Mick Hartley

We’ve had the Cass Report on puberty blockers; we’ve had the Supreme Court ruling on single-sex spaces. Mermaids was investigated by the Charity Commission and was found guilty of mismanagement. Yet still the trans cult survives.

Lauren Smith at Spiked – How the Blob keeps trans activism on life support:

You might think that, after all this, it would be curtains for Mermaids and the trans lobby. But like a cockroach emerging from the rubble of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, the whole sordid movement continued to crawl along….

On the surface, Mermaids stepped back and much of its funding dried up. But in reality, the same bodies that had previously been funding Mermaids, simply started funnelling their money into another trans charity instead – Gendered Intelligence.

Gendered Intelligence has historically had a much lower public profile than Mermaids, although it received broadly the same amount of institutional funding (£1.39million between 2015 and 2022 vs Mermaids’ £1.27million).

Since 2022, Gendered Intelligence has been given £2.5million from institutional funders. That includes more than half a million pounds from state-linked sources – £257,000 from the National Lottery, £134,000 from DCMS and £151,000 from Sport England. Even more strikingly, the report notes that several major funders entered this space for the first time only after the Mermaids scandal, including Comic Relief, BBC Children in Need, City Bridge Foundation, Trust for London and Sport England.

What exactly is this money supporting? Like Mermaids, Gendered Intelligence focusses on supporting trans-identifying youth, as well as providing ‘trans awareness’ training. Its influence can be found in schools, the courts, the NHS, sports and even theatres. A Policy Exchange report from last year found that, between 2020 and 2024, six councils across England paid Gendered Intelligence to provide trans-related training services to their employees.

Gendered Intelligence, then, is effectively Mermaids phase two. Or Stonewall. The same gender nonsense, but with less fanfare – working quietly behind the scenes.

Gendered Intelligence’s aim, at its core, is to normalise the idea that children can be transgender, and to encourage their social and medical ‘transition’ to the opposite sex. Some of Gendered Intelligence’s ‘advice’ to schools and other institutions includes telling staff that that being trans is ‘not, inherently, a safeguarding matter’, that parents should usually only be told about a child’s gender confusion with the child’s consent, and that young people should be allowed to use names, pronouns, uniforms, toilets, accommodation and sports teams that correspond to their self-declared gender identity….

The issue is not simply that Gendered Intelligence (or Mermaids, for that matter) has been handed money by the millions. It is that a charity promoting a highly contested – and demonstrably dangerous – ideology has become increasingly embedded in institutions that are supposed to be neutral. A charity that believes children can consent to life-changing and unnecessary medical procedures is being pumped with money to influence policy and public institutions.

None of this has been put to voters. There has been no democratic mandate for embedding gender ideology in councils, schools, sports bodies or judicial training. Yet through grants, training contracts and institutional partnerships, these ideas have continued to spread.

So ingrained has the trans cult become that there are clearly many many people – especially of the kind that work in the charity sector – who will never be persuaded that they’re in the wrong here; that it’s all nonsense. Like a religion, it’s not something they can be persuaded out of. Do we have to wait for them all to retire and fade away? A most depressing prospect…