Mermaids, the world’s most powerful champion for pediatric transition, is trying to challenge the charitable status of LGB Alliance in a British court chamber this week. The result is an unmitigated disaster as all their witnesses have crumbled under cross-examination by attorneys for LGB Alliance, offering weak but testy resistance until forced to make statements that could very well damage the lawful charitable status of Mermaids instead.

At the very least, witnesses presented by the so-called Good Law Project on behalf of Mermaids have absolutely established why same-sex attracted people need their own charitable organizations separate from “trans,” “queer,” and the ever-expanding alphabetical microidentity movement. The defendants have made their case during the plaintiff’s presentation of their own case. As legal actions go, Mermaids vs LGB Alliance is turning into an historic legal debacle. “Gender identity” is being examined in isolation, consequence by consequence, under the unsparing illumination of courtroom cross-examination, where it becomes legal record.

The wheels of justice grind slow, they say, but also exceedingly fine. We are witnessing ideological annihilation through witness examination in a trial of facts. This is an extinction of magical thinking, a twilight of the gender gods.

Genderdämmerung.

Tribunal Tweets has been keeping up with the action, so if you want the next best thing to a courtroom transcript, here is the link to their Substack page collecting all the pertinent information, filings, and threads covering the testimony.

Also, we aren’t a law firm at The Distance and this is not a legal analysis. The closest I got to law school was college mock trials, in which I won several witness awards, including at the national tournament, though it was over two decades ago. So this will be about witnessing, not lawyering.

There are two main ways a witness can damage their own side of the case: by assertion, or by admission.

For example, a person on trial for murder might assert that they were in another city when the crime was committed, and this assertion might be proven false. Or the same defendant might admit they were in town at the time the murder was committed.

That is a simplistic, extreme example, but the principle applies to being a witness in any sort of trial process, whether it be a divorce proceeding or a product liability case. Good lawyers prepare their witnesses so that all their assertions and admissions are credible, advance the case, and don’t damage it. This is also why all lawyers advise defendants against testifying in their own defense: they might make damaging assertions or admissions under cross-examination.

No such preparation seems to have taken place with the Good Law Project. Everyone involved appears to have been too confident in their own rightness to consider their own case objectively, or imagine the questions they could be asked. Call it criminal contempt of court process.

Fundamentally, the plaintiffs claim that the LGB Alliance not only hates, but actively harms transgender people. However, with the case presented in full, no evidence of actual harm or hate speech has been presented. LGB Alliance has certainly expressed a different set of views about public policy issues than Mermaids, but that is hardly a crime. Courts generally frown on political opinion-policing through litigation.

In trying to press this case, witnesses for Mermaids have exposed their own biases on the stand instead.

The Distance

Diane Ehrensaft, 'Satanic Panic' Woo Peddler, Now Champions the 'Gender Angels' Among Us

Diane Ehrensaft believes in “gender angels.” Really. She says so. Not only are they real to her, these invisible, ineffable gender angels express themselves to her from the very beginning of a child’s life. She can read them as easily as a children’s book…

Read more

7 months ago · 15 likes · Matt Osborne

Whatever their public stance, the organization is still operating under the pseudo-religious rubric that children can be “born in the wrong body.” John Nicolson, actual member of actual Parliament, asserted that Mermaid’s political lobbying benefits“someone who is born into the wrong body.” This religious faith in gendersoul/body dualism is never questioned.

Mermaids assert that no “trans child” would ever grow up to be gay or lesbian if left alone, or that any “gender nonconforming” child is ever pushed down a transition pathway, or that anyone is ever harmed by transition. Detransition never happens, they assert, again entirely on faith.

Furthermore, because someone can be born in the wrong body, all sexual attraction — all, not just same-sex attraction — is transphobia. All of it.

In court, representatives of Mermaids are now on the record asserting that all sex-based boundaries are hateful of transgender people.

Single sex prisons, sports, spaces, restrooms, etc, are all transphobia, according to Mermaids.

Lesbians refusing to date men (“trans lesbians”) is transphobia, according to Mermaids.

Gay men refusing to date “trans men” (women) is transphobia, according to Mermaids.

Heterosexuals refusing to date “trans people” of the same sex as themselves are transphobes.

Any legal or factual or interpersonal recognition of human sexual dimorphism, for whatever purpose, is a form of hatred against the special new sacred caste of people who were born in the wrong body, and any objection to this bizarre agenda is deemed “hate speech,” according to Mermaids.

Now consider the admissions. Mermaids has admitted that they brought the case for fear that their own charitable contributions and grant applications might suffer if the LGB Alliance is allowed to exist. ‘We are in it for the money’ is hardly an impressive argument to anyone. Fear that the public might be deterred from giving you money if an organization talks about your gay-sterilization program is not a good legal argument for shutting up that organization.

Mermaids, ostensibly a charity for children, has also admitted that they advocate for changes to British law that would reduce the requirements of legal transgender status (marked by a GRC, or “gender recognition certificate”) so that fully intact adult men can “identify” as women with the stroke of a pen.

Under questioning on this point, Nicolson asserted that the phrase “lower the bar” is “emotive.” He asserted that the changes proposed by Mermaids would be “less intrusive” for men who want to intrude on women, their spaces, their prisons, their sports, and sexual boundaries, backed by the coercive power of the state. However, Nicolson admits that this is what he wants.

Asked to recognize that LGB Alliance might have legitimate concerns about this erosion of sex-based rights, Nicolson dismissed the idea that any concerns might be valid. Concerns are just hate, even when they are not written in hateful language.

On this, he is the expert witness.

Nicolson is expert in nothing else. None of the witnesses for Mermaids have been experts in anything but their own hatred of LGB Alliance. All of them have admitted that they are not experts in any medical or legal field related to pediatric transition.

Moreover, they have asserted that the organization does not offer health care advice and admitted that their advice to WPATH, the global authority behind early puberty blockade everywhere, is not based on evidence.

“I would expect that given the difficulty in this area, any charity would be very careful in focusing on this area and would need deep specialism,” Mermaids CEO Dr. Belinda Bell observed. Quite.

Asked factual questions on the issues related to gender identity, Paul Roberts, CEO of LGBT+ Consortium, also admitted that he has no expertise in law, statistics, or medicine.

Meanwhile, the message board on the Mermaids website is a pseudoscientific echo-chamber promoting early transition for kids “born in the wrong body.”

Perhaps the most damaging admissions so far are that none of the witnesses have actually read the so-called Cass review, an interim report on the forensic investigation of Tavistock. They have only “skimmed it.”

Asked whether children at the now-shuttered Tavistock GIDS clinic were “improperly diagnosed and locked into a treatment pathway” as the Cass report says, Dr. Bell replied that “I don't think that a reasonable or only interpretation of what Dr. Cass is saying” in a report that no one at Mermaids has actually read for themselves.

Nicolson rejected the word “child” in reference to minors being sterilized, complaining that it is “emotive.” He prefers the term “young adult” to describe a minor child being sterilized. They are old enough to “have a responsibility,” he asserts.

However, Nicolson did admit that those children are ultimately sterilized by the medical pathway of “affirmation.” He knows what is happening. He just doesn’t care.

Even read at a distance, from an unofficial transcript, these assertions and admissions seem damaging, and not just in this case, but for future cases. Mermaids is culpable for sterilized, traumatized children worldwide. This might be their undoing. As the lawsuits begin over Tavistock, and inevitably in other countries as well, the official transcript of this trial will be used against Mermaids, over and over again. Parts of it will be read into Congressional and Parliamentary records when the damage comes due as hearings and debate on legislation.

It might be used to challenge the charitable status of Mermaids once the final Cass review picks apart their role in the travesty at Tavistock. Sterilizing gay and lesbian kids is the most hateful, homophobic thing imaginable. At the very least, an organization which promotes such harm should not be receiving public funds.

Susie Green, the founder of Mermaids, told a TED Talk audience years ago that she recognized her son was gay, that her husband was homophobic, that she gave her son a puberty blockade rather than just let him play with “girly” toys, and then flew him to Thailand for “sex reassignment” at sixteen. This scandal has always been visible to those who wanted to see it.