Is transgender children’s charity‘ meddling’?

THE parents’ battle over a mother dressing their five-year-old son as a girl (Mail) is like mine. My ex shaved my daughter’s head and started calling her by a boy’s name. A Child And Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) therapist then ‘diagnosed’ her with gender dysphoria, based on coached information. Then Mermaids got involved. My daughter is just nine, but is ‘transitioning’ in school at the request of Mermaids who say it would be discrimination not to let her. My child is confused and expresses no interest in being a boy anywhere but around her mother — yet I’m chastised when I speak up. Mermaids representatives have even been in child protection hearings with her for ‘emotional support’. The woman they sent was nothing more than a bully. I’m told I must go along with ‘my child’s wishes’ and the CAMHS won’t listen to anything I have to say. I’m an IT worker, not a therapist, but when I suggest there are other issues at play in her home life, I’m seen as ‘non-supportive’ — but these other issues are the reason social services were involved in the first place. I just want my child to be happy and will accept it if this is what she wants but I need to be sure it isn’t something being forced on her. I’m supportive of whatever she wants to do, but I know this is invented by her mother. Why does no one listen to fathers, taking these children at their word when they’ve been told what to say by a mother? It’s ruining our children’s mental state and it’s not right.

Name and address supplied. I WAs very concerned to read of the parents in a bitter battle over their child’s gender and that the father had branded the charity involved ‘meddlers’ (mail). mermaids has done more to protect the interests of transgender children in the UK than any other institution, including the nHs which fails these children at every level. Parents have nowhere else to turn: mermaids has provided the support children and parents crave. We’ve worked with both shelley Bridgeman and susie Green, and have found them highly dedicated individuals, passionate about protecting transgender children. If shelley and susie ‘have no qualifications’, that’s because in the UK there are no training programmes in transgender care, bar a training certificate written by the adult transgender charity, GIRes. It’s the right of every human being to be treated with dignity and to be referred to by the correct gender. Use of the incorrect pronoun when referring to a transgender individual is an infringement of their human rights. Drs HELEN and MIKE WEBBERLEY,

specialists in gender care.