Victoria Derbyshire today and Girlguides

Dd has just started brownies and loves it.
I was browsing through the booklets and saw it described as a space for girls and then read the trans policy and rolled my eyes.

TerfyOwl - you sound like such a great Guider. Your post made me quite teary but then it made me rage stroke that all this wonderfulness for girls is being thrown away. For the penis.

terfyowl, what a beautiful post.

That’s exactly my concern with it. Bad men and teenage hormones are on my list, but way below just letting girls be girls in a girl-only environment.

Terry - you sound amazing. I wish my dd could come to your unit! Sadly I've just seen on twitter that gig are proud to accept 'all girls' including young people who self ID as girls. I could cry.

SomeDyke - this is exactly my issue. My unit are teenagers (I have run every unit from brownies up, but currently teens) and a LOT of our discussions centre around the physical reality of being female. We ran the Millenium Development Goals meetings and have discussed maternal mortality rates, female rights to education, (and implications of not having access to products for menstruation in the same breath as not having shoes) and every single discussion is centred around biology. It is the mere act of biological sex that determines this shit. Alongside this, we discuss what it means to be female in our own society - we discuss to a micro level what the expectations are for girls in their own schools (I have three schools feeding my unit) and we very gently (or sometimes quite robustly) question why these social expectations are in place, whether they are reasonable, and how they can free themselves from gendered expectations to be who they want to be. We run a ‘reduce reuse recycle’ night which is a giant clothes swap - alongside lengthy discussions about ‘how women are supposed to dress’ and look at female politicians and media coverage. We discuss peer pressure and independent thought and being true to your own beliefs. I have girls who wear giant teenage mutant ninja turtle hoodies, long stripy socks, and have strong feelings about the health implications of deodorant (they don’t use any). I have girls who have different coloured hair on a monthly basis. I have invisible kids in grey, and loud mouthy kids in a rainbow who need to tell everyone everything all the time. Last week they made personal flags to represent themselves and one girl announced she was bisexual and literally waved her flag. No fanfare, no gushing, just ‘thank you for sharing, this is a safe space’.
I am trying to support these girls to negotiate their lived experience as females, in their own lives, with international context.
I have LITERALLY no intention of telling them that some girls have penises, budge up, and I can’t talk about how to handle periods at camp or in the backcountry in case it’s transphobic. I want these kids to question everything and figure out where they stand. It’s the very opposite of spoon feeding them ideology and telling them that must ignore basic reality. (Don’t get me wrong - we also talk a lot about ethics and being kind - but we also question the context and consider gendered expectations of kindness and how they affect behaviour). Moral responsibility shouldn’t be gendered.
I’m a Guider because I passionately believe that there has to be a space that allows girls to just be, and later, to negotiate their own context as women in a gendered society. To be able to critically consider their own place.
How the actual bejesus do I do that with a biological male in my group? I’d be splashed all over fecking Twitter for attempting conversion therapy on a vulnerable trans girl. For encouraging him to question gender in and of itself.

They are failing every leader (and of course the kids) if they don’t address this head on. They simply cannot ignore sex. It’s a protected characteristic under the Equality act and any compensation could include a separate award for injury to feelings as well as the PI claim

I strongly advise that every leader reading this thread get organised and spell out your concerns including the real risk of litigation.

Thanks for that. namechangedasimaguider. And a brilliant job, btw.

cake

I don't really understand what you're trying to say.

The bit of safeguarding that understands the sex specific nature of certain problems is being removed.

It doesn't alter other safeguarding issues like bullying and wearing lifejackets when on water.

Which it will be if they haven’t updated it to deal with the trans issue

My understanding is that if the safeguarding policy used is negligent then volunteers could be held liable in civil courts.

That’s a PI type claim. I linked up thread somewhere

The safeguarding is there to protect all children so children from children, children from leaders.
As a side note it also adds a bit of protection for leaders from false allegations.

Datun, to clarify: all the leaders, in all the sections, are volunteers. From Sunflower in Rainbows, Brown Owl in Brownies, in guides and Rangers: we are all unpaid volunteers.
We have to be DBS checked, and we do get training including safe guarding and basic first aid. If we want to take girls away, there is a lot more training and lots of rules.

There are some paid staff at GGHQ in London, such as the chief executive Julie Bentley but all of us on the ground are ordinary volunteers doing this alongside our "normal " lives.

Sorry if you already know this, but it's worth repeating.
Quite frankly the safeguarding issues this raises are above my
nonexistent paygrade!

Cake

Sorry I'm still misunderstanding then? Protect the trans child and girls from whom? Each other?

DBS check only picks up known offences or warnings. Policies and procedures do the rest.

As I've said, tell me I've got a suspicious mind, but you name one other 'civil rights' movement, spearheaded in the main by adult males who never had childhood dysphoria, most of which are fetishists, so concerned with kids sexed bodies? I can't think of one.

Plus if we follow Queer Theory logic, biology is not real, it's fluid, it's an internal ineffable soul. By that logic, what is 'child' and what is 'age'?

A massive part of teaching boundaries to little kids is teaching them about bodies and body parts and names for things. Like teaching them 'what is in your pants is private' and now we are waving in an ideology that says 'penis is female' and submissive gendered expectations means you are a girl.

My instincts tell me there's something very wrong with that.

I mean the safeguarding in place to prevent predatory adults.
Clearly the safeguarding isn’t in place to protect the trans child or the other girls. Which I’ve previously said

How can safeguarding be in place already? Universally ALL safeguarding advice is that it should be for sleeping, washing and undressing, segregated by sex, and GG are saying it's by GENDER?

Teaching girls to have boundaries is part of safeguarding.

Those rules are there to protect adults too. Also, frankly, saying 'girls can have willies' and 'this is our new brown owl' (big burly bloke in a dress) is a bit groomy, telling girls not to trust their own reality.

Plus Im assuming female leaders will have to bunk up and share a tent with a transwoman, all the 'women' together.

PS Ian Huntley, who btw is now saying he's a woman called Lian, was a serial rapist of women, police later admitted they let him get away long before he killed children. I think that's the kind of thing that WOULD show up on an enhanced DBS, even if he was never charged. news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3313303.stm

Im not disputing men are more likely, thats evident. However what i am saying is that the safeguarding should be in place already to prevent it from happening .
safeguarding mitigates it, its reasonable precautions you take to prevent it. It still happens sadly, because predators are just that.

Why do we bother DBS checking women? Because there is still that risk, all be it smaller than men and thats my point.

Snibble

Quite, as the OP said, when she tried to bring it up she was told that girls sometimes have penises. Rape victims the world over rejoice!

I've spent a bit of time on trans reddit researching something else, it's quite blatant, I suggest, if you've just had your lunch, you don't look at the lactation threads - they even openly joke that 'blanchard would have a field day' - and no, you really do NOT want to know what they want to lactate for.

Datun
Having to constantly have the women do it too argument is a tedious waste of women's time and energy. By every global measure, men are completely out of control. God knows why they say women are 'emotional' - men seem to have very little control of their fairly sick impulses.

Totally agree re TV and depictions of women, read an article once that called it 'crime porn' - female fear as titillation and gruesome depictions of 'realistic' female murder as entertainment.

And yes the male gaze, we can't even talk about female arousal, desire and pleasure really - it's all about the man, which is why girls are under so much pressure these days, boys pressuring them for pornified sex. My 13 year old niece was overheard saying 'I hope I have big boobs, then boys will like me' - surely Guides should be a haven from this shit? Not spending with boys who think femininity is a bloody civil liberty.

I mean when you've got 12 year old girls turning up to the GP with a prolapsed anus (that's quite common these days, and surveys of boys said they like the idea that it HURTS) then call me old fashioned, I think risk of assault and coercion is a valid concern.

Why can't girls and women have the postage stamp sized space that's ours alone? The entire f*cking world is a man only space, I can't even walk my dog in the woods on my own! Or walk down a dark street at night, and now they want into the girls guide camp?

I think we just need to get better at saying 'we said NO' and that's it.

"Sexual assault in schools by boys against girls is massively on the rise, up skirt photos, sexual bullying."

GG claims to care about this sort of thing - their sexism in schools report specifically mentions that girls are at risk from assault by boys.

I have no idea how they square this with the idea that one can literally become the other on a word.

It's so tiring when people ignore the sex specific nature of predation.

There are 10 to 15,000 male sex offenders in prison. There are 120 women.

If we managed to stop male violence, the entire problem would almost disappear overnight.

We are even incapable of being murdered unsexily if you watch high gloss US crime dramas.

Our dead bodies are sexy.

This is why we need feminist discourse - and of course men - whatever they call themselves - they find it really hard to get to grips with this stuff even if they try to.

The men on that thread - they embrace the idea that the purpose of a woman / girl is to have her every move sexualised by men.

Female sexual predation is very very different to male, which is why segregation by sex EXISTS, it's why safeguarding EXISTS, it's why facilities for the most serious sex offenders don't even exist in the female prison estate. Other thing to remember is since the GRA in 2004, crimes committed by biological males have sometimes been counted in the female stats, I've just written to my PCC about this for clarification for my region. Stats could be wrong, as males could be being counted as females.

Fair Play for Women did a good report on this: fairplayforwomen.com/3781-2/

Girls are five times more likely to be preyed on by a paedophile than boys, paedophiles are absolutely always men bar the very odd anomaly (and then women tend to cover up for men, procure for men, or otherwise be in thrall to a man, it's a very different offender profile).

78% of child rape victims are GIRLS, look at all the other stats, it's GIRLS who are at more risk than boys, from MEN. Sexual assault in schools by boys against girls is massively on the rise, up skirt photos, sexual bullying.

There was a girlscout leader in the States, trans woman, used his position to rape girls in his care. It's already happening. If predators will train a therapist, become a priest, court and marry a woman and wait until she has children and they are the right age for his preference, then I seriously don't think it's beyond impossible that predatory men will exploit Gender ID.

I mean look at that Mesmac story in the press last week, a predatory paedophile managed to get himself to the HEAD OF SAFEGUARDING for a large metropolitan council and onto the board of a charity dealing with sexually traumatized young people, with one of the staff harassing a female child sexual exploitation expert who'd tried to raise the alarm about their safeguarding policy. Wherever there are gaps in safeguarding, there are predatory men. And then look what happens to whistleblowers, partic if they are women.

I think any appeal to GGA needs to include the predator angle. Plus even if AGPs aren't predators, are we really saying it's OK for them to work out their fetish in girls' safe spaces? They get aroused by crashing boundaries, being 'seen' as a woman, what we really don't think they are not going to have dick tingles with a load of girls having to call them Brown Owl?

That thread is an absaolute object lesson in

Male gaze
Male assumption that their view = THE view
Total lack of understanding of how objectification of women and girls damages everybody

This stuff about women and girls getting turned on by the reflection of themselves in the eyes of the male observer is very complicated and is a male constructed narrative.

All the films with women and girls being sexualised going about their daily lives - seemingly we are incapable of dressing, undressing, walking, eating, anything without doing it sexily and this male gaze narrative is taken and turned back on us with the claim that we do indeed turn ourselves on by imagining ourselves / or actually dressing, undressing, eating, sleeping.

How often in films ads etc do women put tights on in a way even appraching the way that normal women actually put tights on when dressing on an average morning?
How many women approach taking a shower as if they know a gaggle of men are watching and they are keen to get them aroused?

I think you can argue it changes the whole ethos of guides, its culturally an issue for some of the attendees, its not what people wanted when they were consulted. But the predator aspect shouldn't form part of the argument, because as you say theres already that 2% chance

CakeOfThePan

Except knowing that 2% of predators are women, cannot and does not, have any impact on sex segregation.

Which is the issue here.

I think you lose some of the power of the argument by saying only men can be predatory, as it is simply not the case. It is the case that more men are, but it isn't solely men. The safeguarding is (and should be) in place to protect girls from predatory women as well. Abuse is abuse is abuse regardless of the perpetrator.