We are assured that trans people are the most marginalised minority in the world. It’s a claim that’s hard to square though with the attitude adopted towards the trans lobby by many of the world’s most powerful corporations. Unobjective celebration was on full display at the Annual Gala of the influential lobby group Trans in the City, held last month.

As trans activists mingled with the great and the good of global capitalism, there was all the “marginalisation” of a Davos junket. Founded in 2017 to promote more trans representation at senior levels of big corporations, Trans in the City now claims to have 300 “corporate partners”. Given that 600 people attended the Gala that works out at one globally important firm for every two guests. The kind of marginalisation of which most minorities can only dream.

Sponsors of Trans in the City include a roll-call of top brands from Barclays, Macquarie, Amazon and BP to Ernst and Young, BAE Systems and OVO Energy. In 2021, the Stock Exchange even put on a party in honour of Trans in the City complete with a light show and dancers. The latest of the group’s trans training days for executives was hosted by the software company Sage at their headquarters in the Shard building. 

Has any civil rights movement in history been as successful, so rapidly, as the trans lobby at inserting its agenda into what socialists used to call “the commanding heights of the economy”. If only the revolutionary Left of the past had known they didn’t need to storm capitalism’s centres of powers. They just had to get men to throw on a skirt and sashay past reception with head-tilts at the ready.

A question remains though. Do the corporate sponsors of Trans in the City really understand what they are supporting? One thing that suggests they do not was the centrepiece of last month’s Gala: Trans in the City’s 2024 Awards. 

As executives looked on, Trans in the City handed its top honour to one of the most controversial social justice activists in the UK. 

Trans in the City describes its CEO Award as “our most prestigious”, yet incredibly it decided to hand it to Susie Green, the former boss of the “trans child” charity Mermaids. She has often been criticised for promoting the notion that children as young as two can signal their trans identity. She claims to have become convinced her own son Jack was really a girl before he could properly walk. 

“As a toddler,” Green has explained, “he always headed for the dolls in toy shops”. He also “loathed having his hair cut”, she says, to dispel any lingering doubts.

So confident was Green of her son’s transgender status she flew Jack to Thailand in 2009 to have him castrated. This would have been a criminal offence if it had been conducted in the UK. This kind of “sex change surgery” can only be conducted on over 18s in this country (Jack was 16 at the time). The same rule now applies in Thailand too. 

Under Green’s leadership the charity was criticised for sending breast binders to girls against the express wishes of their parents. Green hit the headlines again after Mermaids appointed as a trustee someone accused of defending paedophilia. In his book Ambivalent Childhoods, Jacob Breslow describes his exhilaration as he watches an underage boy perform a sexualised dance. He also spoke at a conference of B4U-ACT — an organisation devoted to the needs and rights of “people with an attraction to children and adolescents”. Green claimed ignorance, but resigned soon afterwards amid public scrutiny.

Green’s activity since then has been just as undeserving of a business award — and raises just as many questions for the companies who sponsor Trans in the City and participate in its annual Awards.

In February 2023 Green joined Gender GP —  a private clinic which, before the banning of puberty blockers, helped families get round NHS restrictions on the drugs. Green could have been in no doubt about the  controversial nature of the outfit. In 2017 its founder Helen Webberley was fined £12,000 for failing to obtain a licence to run an online clinic.

In 2022, her husband and co-founder of Gender GP Mike Webberley was struck off for “wide ranging failures” which included prescribing testosterone to a 12 year old girl in breach of NHS guidelines and giving puberty blockers to a 9-year-old girl he’d spoken to for ten minutes on Skype. 

Green however characterised the Webberleys as the victims of transphobia. After she joined Gender GP, she published a long thread on twitter which detailed her connections with the Webberleys while she ran Mermaids. Here, Green admitted she had recommended Gender GP to families after they had been turned down by the NHS for puberty blockers. 

This was deeply irresponsible since it ignored the advice of patients’ own doctors. In 2019, after a series of complaints about its donation to Mermaids of £500,000, the National Lottery Community Fund carried out an investigation, publicly putting to Green claims made by complainants. The lottery fund was particularly concerned about the claim “Mermaids encourages families to seek treatments from Private Practice that don’t follow UK NHS guidelines”. Green denied ever having done so — a denial seemingly at odds with her twitter comments last year. 

How could a lobby group honour as CEO of the Year a woman who, amidst such controversy, left her job as CEO two years ago?

In its press release about the award, Trans in the City cited Green’s latest venture, a start-up called Anne Health. This, however, only raises more questions for corporations who fund Trans in the City — above all, perhaps, for the two major legal firms who sponsor the group and its awards, Clifford Chance and Clyde & Co.

Anne Health, the company of which Susie Green is now CEO aims to supply puberty blockers to children. These drugs were, however, banned by the NHS in May this year and have now been banned indefinitely by the Labour government. This followed the Cass Review, which slammed a lack of evidence that blockers do any good and pointed to contrary evidence that suggests they do harm. Yet ever since she set up her company Susie Green has openly admitted she aims “to exploit this legal loophole” of securing the puberty blockers from an EU prescriber to ensure vulnerable children can be medicated with these drugs the NHS has banned. 

Cannot law firm sponsors like Clyde & Co and Clifford Chance see the moral difference between advising clients to understand how best to reduce their tax bill within the law and saluting those who exploit a legal loophole to give a child a drug the NHS and the government of the UK has very specifically outlawed? 

Lest it be imagined the complacency of these law firms is the result of their distant relationship with Trans in the City, according to the group’s social media posts Clyde & Co’s own Diversity and Inclusion Head was actually on the panel of judges. 

It’s not as if Clyde & Co are too stretched to do a bit of Googling. The firm, which employs more than 5000 people, had revenue of £788m last year and offers to “navigate trade and commercial risks around the world”. If only it could navigate the risk of its Head of Diversity celebrating a woman like Green. Indeed, the website of Clyde & Co draws attention to the fact they offer expert insights into … the law around child safeguarding. 

Another legal firm that supports Trans in the City, Clifford Chance, should ask itself questions too. As a Partner Sponsor it donates £10,000 a year and has a long association with the Awards. Clifford Chance hosted the awards in 2021 at its Canary Wharf headquarters and was their headline sponsor last year.

You’d think Clifford Chance might be able to do some googling about Susie Green too. As one of the three biggest law firms in the UK it has revenue of over £2 billion. And it too is not unfamiliar with the importance of child safeguarding.

The choice of Susie Green as CEO of the Year defies simple common sense

On its corporate website it offers to advise clients on “navigating complex regulation” regarding … children’s online safety. The firm also makes much of its partnership with Save the Children. Perhaps one way to keep children safe would be to not “exploit loopholes in the law” around life-altering drugs?

The choice of Susie Green as CEO of the Year defies simple common sense. When Trans in the City plumped for Susie Green they picked someone who is currently CEO of a company, Anne Health, which was only founded in August last year. According to Companies House it has yet to post any accounts. How can someone possibly be CEO of the Year whose company’s performance we know nothing about?

Green’s CEO of the Year Award doesn’t just lend an air of respectability to her unethical behaviour. It gives the impression to potential customers and suppliers of Anne Health that they should place their trust in it. After all, they just have to look at all the major banks, accountancy firms and law firms who back her award and the lobby group that awarded it. 

Celebrating Susie Green as the acme of executive expertise is a perfect example of how transgender ideology is now given a free pass in the business world. Perhaps it’s time that firms stopped obsessing about being vehicles of social justice and concentrated instead on not sabotaging their own reputations. If not, they are the ones at risk of being marginalised.