Trans ideology has spread far beyond Mermaids
by Jo Bartosch, spiked:
[…] Mermaids may now be in deep water. But the mythology it subscribes to has already spread its tentacles through every school and local council. The monster is less a mermaid and more a hydra – cutting off one head won’t slay the beast.
The growth of the ‘transgender child’ as a concept has been rapid. Despite a paucity of research and a lack of medical consensus on this question, there are few schools or local councils that have escaped some form of trans-activist-led training about ‘trans kids’. Mermaids alone boasts of having delivered 143 training sessions to other organisations in the last financial year – including to social services, police forces and schools. What public officials are taught at these training sessions tends to be ideologically infused falsehoods – such as that failing to affirm a child’s transgender identity increases his or her risk of suicide or self-harm.
Trans ideology has been adopted wholesale by far too many public institutions, with often disastrous consequences. Children are now skipping school because they don’t want to use unisex lavatories. And girls are self-harming by binding their breasts. Countless families have been left to clean up the mess.
Worse, it is hard for families to speak out against what is happening. Parents who don’t affirm their offspring’s ‘gender identity’ are aware they can draw the attention of social services. For the most part, the people victimised by the new cadre of trans-trained public officials are those at the bottom of the heap – those without recourse to lawyers or who lack the financial security to risk becoming unemployable.