Girl Guides are now GIRL ONLY! - Thread 2

[CohensDiamondTeeth]

I hope no one minds me starting thread 2, I clicked post on my last reply but the thread had filled up.

There was some interesting discussion had, and on the last page @LostMySocks posted that she was thinking of sending a positive email to HQ, which I think sounds like a great idea. Maybe those who support this move could do the same? It would show Girl Guides that people are paying attention.

Link to the first thread here: Girl Guides are now GIRL ONLY! | Mumsnet

The first post of the thread was so good I'm just going to copy and paste it here too. Girl Guides statement is incredibly begrudging in tone.

@Iamwhoiamwhoareyou · Yesterday 14:41

Following April's supreme court ruling, the Girl Guides have FINALLY made a statement and will remain GIRLS ONLY - Finally closing the door on admitting trans members or allowing BOYS to invade female only spaces/camp (which, would be done without informing parents that their daughter would be sharing a room with a biological male!) - I have a previous post in feminism chat for anyone wanting to read the previous thread on this

EMAIL RECEIVED HOT OFF THE PRESS 5 MIN AGO -

As the parent of a young member in Girlguiding, following April’s Supreme Court decision relating to sex and gender, we wanted to give you an update. Many organisations across the country have been facing complex decisions about what it means for girls and women and for the wider communities affected, including us.

Girlguiding’s governing charity documents set out that the membership and people who benefit from our organisation are girls and women. In April, the Supreme Court ruled that girls and women are defined in the Equality Act 2010 by their biological sex at birth.
Following detailed considerations, expert legal advice and input from senior members, young members and our Council, Girlguiding’s Board of Trustees has made the difficult decision that Girlguiding must change Girlguiding must change, following the Supreme Court’s ruling.

From today, 2 December, it is with a heavy heart that we are announcing trans girls and young women will no longer be able to join Girlguiding. This is a decision we would have preferred not to make, and we know that this may be upsetting for members of our community.

There will be no immediate changes for current young members but more information will be shared next week.

Most adult roles, including unit helpers, district helpers and administrative support, are already open to all, so we are confident that no volunteers will have to leave the organisation.

Girlguiding believes strongly in our value of inclusion, and we will continue to support young people and adults in marginalised groups. Over the next few months, we'll explore opportunities to champion this value and actively support young people who need us.

You can find our full statement and updated policy on our website.

We are proud to be the UK’s largest youth organisation dedicated to girls and is focused on creating an equal world for girls and young women. For over 100 years, we have been a welcoming space for all girls to have new experiences, support their communities, build friendships and grow their confidence.

While Girlguiding may feel a little different going forward, these core aims and principles will always be the same. We remain committed to treating everyone with dignity and respect, particularly those from marginalised groups that have felt the biggest impact of this decision.

If you have any immediate questions, we have our special support team in place, to give volunteers, parents and carers the best support we can. We are asking Girlguiding HQ, trading and country/region staff to refer any volunteer or parent who has questions about this announcement. Details below.

Contact [email protected] or 020 7532 3970
All calls/emails will be confidential, and the service will be open 24hrs, 7 days a week.
Find out more, including how this team will handle personal data.

Denise Wilson (Chair of Trustees), Felicity Oswald (CEO) and Tracy Foster (Chief Guide)

"I prioritise inclusion, unless actual safety is the priority - which in many day-to-day cases it isn't".

That's not how safeguarding works @SolidMam . But you have demonstrated, what a professionally dangerous idea looks like.

Given that you've claimed to work with the Brownies, if you've got that notion from their safeguarding training, there's an even greater problem than anyone realises. (Tbh, I don't actually believe that's anywhere in any reputable safeguarding training, even in a captured organisation)

It is awful that any boy is allowed to play in girls leagues at all. They can play in boys teams no matter what their gender identity is.

Given that he will have no option to play in boys leagues after that age it seems pretty cruel to put him in girls leagues now. Or do you expect he will simply give up a sport he loves when he reaches that age?

What a way to limit your own child!

And here is that fundamental lack of understanding of the safeguarding principles.

You 'assume' that "the mere presence of a male doesn't always constitute a threat to safety."

A strong safeguarding stance is actually to understand that female people have a right to expect privacy and dignity as well as safety. And people who 'assume' that a female person doesn't need to be in a designated single sex provision away from male people fail at providing safeguarding to female people.

This continues to come around to your belief that sex based rights are reductive and no longer needed.

It also feeds directly into the fact that you don't seem to understand the environment has been created where female children will not either express their distress or recognise that they are allowed to express distress or merely discomfort where such weak safeguarding is involved.

🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩

I have HUGE fucking concerns about this

There are red flags all over it.

Okay, as an example, there is much less of a threat and women are much more safe when there are cubicles. Most swimming pools now have mixed sex spaces with cubicles in them for privacy.

Toilets for both sexes also have cubicles in them, which protect modesty and improve safety. If more public toilets were designed and understood as public pool changing rooms are, in a mixed sex way, it would not be as divisive an issue.

The problem is chiefly one of public space design. Unfortunately, it seems many people here think the problem is the design of my daughter.

It is not necessarily or always a safety issue to have a male (transwoman or not) in same-sex spaces. It is simply not true.

Male hes a boy but @solidmam Has lied to him since before he could talk that he was a girl because apparently he pointed a pictures of women in story books and thats how she knew that her son was really a girl

I am out and about but I wanted to address this

It is not necessarily or always a safety issue to have a male (transwoman or not) in same-sex spaces. It is simply not true

You are right. If full informed consent is given by every single user of a single sex provision, and the law permits it (which is unlikely), it may not be a safety issue.

Consent is a massive part of safeguarding though. And fullly informed consent.

Cubicles take up a lot more space than communal change areas which is why there is, more often than not, a mixture of both.

Your child is male and has no place in spaces where girls and women change.

You should be advocating to males to accept your son's gender identity as part of being male (which it is), rather suggesting that planners and women and girls should move over for him.

if he is there then many women and girls will self exclude. But, hey they're just female right? They simply don't matter as much in the hierarchy that your gender beliefs seek to impose on others.

Mixed sexed faculties improve safety for who exactly @solidmam?

Based on what research?

You might want to get your receipts in order before asserting “facts”.

“The problem when this common-sense approach is ignored was revealed by Andrew Gilligan in The Times in 2018. Through a freedom of information request, he found that the vast majority – just under 90 per cent – of complaints regarding changing room sexual assaults, voyeurism or harassment reported at leisure centres and public swimming pools took place in unisex facilities. Of these, sexual attacks made up 67 per cent.
There were 134 reports of sexual assault in changing rooms over the two year period 2017 to 2018. Of these, 120 took place in gender-neutral changing rooms compared to just 14 in single-sex changing areas. A further 46 sexual assault allegations were made about attacks in other areas such as in the pool, in a sports hall or corridors. These are not included in the percentages.”

https://fairplayforwomen.com/unisex-changing-rooms-put-women-in-danger/

How is my language unstable? I've been consistent, I think.

Male/Female for sex

The rest, we differ on our use of, especially on who gets to be a 'woman'.

She's having a hard time recognising that her relationship to Brownies will have to change, so I suppose events such as this will inform our conversations about who sees/affirms her as a 'girl' and who doesn't.

To be clear the “facts” you are stating are in direct contradiction of evidence.

See my post referring to research.

I've just realised i've missed a key word here.

Paragraph 2 should read

'Given that he will have no option BUT to play in boys leagues after that age'

Yes, this was a pivotal moment for me too.

They really do.

But you've LITERALLY in the post ABOVE THAT said you that you disagree about prioritising girls' safety in the context of your own kid playing football in the team they prefer. Are you aware girls have suffered life-changing injuries in female sports due to your attitude?

Meanwhile, I find it telling that you've not replied to the only post with unavoidably numbered questions posted twice for your attention on this thread.

To be honest, I'm losing patience again and am back to wondering about trolling. It's like my earlier "reading Jane Austen, then saying you liked the bit with the spaceship" analogy. There are different opinions - fine. There are starkly different opinions - also fine. There's debates about the challenges of balancing sex-based rights versus trans rights - fine. But this isn't any of those. There's too much that's too absurd, rather closer to Pride and Prejudice with Aliens than it is to what I signed up for: polarised opinions and rational debate. Contradictions within single posts and adjacent posts, naive comments that (after holding back as long as I could, I'm going to say it now) are perhaps better described as stupid comments, and appalling generalisations about other groups' rights that, in any other context than women and girls, would see you (wrongly, to my mind, but I'm an outlier in this nowadays) hounded off sites and out of social circles.

Christ! Even after years of this bullshit, I was genuinely shocked by that, Helleofabore. That a mental-health professional asked a child such a dangerous leading question, on such ridiculous grounds. I knew some of the people meant to be helping kids were doing a crap job. But this sounds like an attempt at recruitment. These people shouldn’t be allowed near children.

How do you tag someone not in the chat? I'm thinking of KeepToiletsSingleSex, to address the same old mistakes here with her campaigning expertise in loo design and safety.

Here's a recent thread she was on, anyway. KeepToiletsSafe, some way down the main page, with MarieDeGournay and others sharing many key details before her arrival. The survey's interesting, too.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5414272-the-removal-of-ladies-toilets

Does this mean that as leaders you are allowed to ask about sex rather than gender
What happens if you haven't been told officially? Do you just accidentally happen to arrange the tents by sex?

"I prioritise inclusion, unless actual safety is the priority - which in many day-to-day cases it isn't".

I'm still wrestling with this one. It's up there with sex-based rights being obsolete, but for different reasons. I think there's probably some logical fallacy or literary device applicable here - something like irony, or oxymoron, or paradox, although none of those are right.

Safety is always the priority. Always.

I think you perhaps mean, except where safety is applicable (like, in origami, bar a severe risk of paper cuts, it isn't, really, but in football, it is)?

I always remember being allowed to play rugby with the boys in my very early teens on one crazy afternoon (weirdly enough, it didn't happen again) and, in a moment of unsupervised silliness, 3 of us girls flinging ourselves at one of the taller lads' legs and grabbing his ankles to stop him getting a try.

You know what? He had a good few meters still to go - and we still didn't stop him (although we loved the muddy ride!)

Looking back, it honestly wasn't very safe - kids need adults (and sports orgs) to protect them by making that clear, and, where it's arguably a bit of a grey area (as eg. the FA has argued) prioritising safety over inclusion.

There’s going to be a lot of hard times ahead as you have set him up for a massive fail in life. What’s your plan when he hits puberty and the difference between him and actual girls becomes too difficult to deny.

Hm, I've realised that in a few places in recent posts I've slipped into being a bit... "catty" (which, despite my username - which was never intended to link to this! - I really, really try to avoid). If you're actually trolling, Solid, then a gently facetious thanks for giving us the opportunity to challenge what I will now call some of the more surprising perspectives in this debate. From this point on, I'll return to assuming you're not, with apologies for my unusual directness a few times above - and would be especially reassured if you do now feel able to address my twice-posted question in good faith.

It's disgraceful. It was my daughter it happened to.

At the time my theory was that the minute any suggestion of 'gender' came into an autistic child's presentation the preference of CAMHS was to signpost to gender services and remove the child from their caseload. We ALL know that CAMHS have massive caseloads.

In our area the vast majority of autistic girls now identify as trans or non - binary.

The parents and their daughters were sold a lie, that identifying as boys would solve their issues and then suddenly the children now have a 'cool' identity. At that time it was all Mermaids and Unicorns.

I haven't had the strength to do a FOI request about this at our local CAMHS, my daughter is about to transfer to adult services, when that happens and she will not be impacted I will make a complaint and investigate further.

Dime, I'm so sorry to hear about you and your daughter's experiences. May I ask if you've read Hannah Barnes' Time To Think? I imagine you may have done, but if not, would recommend it if you feel able. It can be a tough read, particularly, I imagine, after your experiences, but is enlightening on the dynamics between CAMHS and gender services, including, as I remember it (may be wrong!), practices, in squeezed services, not dissimilar to what you suspected. (This may, of course, be what led you to suspect this - apologies if so).

I believe you have misunderstood completely what I said.

Destabilised language. Not 'unstable' in your language usage. You choose to use language that is destabilised from it's original and intended meaning that now means the opposite to that original and intended meaning.

Yes, you are consistent in using destabilised language. And you have destabilised it to suit your political aims and personal aims for your child.

"I suppose events such as this will inform our conversations about who sees/affirms her as a 'girl' and who doesn't."

I see. So, do you see how you have leveraged destabilised language there to suit your personal agenda. You use 'girl' for your male child. That is not the meaning of 'girl' at all.

By using the term 'girl' for your male child, you have made the connection in your son's mind that he should have access to every single thing that is meant to be just for 'girls'. That is quite an entitled viewpoint that you are communicating to him.

If you used the term 'single sex' and made it clear that some things should be respected as being only single sex, maybe your child would not be so distressed by this decision. Because maybe your child would realise that society does not have to support any 'gender identity' at all when it comes to single sex provisions.

Hence why I have pointed out the issues with your chosen language usage.