Mermaids to train child gender Trust
Fears charity will put pressure on Trust taking over child gender care
An NHS Trust taking over care of trans children from the Tavistock clinic is being trained by the controversial charity Mermaids, The Daily Telegraph can reveal. The charity, which is under investigation by the Charity Commission, will provide sessions for staff at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust. The Trust is taking over specialist mental health support for children questioning their gender identity after the Tavistock’s service was found to be “not safe”.
AN NHS Trust taking over care of trans children from the Tavistock clinic is being trained by controversial charity Mermaids, The Daily Telegraph can reveal.
The charity, which is at the centre of a number of safeguarding rows and is currently under investigation by the Charity Commission, will provide sessions for staff at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust (SLAM) starting this month.
It comes as the Trust takes over specialist mental health support for children questioning their gender identity as part of a regional service set up to replace the Tavistock after it was found that its service was “not safe”.
Mermaids’ influence on the Tavistock was cited by some whistleblowers as one of the reasons why it lost its way, with claims that activists put pressure on clinicians to affirm children’s belief that they were trans and to prescribe potentially life-altering drugs.
The Charity Commission is carrying out a statutory inquiry into Mermaids amid concerns over its governance and management.
SLAM has insisted that the training is not related to their roles in the new gender identity clinic. It is the second year running that the Trust has had “LGBT+ awareness training” from the charity.
Medics who blew the whistle on Tavistock said that the trans charity’s involvement with SLAM is a cause for “concern” and that previous training has been “inaccurate and misleading”. They called for a “completely different approach”.
For eighteen years staff warned that Tavistock medics were being put under pressure by trans campaign groups such as Mermaids, leading to fear that they would be labelled transphobic if they questioned whether a child had gender dysphoria.
Young people were being rushed through assessments without other medical conditions being considered and potentially life-altering drugs were being doled out to children without evidence, a review has found.
After years of controversy at the Tavistock, an interim review, led by Dr Hilary Cass, said that it was “not safe” and there needed to be a “fundamentally different” service.
The NHS announced in July that the Tavistock’s gender identity clinic for children would be replaced by regional centres led by experts in paediatric health.
Sue Evans, a Tavistock nurse who first raised concerns in 2005, said: “My experience was that groups like Mermaids exerted a pressure on the clinical service which was not always helpful in terms of thinking about patients holistically.
“I have serious concerns about Mermaids providing training to staff at SLAM.
“The Mermaids teaching materials that I have seen were inaccurate and misleading.” SLAM will provide the specialist mental health services at the London clinic, led by a partnership between Great Ormond Street Hospital and the Evelina London Children’s Hospital.
A SLAM spokesman said: “This training is not related to the development of an early adopter service for children and young people experiencing gender dysphoria and incongruence.
“We provide high quality professional training courses ... to support the provision of personalised, safe therapeutic care for young people.”
A spokesman for the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust said: “The Trust has a clear position of independence, and engages with a number of support groups. “We are committed to providing an environment where staff can work thoughtfully with each individual patient with no preferred outcome in mind.”