Here’s the conclusion, but to get a feel for the true extent of the blind eye that was turned you really have to read the whole essay.

Maybe the Mermaids board belatedly realised that if they want their organisation to endure, they needed to get rid of the wacky front woman [Susie Green]. Ultimately, I don’t care why she went, because so much damage has already been done. But what I do want to know is this: how did so many people take Green so seriously for so long? Why did so many people turn off their intelligence when faced with this former IT consultant from Leeds? And how could so many LGBT activists champion and defend a woman who saw effeminacy — and therefore homosexuality — in her two-year-old and feel she had to “correct” this “defect”?

Green kept telling the story of Jackie because, for a long time, it gave her moral authority. No doubt, parents have long been great advocates for the rights of their marginalised children. But an alternative way of looking at Green is she was at least as good an advocate for her own rights: the right to put her child on untested hormone pills, the right to take her child to Thailand for a sex change. There is a fine line between using your parenting experience to help others, and validating your parenting choices by encouraging others to do the same.

I’m not waiting for celebrities such as Emma Watson to own up to their foolishness, mainly because I don’t care what Emma Watson thinks about anything. But all the journalists, teachers, editors and activists who endorsed Green’s obviously ludicrous ideas and shouted down anyone who didn’t, they really need to take a long look at their judgement, their motives and themselves. Because Green never once hid who she was.