Starbucks promoting a “transgender youth” charity through the sale of Mermaids cookies is “incredibly sinister” says author Douglas Murray.

“This is the crossover of one of the ugliest bits of capitalism with one of the most sinister things in our time,” says Murray.

Murray, who dedicates a significant chunk of his most recent bestseller The Madness of Crowds to discussing the hijack of transgender issues by the radical left, expressed his fury that so controversial an issue should be so casually used for marketing purposes by an international hot beverage chain.

Starbucks — the British branch — is currently donating 50p of each Mermaids cookie it sells to the British charity Mermaids.

According to the Mail:

Mermaids was set up by Susie Green, who took her son Jack – now Jackie – to Thailand for sex-change surgery at 16, because the NHS would not operate on someone so young. The charity advises Government agencies, schools, the police and social workers. But critics say its advice is not objective, because it is run largely by parents with a transgender child.

Murray believes the association between Starbucks and Mermaids is toxic.

“Mermaids is a British charity which is actually quite notorious. It should be interrogated far more than it is. It claims to be supportive of young people who don’t know what gender they are and to advocate for transgender youth […] I’m very sceptical about this whole thing. We’re allowing something utterly mad to go with the adults giving up. This idea that because you’re feeling a bit feminine one day and a bit masculine on another and it’s all so confusing — no, I don’t accept all of this. I offer a weeks’ supply of actually edible croissant from any of Starbucks’ competitors to anyone who can actually define for me what ‘non-binary’ actually means. Mermaids is an incredibly sinister organisation. I don’t accept that there’s such a thing as transgender youth. I think the adults have left the room on this and it is not for a major multinational like Starbucks to jump on board something on which so little has been thought about ethically and practically.”

He added:

“Telling confused and unhappy children that their lives can be solved by going through incredibly difficult hormonal therapies including puberty blockers and then at a later stage being made into an approximation of the body of the opposite sex? No. No. No!”

Starbucks has backed up its campaign with a TV commercial in which a crop-haired girl called Jemima deliberates as to what she’s going to call herself when she orders her soy latte from Starbucks. Jemima eventually plumps for the name James and the viewer is clearly meant to be full of admiration for her stunning bravery in choosing to give herself this (admittedly very splendid) new Christian name.

But Murray believes this is just another case of glib corporate virtue-signalling by a multinational which can’t even do one job properly.

“There is just one thing Starbucks needs to do right — make coffee — and it can’t even do that. I don’t like the counter of inedible products — croissant that look like rock cakes. It is a great failure that such a dreadful chain should perch in every town in the world. I already had an instinctive, vitriolic loathing of Starbucks. But in the last week, my prejudice against the chain has been ramped up to category ten.”

Why is Starbucks doing it? For the same reason all the most evil and hateful banks and multinationals do it — as a cheap way of deflecting flak from their many critics who see themselves as the unacceptable face of capitalism.

Murray says:

“What these companies are doing are very loud, ostentatious appeals to show that they are on board with the zeitgeist. Barclays Bank, for example, after 2008 had lots of things it should have done and a lot of blame it should have got. The cheapest way you can get is to soak up the woke agenda and do it very visibly. So Barclay bank goes for LGBT Pride Month in a HUGE way. And Starbucks demonstrates it wants to transgender children to the opposite sex with their Mermaid cookie.”

Douglas Murray’s full interview can be heard on Podbean, iTunes, YouTube or at Delingpoleworld.com