Staff revolt ‘ousted’ Mermaids boss due to her ‘incapable leadership’
‘There’s been scandal after scandal and a lot of staff ask: “Why hasn’t it done due diligence?” There’s clearly been some failure’
The boss of Mermaids was forced out amid a staff revolt, including complaints that she was not transgender, The Daily Telegraph can disclose, as a statutory inquiry is opened into the scandal-hit trans charity.
Susie Green suddenly stood down last week after six years as chief executive of the embattled group, with no interim boss in place and the move shrouded in secrecy.
But a whistleblower has revealed disarray and anger within the charity’s Leeds and London offices.
Ms Green faced a staff backlash over her “incapable” leadership, culminating in a “nail in the coffin” report, which trustees received last week. The internal audit, launched earlier this year by the Social Justice Collective, 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 children.
While campaigners have long raised concerns about the group’s “unfettered access to children” and support of gender-affirming healthcare, those in 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 that Ms Green was gone and her replacement “needs strong equality, diversity and inclusion experience, ideally lived experience”. Some staff took this to mean being transgender.
There has been an exodus of staff from the charity, with some junior transgender staff claiming they were “treated like children” by Ms Green and that 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 sex-change.
Last night, the Charity Commission escalated its probe into Mermaids by launching its highest level of statutory investigation “due to newly identified issues about the charity’s governance and management”.
The regulator’s inquiries into safeguarding concerns began in September, when a Telegraph investigation found it was agreeing to send potentially dangerous chest-binding devices to 14-year-olds against their parents’ wishes. The fiasco deepened when Dr Jacob Breslow was forced to stand down as a trustee in October after it emerged he spoke at a 2011 conference for a group which promotes support for paedophiles.
The whistleblower told The Telegraph: “A lot of new board members came in who were Susie’s friends. No one really knew they were there, which was an added shock when the whole Jacob stuff happened.
“We had a staff call then. Mermaids said: ‘Staff can drop in and say what they’re feeling.’ Susie wasn’t on that call and there were a lot of staff asking for accountability ... but no one really got answers.
“People were very frustrated around Susie’s lack of being on the ball with staff, talking to staff about what happened, and shoving her head in the sand without giving answers to anyone.
“More recently there’s been scandal after scandal after scandal and a lot of [staff ] are like, ‘Why hasn’t Mermaids done its due diligence of Jacob or background checks on staff?’ There’s clearly been some failure.”
Mermaids has also launched the first legal challenge of its kind seeking to strip LGB Alliance, a same-sex group critical of gender ideology, of its charitable status. This left some staff “confused as to why Mermaids was taking it on”, the source said.
Of Mermaids’ 10 trustees, half were appointed last summer alone. It is understood that eight out of 44 staff have left in the past two months, half of them transgender and many of them junior managers or officers.
An insider also claimed that three out of around five people of colour in the charity have left this year.
The whistleblower claimed: “One of the big issues with Susie was she is incapable of being self-reflective, so when anyone took any complaints to her it would fall on deaf ears ... even when it was ways of suggesting how handling things could be improved. It would be like you were attacking her.
“A lot of junior staff, especially trans ones, were the ones left on the sidelines and almost treated like we were children. Some people had put in complaints. More junior staff – the younger trans people who you would hope an organisation for trans young people would support – are the ones most dissatisfied at how it’s being run. They were getting treated the worst.”
Last night, a Mermaids spokesman confirmed: “Earlier this year Mermaids decided to carry out a frank and honest appraisal of our internal culture and how we measure up in terms of equity, diversity and inclusion. As part of this,
we commissioned an independent external report, which highlighted a number of significant challenges for us.
“We know we must do better and we are absolutely committed to doing so for our staff and our service users. We will be implementing the report’s recommendations as a priority.”
Earlier this year, this newspaper also uncovered evidence that Mermaids’ online help centre advised users who presented themselves as being as young as 13 that controversial hormone-blocking drugs were safe and their effects “totally reversible”.
In one month alone, there were discussions in the charity’s moderated forum for 12 to 15-year-olds on how to raise money to start taking drugs and the best way to take testosterone. Discussions of breast binders on its Youth Forum date back to 2019.
The whistleblower claimed that Mermaids’ forums are “out-dated” and “the way it goes about safeguarding, the way it interacts with young people, really needs to be modernised”.
The Charity Commission said it has not received “necessary reassurance or [been] satisfied” that there has not been “serious systemic failing in the charity’s governance and management”. A report will be produced in due course.
Last night, the Conservative MP Miriam Cates, a member of the Commons education committee, told The Telegraph: “It is clear Mermaids has been responsible for multiple safeguarding breaches – including encouraging children to harm their own bodies – which is why I called in Parliament for a criminal inquiry.
“We should urgently consider how Mermaids has for so long been allowed unfettered access to vulnerable children and been funded by taxpayer cash... despite multiple warnings.”
Mermaids’ advert for an interim CEO offers a salary of £80,000.
Mermaids was run by volunteers until 2016 when Ms Green, who took her child to Thailand for a sex-change operation, became its first staff member.