Mermaids CEO, Susie Green, joins Dr Helen Webberley and Marianne Oakes to discuss gender variance in younger people.
Useful links:
www.mermaidsuk.org.uk
@mermaids_gender
@green_susie100
About Mermaids:
Mermaids is passionate about supporting children, young people, and their families to achieve a happier life in the face of great adversity. We work to raise awareness about gender nonconformity in children and young people amongst professionals and the general public. We campaign for the recognition of gender dysphoria in young people and lobby for improvements in professional services.
We prescribe hormones according to stage not age. Find out about our care for trans youth
Helen:
Great! So I’m really, really, really delighted to welcome Susie Green with Marianne and I this morning. Susie is the CEO of Mermaids charity and perhaps Susie, you might be the best person to introduce yourself and what you and Mermaids do.
Susie Green:
My name is Susie Green, I run the charity Mermaids we support transgender children and young people. I came on board as the first member of staff, as the CEO at the beginning of January 2016. But I’ve been involved with Mermaids for over 19 years as I made my first phone call to the charity when my daughter was 6, she’s 25 now which is a bit embarrassing- she’s very much grown up. We support transgender children and young people and their families. We also do a lot of work with professionals supporting trans kids as well including delivering training in schools and supporting GPs, that sort of thing.
Helen:
Brilliant! Well it’s lovely to hear of your work. So Mermaids has been going for quite some time then, if your daughter’s 25 and you phoned the helpline when she was 6. That kind of goes against this idea that this is a new-fangled thing Susie, which I’m sure you get thrown at you quite a lot from the kind of people who don’t understand it quite so well.
Susie Green:
Yes, I knew nothing about gender dysphoria when Jackie told me when she was 4 that God had made a mistake and she should have been a girl. I think I found a paragraph in a book talking about girlie boys, and it was only really a couple of years later when it wasn’t going away that I decided I needed to find some help for it. I did an internet search, I think it was Ask Jeeves, which is embarrassing but never mind, and about halfway down the page was Mermaids. Everything else was nonsense, but Mermaids was there and it had a helpline number in it and I phoned and spoke to Lynne who was one of the founding members. I mean, Mermaids has been around since 1995 and was pulled together by a group of parents who were attending the Tavistock, which is the NHS service; So, no this isn’t something new. I would say that finding support and finding help back then was much more difficult than it is now, obviously with the internet being so much more accessible. But I don’t think it’s anymore prevalent now, I think it’s just that people feel that they can talk about it, whereas back then it was really very very hard.
Helen:
Yes, I mean I still find working with children and families amazingly rewarding but completely heartbreaking at the same time. You must see some, well, I guess both ends of the spectrum stories really, is that how it is for Mermaids?
Susie Green:
When people phone the helpline or come through the email service then we offer them access, if they want it, for younger children it’s generally the parents group that parents join, for teens between 12 and 19 they can join our youth group as well. What we do see on youth group is a lot of people who aren’t supported by their parents, who don’t have anywhere they can talk about this other than online and we want to provide a safe space for that because we know that there are a lot of predators out there who would love access to vulnerable young people like this; so Mermaids is a space. For parents, we do have parents with children as young as 3 and 4 up to and including 19 joining our groups and again it’s that safe space to talk about how you’re feeling. We have parents who come in and they’re devastated, we have other parents come in who say that they have known this for some time and it’s just taken their child actually opening up and talking to them. So we have people at very different stages coming in at all times and from a couple of hundred parents at the beginning, which there were when I joined, to now we’ve got nearly 1500 parents in our parents group and that’s growing by between 40 and 80 people every month.
Helen:
Really? Wow!
Marianne:
While you were talking then about Mermaids being in existence from 1995, I’m wondering how you’ve noticed the dynamics changing in terms of trans boys over trans girls and the numbers. Has that changed within Mermaids or is that just a public perception?
Susie Green:
It has changed within Mermaids. So, when the charity first started all of the parents had children who were assigned male at birth, who identified as female, there weren’t any trans boys. I’d say that probably continued, the trans boys we would see coming in at teenage years really only started around 15 years ago. But, I’ve got my sort of theory for that, I think that kids who are assigned male at birth who identify as female and prefer what are stereotypically considered to be girlie things, that’s much harder and they get a lot more resistance, so they likelihood is that would get noticed and acted on a lot younger. Whereas, kids who are assigned female at birth who don’t identify as their birth gender, whether it’s because they identify as male or because they identify as non-binary, those kids are allowed to be tomboys and nothing is ever really thought of it. So, I think that’s why we see more of those young people coming to us in their teenage years when puberty starts, because up until that point they’ve just been allowed to be, whereas it’s not really the same for girlie boys.
Marianne:
Gender expression when they are younger definitely seems to be easier for trans boys, I think people are kind of more accepting of, dare we say, a young girl who is presenting masculine and nobody’s really questioning it. But when it’s a boy, it does seem to raise flags early doesn’t it?
Susie Green:
It does and I think that’s why we do see that families who contact us when their children are younger, it’s generally because their children are assigned male at birth and identify as girls. I think it’s not acceptable in society, I think it’s picked up much earlier. We do see trans boys, but not as many and I think you’re completely right in so far as it’s not seen as being acceptable and I think there’s a lot of patriarchy in our society and this goes against it; Kids that don’t want to be male and are saying that they aren’t male and that this is who they are. It creates much more friction in families as well, the majority of cases where dads are having a real issue, and it’s mainly the dads, sometimes mums but mainly dads, that generally is when the child is identifying as female.
Helen:
Susie, you mentioned there the parents who don’t feel able to support their children and the children therefore come to you without that support, we obviously at GenderGP see that same scenario coming through and I don’t know about you Marianne but they’re always very difficult. We so wish the parent’s were there through their whole journey, so what advice would you give to parents, to those children, to us, to other supporters of trans families?
Susie Green:
I think the main thing, and this is also born out by international research and international guidelines, is that listen to your children and try not to get too caught up in what the eventual outcome will be, but support them in the here and now. Because, that means you will have a relationship with your child where you can have those open and frank conversations and so if things do shift then they will be able to talk to you about it, but when you shut your kids down then the likelihood is that is going to damage your relationship with them regardless. I have seen families where children have identified either as non-binary or identified as other than their birth gender and with the right support and with a really open, honest dialogue all the way through have at some stage decided that that’s not for them.
Marianne:
I think we’ve got to accept, you’re right Susie we’ve got to support them in the here and now and one of the obsessions is what if they change their mind? The trouble is if we don’t deal with the here and now the effects of that carry on through their life. For example, once they start with severe mental health issues, they don’t just disappear when they’re 16, that can carry on right through their life as well. Another example is eating disorders, which I see a lot with young trans boys, and once you’ve got an eating disorder that isn’t something that just disappears, it stays with you for life, like any addiction I suppose.
Susie Green:
Yes, and I think the thing is as well with all of that is that as soon as you get into a situation where you’re shaming your child for the way that they feel about themselves and who they think they are, then that can’t be a good thing and that’s born out by studies in terms of that if a child is supported then their mental health and wellbeing increases, that there’s definitely a drop in suicidality and self harm. If they start those behaviours, they’re then very difficult to drop so I think it’s just about making sure you’re listening, listening and hearing them and not just hearing and dismissing.
Marianne:
And that it’s ok to change your mind at any time, I think one of the things that concerns me at times is that children feel pressured to keep moving forward because again they’re frightened to keep talking to their parents about what’s happening and it’s ok to go in stages. When I work with some of the children, I do get a sense that they want to talk to their parents, it isn’t that they’re not questioning their gender identity, it’s just that things are moving too fast for them sometimes. Being able to have an open dialogue without fear of judgement, I think would be really important.
Susie Green:
I think I’ve seen this where parents have just got so caught up with wanting to have a definitive answer to what is going to happen, how it’s going to happen and to be sure and sometimes you can’t be sure. This is too complex an area, especially for kids who are trying to work out their way through. I see this a lot with the young people who are assigned female at birth, it may be that they go through stages including identifying as non-binary, then they go more trans-masculine, then they may go back to being non-binary or they decide that being female is fine for them, but they define how they live as female and they don’t do it based around stereotypes. Being able to challenge the stereotypes is really important. I know kids often feel that if they put their parents through so much already by transitioning and their parents are being supportive, then saying that this isn’t what I want anymore is actually quite hard, so this is all about listening and constantly allowing that evaluation. But, at the same time if you’ve got a kid who’s saying this is who I am, you don’t need to question them over breakfast every morning as to whether this is how they feel today.
Helen:
Yes, I think you hit that nail on the head there, that growing up from nought to, well I’m nearly 50 and I’m still understanding myself, it’s a continually changing process isn’t it? How you feel, how your sexuality feels, how your identity feels, how your political view feels, how you want to express yourself in the world next week or last week and you know gender is no different. Particularly as these children are growing up, I think that exploration is really really important and we see lovely, lovely, lovely children who one month have completely short hair and absolutely everything masculine and the next month they’re like ‘actually, do you know what? I’m just going to see what it’s like to wear some makeup today like my friends are wearing’ and what is wrong with that? We don’t need those alarm bells, ‘oh my goodness, change of mind here, have I done the wrong thing as a parent? Have I done the wrong thing as a doctor? Have I done the wrong thing as a teacher’ I think allowing these children to explore their gender in an uninhibited way has got to be our vision for the future really.
Susie, for the benefit of our listeners, you mentioned the non-binary word there a few times. I know it’s a tricky thing to understand, it’s tricky for me to understand sometimes, it’s tricky for parents, for friends. Do you mind, in your experience, giving your snapshot view on how that feels to be non-binary, or for a child to be non-binary?
Susie Green:
I would say that it’s really only been over the last sort of 5 years that young people have been expressing themselves more openly in this way and what I’ve seen is young people that are saying ‘actually I don’t identify with my assigned birth gender, but I also am not going all the way over to the other side either’ and refusing the be defined by the binary. We know that in biology that gender is isn’t binary, we know that sexuality isn’t binary so I think that this is young people actually saying ‘this is not who I am, I don’t fit as male, I don’t fit as female, so actually what I’m going to do is live in that space in between.’ I think that the main thing is that people seem to have massive confusion around what that means and ‘oh you’re a boy, you’re a girl’ and actually there’s lots and lots of conditions where there’s chromosomal issues, there’s hormone issues, where that isn’t as straightforward. But I think the bottom line for these kids is that they’re going ‘I’m not going to let anybody else define me, this is myself and I’m going to define me. My major overriding concern is when people try to say ‘no you’ve got to be one or the other’ what difference does it make to anybody else? Because all that young person is saying is that ‘I’m not going to fit into a binary.’ What difference does that make to me? What difference does that make to you? It makes none whatsoever, but if it makes them comfortable and it makes them happy, then they’re not hurting anybody else so why shouldn’t they be supported to be themselves?
Helen:
Again, I think you hit the nail right on the head right at the end there for me, if they’re not hurting anybody else, what is the difference? To those people that would judge families, judge young people, judge those people that support trans people, no harm is being done to the outside world here, let people live the way that is comfortable for them and their world. Then people like Marianne and I, and you Susie and all the organisations that we work with can support that.
Talking about the kind of medical support, Susie, if you had a beautiful rose painted picture of the future, how would medical support for families and children be in the future?
Susie Green:
I’ve just got back from WPATH, which is the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, they held their 25th Anniversary Conference in Buenos Aires and the thing that really struck me there was actually how proactive many of the American clinics are and if we could have the same kind of care as is provided in Washington and California, their waitlist is like 3 to 4 weeks and then in terms of assessment etc that young people go through, that can take a few weeks. At the moment the current services within the UK with 18 months as a minimum wait time at the moment, young people are held in limbo in a situation where their bodies are often changing and they’re in massive distress. I know that this is due to an overwhelming rise in numbers, but I also think that there needs to be a really good look at services and how they’re run, to actually work out ways for them to be more responsive and get rid of that wait time which is incredibly damaging.
Helen:
So, on the converse of that, is the criticism that maybe children are being pushed through too quickly, is that a possibility?
Susie Green:
Well that isn’t borne out by the research and it isn’t borne out by the data, I think that if you have an assessment that is thorough, then I don’t see that that sort of narrative can really be pushed. We know that kids and young people who can’t access services, the likelihood is that they have known for some time before they have maybe disclosed that to their parents, or maybe the parents have known for some time and have been waiting for their child to talk to them. Let’s be clear as well, nothing is given prior to puberty, so if a parent of a 6 year old went to a clinic and said ‘my child is expressing as female’ or ‘my child is expressing as male’ or ‘as neither and is non-binary’ then in fact no medical intervention would be given in any case to that child until they had reached the beginning stages of puberty. So, first off, there’s nothing other than social transition, which is non-medical, for younger children anyway and for kids who are in the beginning stages of puberty or maybe this feeling of gender dysphoria has become more apparent for them as they’re going through puberty, the main things is around arresting the development of the secondary sexual characteristics because those are the things that cause massive distress to young people. As their bodies change and their bodies are different to the way that they feel and who they are a gender dysphoria diagnosis would not be given at the drop of a hat, the assessment needs to be well done and it needs to be thought through but there’s nothing to say it can’t be done quickly to deal with the very genuine need that these kids have.
Helen:
I think for me the most distressing, and then the most rewarding children we have seen are those who have had to endure puberty and the changes that just march on everyday and there seems to be nothing that that child can do to stop those changes happening. And very often that child is withdrawn into their bedroom, out of school, they don’t go and play on the street, they don’t present themselves to their friends anymore, they kind of hide in their bedroom, hide behind their computer screen with a different anime icon that they use to portray themselves. Then once you actually start medical intervention, stop those changes happening and get that child’s confidence back again and the child starts talking again and comes out of their bedroom and starts reintegrating into society; that for us is just so wonderful. You know, that’s what we’ve really got to continue to fight for in medical care and I’m sure Marianne, you get to see a lot of that joy, don’t you, when working with people?
Marianne:
I sometimes message you, don’t I Helen? When I’ve spoken to some parents and it’s reflected to me that I’m the first person that they have spoken to that’s not tried to catastrophize what’s happening or be the voice of doom, that it’s just a friendly voice, and sometimes it’s the first friendly voice and it’s the first time that they have had some hope. You know, just that in itself, as you were talking before I was just thinking about, when we are talking about prepubescent children, actually supporting the parents to prepare them for what might be coming up and to help them to help their child, I don’t know what you think Susie, but it just feels like there isn’t a lot out their, in terms of practical help. How do we create a good environment for a trans child who is socially transitioning to feel empowered, to keep their self esteem?
Susie Green:
We do see families with very young children and our job is not to tell them whether or not their child should transition, our job is not to tell them whether their kid is trans or not. We’re there to support the family and we’re there to give them the tools and information to actually work their way through this and work out what is best for them. One of the things that I’m involved in is the standards of care that are used globally to treat children and young people and adult trans people, are being revised at the moment and I’m on the new children’s chapter and it is so much a part of the ethos around these clinicians who are from all around the world, and I’m in that group as a stakeholder supporting and representing parents, is not to get too caught up in the eventual outcome. As I said before, it’s to support the child in the here and now, to make them feel listened to, to make them feel supported to be themselves and to make sure that their environment is a supportive environment and there is a very very strong push against what’s called reparative therapy or conversion therapy, which is where you try to encourage or force a child to live as their birth gender and to ignore their feelings of gender dysphoria, that’s been roundly condemned and has been picked up on as being extremely harmful. Whether the child turns out to be trans or not listening to them is incredibly important, in terms of the attachment to parents and the way that they live in the world.
Marianne:
That’s an interesting question as well, whether they are trans or not and I suppose it is just about allowing them to discover what are their feelings actually saying to them, rather than trying to interpret it for them, have we understood that correctly?
Susie Green:
Yes, absolutely! Because the fact is we live in such a gendered society that, you know, the stereotypes around how a child should express themselves means that if somebody steps outside of that norm, even a little bit, then it’s generally picked up on. And, I think we need to be breaking down those barriers and allowing kids to explore without feeling shamed and we should allow kids to have a freedom of expression without being shamed. Now, the fact is that gender variance is very different to kids who suffer with gender dysphoria, and the kids who suffer with gender dysphoria are the ones who are insistently, persistently and consistently saying ‘this is not who I am,’ ‘I am a boy’ or ‘I am a girl’, and it tends to be much more binary in young children. What I have seen, sort of like over the years, working with families and supporting families is that some kids who start out very binary, when they realise that actually they are supported to be themselves and that gives them the freedom to explore, it gives them the freedom to think about who they are and it may be that their expression isn’t quite so extreme in one way or the other. Teenagers tend to be much more fluid.
Helen:
Yes, I think that brings me back and for the benefit of our listeners, the really important point that you made earlier Susie, when these children are working this out, working out where they fit on this gender spectrum, medical intervention is not having long-lasting effects. So we may have paused puberty by using puberty blockers, just to give that time in early teenage years, give that time to see a full male or a full female puberty is going to cause big problems for that person later in life. But medical intervention in terms of sex changing hormones, or sex changing surgery as we see so often recently in the newspapers, is a much later step, isn’t it? Once a lot of this exploration has been done and, you know, a lot of these children that we see are screaming and crying just for a very simple intervention, which is ‘please can you just stop my puberty and give me a breathing space? Give me and my family, and my school, and my friends, and my environment a breathing space, so that I can work out what the best place is for me.’ Those puberty blockers are reversible, you can stop them and puberty just carries on as it would have done naturally, if that’s what the right thing is for that child.
Susie Green:
I think we see so much of the relief in terms of young people, when they are given the opportunity to pause their puberty so that they’re not living through the changes that they abore. Not least with my own daughter who as soon as her male puberty began to make its affects she actually started cutting herself. And when we couldn’t get the puberty blocking medication in the UK at that point, because the NHS didn’t arrest puberty until 16, which would have been too late for her, she told me that she would rather be dead than lose her voice and have facial hair and she was terrified. As I say, as soon as that began she began to cut herself so for me, finding a doctor, which ended up being in Boston, to stop and give her that space and that time was absolute paramount to me and I really don’t believe that she would have made it through a male puberty if I hadn’t taken those steps.
Helen:
I think, as a doctor, when we take a history from a person we say ‘What medical problems have you got? Do you smoke? Do you drink? What medication are you taking?’ and I look at the list of medication that these young people are on, the antidepressants, the anti-psychotics, the tranquilisers that these young people are being prescribed by their mental health services, when actually the young person and the family are saying ‘Please could I have a blocker?’ and it’s ‘No you’re not having a blocker, because we don’t know if that’s the righ thing for you, but here you are, here’s all of these really strong medicines.’ And I just want to pull every hair on my body out, because why can’t people just see it? Give the child the blocker that stops pubertal development and you won’t need those other drugs. The anxiety, the depression, the stress will lessen and give that child a chance. We’ve got a lot to learn in our country about that and I think it’s really refreshing to hear you talk about the international centres such as those we heard of at the WPATH, it’s really good to see that times are changing and hopefully here in the UK we’ll be able to follow that example soon, which would be lovely.
Susie Green:
Well I’m hopeful the new guidelines will be sort of in around a year, is the target I think, they’re doing some systematic reviews at the moment and what is really striking is the clinicians that are part of both the children’s chapter and the adolescent chapter are very clear that it is so important to keep the dialogue open and to continue to talk to your child and to make sure that they understand that you love them regardless and that your love it not based around a predetermined, that you’re not saying ‘I will only love you if…’ that it’s ‘I will love you whatever.’ I understand how difficult it is to not have certainty around this and parents, and I was one of them, just wanted to know what would happen, so actually letting go of that is really hard.
Marianne:
Interestingly enoughI’ve spoke with parents that have recoiled, I think would be the right word, at the Tavistock, because they feel when they go there that the control of the support they can give their child is taken out of their hands, that they have absolutely no say or control over it. It’s difficult for me because I’ve never been involved with the Tavistock, but I’m just wondering whether that’s something that parents fear as well? That actually this is something that your child’s talking about something that you can’t even get your head round, we’ve been conditioned to feel and think in a certain way and now your child’s challenging all of that. It’s not just the loss of control or control of parenting, shall we say, or the inability to be the parent in that situation, but also then we hand over to other services, like we’re handing our child over, do you know what I mean?
Susie Green:
Yes, I mean we get mixed reports with regards to the Tavistock clinicians and some really, really great relationships have been forged, but the ones that seem to work the best are the ones where the parents are supported as well as the young people. So, it’s sort of like a collaborative approach, and also looking at the environment that that young person is in as well. Because the majority of problems that my daughter had were outside of the home, it was the school environment, the local environment and the amount of prejudice that she received in those spaces and as hopefully as trans kids, trans young people and transgender people in general are more visible then it will become less of an issue. I think we have still got a long way to go and I think hopefully international guidelines and international best practice will permeate through our health services as well as those globally to actually make it a better place, a better world for trans people.
Helen:
I think Susie, one of the most beautiful memories and images I have of your Mermaids residential courses is of sunshine and children of all ages just happy, skipping, kicking footballs, laughing, painting, getting dirty and having fun. It doesn’t matter what they’re wearing, it doesn’t matter what they look like, you know they are just free and as I say skipping and laughing without any external judgement, just wonderful support. And, that has got to be our future, inside Mermaids residentials and outside of them in the future. You know, we’ve just got to let these young people and their families be free, be happy, express themselves as they want to, wear what they want to, identify as they want, if they need some medical help along the way I think that we need to listen to the family, listen to the child and see what medical help they’re needing from us. And then in society in the future we will have a lovely cohort of young and middle aged and older adults who on the outside you can’t tell if they were assigned female at birth, assigned male at birth or whatever and does it actually matter? The integration in society is just there and accepted.
Susie Green:
I think we are sort of 20 years behind the gay movement and a lot of the arguments that are being used in the papers against transgender young people and children and particularly trans women as well are all the sort of things that you heard about Section 28, the narrative around kids that’s being put out regards older trans children grooming younger trans children is exactly the same things that were being said about other gay children grooming other kids to be gay and it’s all based around that moral hysteria over something that’s not really happening. And it’s also highly offensive to trans kids because that language in itself implies some level of child abuse and I just think it’s disgusting that adults who have nothing to do with this, it’s not going to affect their life, it’s not going to affect what they do tomorrow or the day after believe that it’s ok to target kids and to label children with such offensive narratives. I am completely bemused by the fact people think that that’s ok.
Marianne:
What I would say is, just looking at my own experience of how it was growing up in the 60’s and 70’s and I look how it is now, yes it has come forward leaps and bounds and there is conversation around this now, but it’s the tone that’s disturbing. It’s great that we are able to be here talking about this and I’m sure Susie you’ve seen since 1995 the changes in this whole subject, but like I say it’s about changing the tone; yes we are talking about it, there is help out there, we’ve got to change the tone of the conversation if we can.
Susie Green:
I think we need to be looking at the positives, we need to be looking at the positives that come around when you listen to kids and you allow them to just be themselves and what a difference that makes in their day to day existence, how much happier they are which means that they will grow up to be good friends, they’ll grow up to be good parents, they’ll grow up to be good people because they have had the needed support when needed it. You make people feel bad about their very selves, what are you going to do other than engender shame and self-loathing and it just is so obvious to me, I just don’t understand why people have this massive moral panic about whether or not a child is trans or not. I just find it really baffling as to why people are so invested in something that’s never going to actually make any difference to their lives whatsoever.
Helen:
I totally agree and it is abhorrent, it’s disgusting and the wider society who is allowing it needs to take some action. I always say whenever an article is written, or a Tweet is put out or a Facebook post, the comments that are allowed underneath it are just hideous and shocking. We would never be allowed to write that about black people or Christian people or gay people or any other minority group; yet these comments about transgender people and transgender children go unmoderated, go allowed, go applauded and someone out there needs to take some responsibility for this and stand up and shout and say ‘No, this is not acceptable behaviour.’
Susie Green:
I agree, unfortunately the regulation around social media, the regulation around what’s in the printed media is just not there is it? I mean, IPSO had 8,000 complaints in 1 year and I think they upheld 1.
Marianne:
I don’t know where it starts, but I think it would help if the politicians would be outraged. It isn’t about whether they understand or not but like we say it’s the language that;s used that we should be outraged about and we should be allowing the professionals to do their job and stop this demonisation I suppose. I can’t help but feel it needs to start with the politicians, I might be wrong.
Susie Green:
I think it needs to come from both areas, I think it needs to come from the law, it needs to come from MPs and the government and it also needs to come from regulation and standards in terms of journalistic standards that are sadly lacking. Which means that anybody who has got any kind of anti-trans narratives feels entirely comfortable attacking trans kids, attacking trans women because they know nothing is going to be done about it.
Helen:
I mean certainly for our listeners today, I’m hoping we get lots of discussion, lots of comments, lots of shared narratives and shared stories. I’d love to hear other peoples ways of how they have managed to support someone that they know who is trans or a trans family, or a trans life that affected their world and how they managed to navigate through. We don’t want any of the nasty comments at all, what we want is future ways to educate, there is a massive need for education, and Susie you have shared so much of your knowledge today and I thank you for that. We need to educate children, educate families, educate those people in the streets who have never met a trans person but feel yet that they can comment on it. Your organisation does wonderful work in schools to help the anti-bullying, I think the future is going to be rosy and certainly I’m looking forward to seeing so many more trans children skipping happily and playing football happily, jostling and knocking around together with kids of all types, whatever that type might be. I think that’s the road to the future of trans children, who will then turn into beautiful and well-adjusted trans adults.
Susie Green:
Yes, and that’s what needs to happen.
Helen:
Thank you so much Susie for coming on today, it’s been really lovely to have you and I applaud heavily the work that you and Mermaids do, thank you.
Susie Green:
Thank you for having me.
