Mermaids Trustee Doctors and Their Influence on the NHS (Part 1)
Conflicts of Interest Embed Gender Identity Ideology in the NHS Without the Public’s Knowledge
The Mermaids Trustee in the Royal College of GPs
Ben Cohen and his husband Dr Anthony James have been described as a ‘power couple out to make a difference in the world for the LGBT+ community’. It is fair to say that they have certainly had an impact.
Ben Cohen is the CEO of Pink News, a news site that consistently pushes gender identity ideology. Pink News has a Snapchat series called ‘Pure Trans Joy’ which is described as ‘The show dedicated to sharing stories of Trans happiness from Pink News’. ‘Pure Trans Joy’ advertises transition stories which will mainly be viewed by children and young people. The series currently has 11.5k subscribers and is one of Pink News’ 20 Snapchat shows which reach ‘millions of British teenagers per month’, according to a now-deleted tweet of July 2022 by Ben Cohen. The overall message of ‘Pure Trans Joy’ appears to imply that its audience’s lives could be improved by transitioning - that they would be attractive, euphoric and similar to celebrities. Episode titles include ‘How Estrogen Changed My Life’, ‘My Chest Hair Gives Me Euphoria!’ and ‘Pete Davidson, Is That You? 👀’.
Meanwhile, Ben Cohen’s husband Dr Anthony James was a Mermaids trustee until December 2019 and simultaneously had an active role in developing LGBT education for all GPs in the UK. In this article of June 2019, Dr James said he was ‘developing a new programme of work with the Royal College of GPs on improving outcomes for the LGBT+ community [which includes] new e-learning resources, face-to-face teaching events and a national campaign to make general practice more inclusive’.
In November 2019, Dr James’ influence in the Royal College of GPs increased when he became the national Chair of Trainees, overseeing a committee of over 60 reps and representing over 14,000 GP trainees. There appears to have been some overlap between this and the role of Mermaids trustee, as Dr James stepped down as a trustee in December 2019.
In January 2020, Dr James and the Royal College of GPs’ ‘trailblazing new scheme’ was promoted in Pink News. The article stated that ‘Publicly and privately funded health centres, which treat millions of people each year, have been urged by activists to ask the […] gender identities of their patients and better equip themselves with the knowledge they need to treat queer patients’. This appears to explicitly acknowledge that changes to the taxpayer-funded NHS are being made by inherently biased activists.
We also cannot overlook the fact that Dr James and the Royal College of GPs launched this scheme in partnership with the Government Equalities Office. Did this government department know that they were working so closely with a Mermaids trustee on this national LGBT education scheme for all GPs?
Mermaids and associated gender identity activists have also taken part in training NHS GPs, as seen below when Dr Anthony James, Susie Green, Jake Graf, Sarah Brown, Katie Cornhill and Jay Hulme took part in a GP training session in February 2018. This was celebrated by Ben Cohen, who proclaimed that it was ‘one of the first ever training sessions on gender identity for GP trainees’. We must ask how much further inappropriate involvement Mermaids has been allowed to have in national UK medical education over the intervening 5 years and what the effects of its extensive influence have been on our taxpayer-funded health service.
In Part 2, I will describe how a current Mermaids trustee is also the Trans Rep on the committee of GLADD, the national Association of LGBTQ+ Doctors and Dentists.
It seems clear from my research so far that gender identity activists have had undue influence on the UK’s National Health Service and continue to do so.