I’ve been shocked about a lot of things over the last few days. The things that were already public knowledge about Mermaids are shocking enough; the sixteenth birthday penis removal holiday; the data breach; the suicide baiting; the lifelong medicalisation of teenagers, many of whom are autistic, lesbian or gay; the links to disgraced doctor, Webberley; the judge who barred Mermaids from contacting a child whose mother was forcing him into transition; the sending of breast binders to children without parental knowledge or consent; the mixed age forums and events (13-19 anybody?); the admission that not only were senior Mermaids staff not any kind of experts, they had not even read the Cass review; the list of serious institutional failings goes on and on.
You wrote "either [Mermaids] failed to perform the most basic safeguarding checks on one of their trustees, or they knew exactly who they were asking to sit on their board and didn’t care."
There is a third, even more horrific possibility - that they actively wanted JB on the board, and sought him out.
It is possible that this is true, and I thought about mentioning it. I think that even if true, it's very unlikely to be proven. So I dickered about whether to include it. Generally speaking, I'm against attributing to malice what can be explained by incompetence. I very badly want to see an end to all this. Strategically, that means I want to stick like glue to actual facts. Bypassers are unlikely to be persuaded by your option, I felt, they might think it was "hysterical" or "conspiracy theory" or whatever. But yes, you are entirely correct in offering this as a third possible explanation of their behaviour. The actual key point is that there is no good explanation for why a children's charity would end up with an open nonce defender on the board. None at all.
Oh that's beautifully observed.
One small point struck me while reading though.
You wrote "either [Mermaids] failed to perform the most basic safeguarding checks on one of their trustees, or they knew exactly who they were asking to sit on their board and didn’t care."
There is a third, even more horrific possibility - that they actively wanted JB on the board, and sought him out.
It is possible that this is true, and I thought about mentioning it. I think that even if true, it's very unlikely to be proven. So I dickered about whether to include it. Generally speaking, I'm against attributing to malice what can be explained by incompetence. I very badly want to see an end to all this. Strategically, that means I want to stick like glue to actual facts. Bypassers are unlikely to be persuaded by your option, I felt, they might think it was "hysterical" or "conspiracy theory" or whatever. But yes, you are entirely correct in offering this as a third possible explanation of their behaviour. The actual key point is that there is no good explanation for why a children's charity would end up with an open nonce defender on the board. None at all.