The UK Department for Education removed a charity targeted at transgender children from it’s official government guidance as a mental health resource following several scandals, Fox News reported Wednesday.
The charity, Mermaids, is a nonprofit supporting transgender and “non-binary” children. Townhall reported this month how a trustee on the board of Mermaids, Dr. Jacob Breslow, resigned after a speech he gave to an organization that provides services to pedophiles resurfaced.
Breslow is an associate professor of gender and sexuality at London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and served on the board of Mermaids. In 2011, he gave a speech with B4U-ACT, a Maryland-based organization focused on “ending stigma” around “minor-attracted persons,” better known as pedophiles.
In Breslow’s presentation, titled “Sexual Alignment: Critiquing Sexual Orientation, The Pedophile, and the DSM V,” he said that “alowing for a form of non-diagnosable minor attraction is exciting, as it potentially creates a sexual or political identity by which activists, scholars and clinicians can begin to better understand Minor Attracted Persons,” according to a report from the New York Post.
“This understanding may displace the stigma, fear and abjection that is naturalized as being attached to Minor Attracted Persons and may alter the terms by which non-normative sexualities are known,” he continued.
Following his resignation, Breslow said in a statement to BBC, that he left the organization so that he wouldn’t “distract from the good work the charity is doing to help transgender and gender-diverse children.”
Belinda Bell, who is chair of Mermaids, issued a statement clarifying that Breslow did not interact with any young people and families affiliated with the organization. Apparently, Breslow only attended one regular quarterly meeting.
Mermaids has been at the center of other scandals, as well. This week, Daily Mail reported that Darren Mew, who worked as the charity’s digital engagement officer shared “explicit pictures and sexualised images” online. Following Daily Mail’s report, Prime Minister Liz Truss said that the allegations against the charity should be “looked at properly.”
Fox News noted that it was revealed that children on the Mermaids’ online forum were trying to move conversations about hormone therapy treatments to “less closely supervised platforms.” And, a £500,000 grant to Mermaids was investigated by the country’s Charity Commission following allegations that the organization was providing “breast binders” to “transgender” biological girls as young as 13 behind their parents’ backs.
In July, reports broke that Britain would shut down its only clinic dedicated to “gender-affirming” care for children after a review that criticized its waiting lists and “lack of consensus about how the health service should assess, diagnose and treat young people seeking gender services,” Reuters noted.