-the-scenes influence of Mermaids on the Tavistock Clinic has yet to be fully revealed – and it'll stay like that if the Tavistock has its way:

The NHS Tavistock gender clinic must release details of its communication with Mermaids, the transgender charity, by the end of the week, the information regulator has ruled.

The clinic had told campaigners who asked for the correspondence under freedom of information laws that it did not hold any relevant data. However, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) ruled that “on the balance of probabilities, the trust does hold information within the scope of the request”.

Mermaids was fined £25,000 by the ICO in July 2021 for failing to keep the personal data of its users secure after leaving about 780 pages of confidential emails viewable online for nearly three years. Those emails reportedly included some exchanges between the charity and staff at the Tavistock’s gender identity service for young people.

In a freedom of information request made in June 2021, the trust was asked for copies of all emails between Susie Green, then Mermaids chief executive, and trust staff between 2014 and 2018. It was also asked for copies of records, notes or minutes of any meetings between the two parties during the same period.

The trust initially refused to provide the information on the grounds that the request was “vexatious”. It later withdrew that claim but said that following “an extensive search of emails . . . the trust does not hold the requested information”.

But no one believes them – which isn't surprising given their record of obfuscation.

Marcus Evans, a former governor at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, who resigned in protest at the “inadequate” care of young people, said yesterday: “Ideological thinking represented by some of the trans charities has interfered with safeguarding and the need for clinical debate, discussion and research in this area.”

He said that a series of reports had highlighted a culture that “inhibited debate and discussion” and an unusually close relationship with transgender charities and clinical services.

He added: “We need to have an open discussion about what has gone so seriously wrong in this area.”

His wife, Sue Evans, was a mental health nurse and psychotherapist in the centre’s gender identity development service between 2003 and 2007. She said that “even back then” Mermaids and similar charities were “involved in helping formulate the materials that the service used, [and] how to talk about things”.

She said the charities had put pressure on the service to treat younger children, describing the political influence on clinical services as “of a different level” to what she had experienced elsewhere. “It was why I blew the whistle back then,” she said.

Mermaids' Susie Green, remember, had her supposedly effeminate son (Dad didn't like him playing with girlie toys) on puberty blockers then taken off on his sixteenth birthday for "reassignment surgery" (aka castration) in Thailand. Better trans than gay. That seems to have been the message she was keen to pass on to the Tavistock.

If you've done that to your son, I'd imagine you'd be keen to make out it's the normal sensible approach which everyone should adopt. Rather than, you know…a crime.