Hundreds of thousands of pounds in taxpayer money is being given to a transgender charity reportedly banned from contacting a family after the mother forced her seven-year-old son to live as a girl.
Accounts for Mermaids UK published last week revealed it has been granted £35,000 by the Department for Education (DfE) and a total of £138,000 by the national lottery’s Awards for All fund and the BBC’s Children in Need appeal, The Sunday Times reports.
The charity has also advertised “same day” cross-sex hormone treatments for children – a treatment banned by the NHS because it causes irreversible changes and can compromise fertility later in life for anyone under 16.
The controversial group gave evidence to a parliamentary enquiry, which recommended making teaching transgenderism to school children “mandatory” and allowing teenagers to change their gender without parental consent.
In a High Court case, reported last year, Mr. Justice Hayden removed the child from his mother after finding she had caused him “significant emotional harm” and “pressed [him] into a gender identification that had far more to do with his mother’s needs and little, if anything, to do with his own”.
After the judgement, Mermaids attacked the “horrific decision” and insisted that the child did, in fact, identify as a girl, and said there was “no evidence at all to support this judge’s views”.
However, it has now emerged that the charity has been “ordered to have nothing to do with this child following their removal”.
The child was home-schooled and dressed in girl’s clothes, the court found. After being removed from his mother, the boy was sent to live with his father and was sent to school, and has since “asserted his own masculine gender” by living life as a boy, the judgement said.
Until last Friday, the youth section of the charity’s site featured a message from Dr. Birgit Möller, a doctor based in Hamburg, offering fast-track hormone treatment for children.
“If the families are interested we would set up a long evaluation appointment at our clinic (3-4 hours) and afterwards an appointment with the endocrinologist,” Dr. Möller wrote.
“In case of an indication for hormone treatment he would prescribe it the same day.”
The message was taken down after The Sunday Times contacted the charity. Mermaids UK then claimed it was not the subject of the court order, but actually, it was the family that had been instructed to not contact it.