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This whole situation seems like a perfect storm of... a lot of things, starting with the fact that it's fundamentally about children, which tends to bring out the least rational, most passionate sides in people, both for better and for worse. I've only heard of this Mermaids group in passing so I'm not intimately familiar with them, but the way you describe them and your further notes about trans activists speaking on behalf of trans kids brings to mind this old blog post that resonated with me, particularly "It felt like I was talking to an AI designed to maximize the number of trans people." The idea of such activists having any influence on actual care providers seems completely FUBAR to me, and likely to cause truly monstrous travesties.
I admit part of my reaction here is colored by a couple of personal factors: 1. I knew a temporarily FTM transman who decided to detransition back to woman partway in and who had felt betrayed by the community that had pushed her to transition and the permanent physical changes she had gone through during her initial transition as a girl in her late teens, and 2. I could easily see myself as having been pushed to transition MTF if I had been born 30 years later and grown up in the same places I have; I am quite fine with being cis male now as an adult. These make me feel that the dangers of false positives are very important to acknowledge and work around. It's only through cold empirical study that we can nail down the proper ways to detect and serve the true positives and false positives, and activists whose motivations seem to be to maximize the true positives with little-to-no concern for everything else should have precisely zero influence in that study.
I think back in 2016-2018, on the actual Slatestarcodex comment section (likely one of the open threads), I had a conversation with someone who believed that calling out the media lying/misleading about Donald Trump in a negative way was worthy of derision, because doing such would help Trump to get (re-? I don't remember the exact date)elected. I disagreed strongly, because my view was that the media spreading such deceptions was discrediting itself, and it was only by calling out such deceptions that the media could be pushed to correct itself and stop its self-discrediting, and it's only by having a credible media that the populace could be expected to take seriously true negative things that the media claimed about Trump. And as someone who felt very strongly about not wanting Trump as POTUS (or as 2-term POTUS), I wanted the media called out on each and every such deception, as harshly as possible.
I feel similarly about this situation. Medical care for potentially trans kids is very important to nail down, and whatever medical institutions come up with the standards for care need to have credibility that they did their homework in a scientific, rigorous way. If there's any indication of undue pressure by certain activist groups to these institutions to put their thumb on the scale, that destroys their credibility, leaving us at square 1 on figuring out this very important issue. So I would expect that anyone who actually cares about helping potentially trans kids would make it a high priority to make sure that such credibility-destroying influence gets called out and corrected. And contrapositively, anyone who's hesitant to call out such influence for whatever reason is someone who can't be trusted to actually want what's good for such kids. And this goes just as strongly for any sort of anti-TRAs that might exist who behave in a way as to maximize the number of true negatives, even if that means maximizing false negatives, who might have undue influence on medical institutions.
That's all pretty meta, and I wish I could form some meaningful opinion at the object level, but at this point, I'll admit that for most CW topics, and certainly this one, I'm just mostly suspicious of anyone who has strong opinions either way at the object level due to how, at the meta level, the ability to find actual true knowledge of the object level concepts seem to have been so corrupted, often intentionally.
On the risks of 'suicide-baiting' + AI
This story seems like a hoax to me, but perhaps this is another attack angle to counter the AI menace:
Perhaps trolls / pro-humanity could start unleashing AI trained with biased prompts similar to this...
You Will Never Ever Be a Woman. You Must Live the Rest of Your Days Entirely as a Man, and You Will Only Grow More Masculine with Each Passing Year. There Is No Way Out.
Or even come up with the most perfect suicide-bait.
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