Parents’ anger as child sex change charity puts private emails online
by Andrew Gilligan, Sunday Times:
Mermaids reports itself to information watchdog after Sunday Times investigation finds families’ personal data on internet.
They were some of the most private emails any mother of a nine-year-old could write. Her son, she said, had fully transitioned from girl to boy but was not coping — fighting fellow pupils, stealing from his parents and in emotional turmoil.
“I have wondered if we have done the right thing — allowing him to transition before accessing the clinic,” she wrote. “But I didn’t feel that I had a choice. He was telling me how much he hated himself and tugging at his clothes.”
In another message, a different mother recounted her trans son’s journey. If she dressed him as a girl, his birth sex, he deliberately wet himself so the nursery would give him boys’ clothes from its reserve supply, she said.
See also: Trans charity Mermaids “deeply sorry” for data breach, from BBC News
A charity supporting transgender children and young people has issued an apology after thousands of emails were made public online.
Mermaids UK said it was “deeply sorry” for what it called a “historical data breach” after it was first reported by the Sunday Times.
The paper claims the correspondence included “intimate details”, names and addresses, but the charity denies this.
Mermaids said it had taken immediate action and reported the breach.
In an official statement on the Mermaids UK website, the charity claimed that the emails were from 2016 and 2017, and that they were searchable only “if certain precise search-terms were used”.
It maintained there was “no evidence” the information had been retrieved by anyone other than the Sunday Times, or those contacted by their journalist…
…The Times, however, reported that the emails contained “intimate details of the vulnerable youngsters it seeks to help”.
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