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'm simply asking you to respect her gender."

And that above, is in fact your demand. You claim that you are not demanding it, yet you have made accusations about my cruelty for not following your demand more than once. That is coercive on your part.

Please can you simply stop and start thinking about what people are posting instead of reacting emotionally to it and making fucking accusations?

"In my view, the erasure of trans people is a huge problem and that erasure starts with language."

In my view, the erasure of female people is a huge problem and that erasure starts with language.

This is one of the best posts I’ve read on MN about this matter. Thank you.

Oh snap! I just read down and see you did the same thing.

Surely if the GG wanted to admit Trans girls, all they need to do was declare they’re a mixed sex organisation from now on? Problem solved. And going forward, welcome girls and boys to their numbers. They can drop the ‘Girl’ prefix and just become Guides.

Exactly. But they don't want to do that. I wonder why?

If they had wished to prioritise those male people, then yes, they could very well have changed to be a mixed sex organisation such as Scouts did.

That they did not is actually a very solid indicator, as far as I believe, that they know that this is not what female people wanted.

"I don't demand anything. I'm simply asking you to respect her gender.
In my view, the erasure of trans people is a huge problem and that erasure starts with language."

What you are asking us to do is join in a belief system where 'gender' is some nebulous feeling existant in individuals, which is apparently more important than the reality of their sexed body, which they will have their entire lives.

Children's inner worlds shift and change - young children believe in magical reality and have lots of magic ideas.

As children grow their brain matures and they see the failure of the magical reality world - they start to understand the reality of the world and how it works.

You are asking us to pretend along with people who should have long outgrown this magical reality stage - to keep them in a state of immaturity, where they do not grow fully into an adult, either in thought or body.

Didn't Jane Fae somewhere give advice to GG? On SAFEGUARDING?

Here he is "adding to and enriching the experience of what it is to be a woman."

(twitter 26/3/2018)
"Most murder is boring, pedestrian, even accidental stuff."
"Somewhere between a third and a half result from too much alcohol. A high proportion are domestic violence 'gone wrong'. A blow struck one time too many: an egg shell skull"
Jane Fae

(twitter 26/3/2018)
he quipped:
I had only to suggest that murder was not some sort of high end glamour crime, and the cisterhood went ballistic ...

But Fae also has supportively campaigned for legalisation of extreme porn. And iirc for the lowering of the age of 'porn' actors.

Plus at the start of covid, he was telling us all that the reason women were not dying in the numbers that men were was because it was men out there working dealing with people. Meaning the women were not working at all...

Yet, I believe that Fae has given advice to GG in the past. I will go and find out more about that. It might have been via his work with Stonewall.

Definitely, this is another male person who is enriching the experience of what it is to be a woman.

I always mention my own childhood in threads like these because if I had been a child growing up now I have no doubt that I'd have been dragged in to the trans world.

I always hated dresses and anything girly. I can remember being tiny (maybe 2 or 3) and being dressed up in frilly dresses and absolutely hating it. At around 5 or 6 I became obsessed with football. I almost exclusively wore football kits for about 7 years. I had my hair cut as short as my Mam would allow. I didn't wear any clothes from the girls section at all.

But the most important thing is that because I was a child and I didn't have full understanding or life experience I was absolutely adamant that I wanted to be a boy. If someone had said to me "well you can be a boy if you want to" I'd have snapped their hand off. As I grew and finally reached puberty (I was a very late bloomer) I began to feel completely differently about it, I accepted I was a woman and am happy with it. I am married with 4 kids, I still don't like dresses, I don't get my nails/hair done and all that but that isn't what makes me a woman.

Had I been accepted as a "boy" as a toddler I can only imagine I probably would have been sent down a road that's hard to come back from.

@Helleofabore , re: "Plus at the start of covid, he was telling us all that the reason women were not dying in the numbers that men were was because it was men out there working dealing with people. Meaning the women were not working at all..."

I didn't know that. Appalling male misogynist cliché at its best. I mean, the most vulnerable, exposed professions were surely NHS (largely female) and education (largely female). AKA, the "caring" professions. Again, though I've not read the source or context, my initial impression is that it represents yet more superficial stereotyping (men = active, heroic, women = passive, protected) that disregards/denies a more mundane reality (women = working damn hard in difficult contexts & undervalued roles!)

And ignoring the biological fact that women tend to do better in a medical sense, female premature babies are more likely to survive than males for example.

Fae was also awarded in the TOP 100 lesbians by DIVA, and this was AFTER the tweet about 'eggshell heads' and with the knowledge of his extreme porn legalisation campaigning and other porn campaigning.

But apparently, all in the enrichment of the woman experience.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/3869907-Jane-Fae-The-coronavirus-death-rate-for-men-is-high-possibly-because-women-are-not-pulling-their-weight-in-the-crisis?page=1

here is the thread.

Totally agree that Gender Ideology is regressive. It just looks at stereotypes allocates them to sexes and says if you like a, b and c you must be a boy / girl. It’s taking us back to the stone ages. My 3 year old likes his sisters hair clips. I’m really worried I’m damaging him by not calling him Jane and putting a pink dress on him. Except I’m not worried at all, because playing with a wide range of interesting things at a young age s just being a child. There’s no way I’d damage the mental health of my child by saying oooh, that makes you a boy / girl. That’s how to totally mess up your child..

Me, too. I felt so "wrong" in my early teens as I watched many (thankfully, not all - the '90s were far better than now in this respect) girls around me succumb to make-up and flirty giggles. But I could see even then how performative it was, and found my crowd outside it - in fact, it's when my feminist instincts really awoke, as I understood girls could be like that, but didn't have to be.

Now, in contrast, I really do suspect I'd have become convinced I was "trans". I recognise that, for girls like I was then, "trans" identification must appear to offer an escape, a safe category that "explains" their sense of difference. But I really do believe that, in most (all?) cases, it's simply rather that we still needed more work on dissociating "girl" from "make-up" etc.!

And I honestly thought we were getting there, too. I never thought we could entirely escape the inclination to perform gender (and why should we? freedom of expression and all that!) but I did think that we'd move towards an acceptance of "some girls choose to go down this route, others don't, there's an infinite range of possible ways for girls to be girls" etc. I never, ever dreamt that a performance of femininity would, within 2 decades, be used to, quite literally, redefine the very concept of what it is to be a "girl". To my mind, it's one hell of a pendulum swing back from the progress we'd made.

"I'm afraid it's absolutely you who is constantly reducing the debate about social interactions to sex organs"

Another thing about this accusation is that it does highlight the very significant issue with language and coercion to used someone else's language.

If I used the term 'girl' in my posts to discuss 'female people', it would immediately be assumed that I included any male who called himself a 'girl'. (including the adult male people who have declared that they are baby girls and live in diapers).

In fact, if I used the term 'girl' in my posts, to then make a point about a male child, I would then have to add the disclaimer 'this does not refer to trans girls'. Maybe some posters would find this less 'cruel'. That I have to pretzel what I write to suit their choices while attempting to maintain accuracy.

Adding any disclaimer for accuracy is just as cruel, in my opinion.

However, there was an interesting dynamic in one of the questions asked:

"Do you see my trans daughter as a threat to the other girls?"

'other' girls.

Meaning that any use of the term 'girls' with some posters will be assumed to include any male person that declares that they are. How are we supposed to have safeguarding discussions for female people of any age when we are being coerced into using obfuscating language?

We cannot. Because of demands such as this, we cannot have the clear and accurate discussions needed and we are constantly having to assess the language that we do use.

All because some male people have a philosophical belief (because there is no biological markers used for diagnosis) that they are not the sex they materially are. Yet, apparently there is no harm at all being done to women and girls.

(and yes, I mean only women and girls who are female people).

Your child isn't being singled out.

I don't expect anyone to conform to a gender, so wouldn't know what I would be recognising.

Often sex is completely irrelevant, and in general sex discrimination is unlawful. However, nobody can change their sex or its consequences.

I had a boy's name all picked out and I told my mother that I was a boy. I told her that I did all the things that 'boys' do so why can't I be a boy. I most certainly didn't want this body I had.

And he could wear a pink dress and decide that his favourite name was Jane and he would still be a boy, just like a girl wearing a Spiderman outfit isn't suggesting anything more than that she like dressing up as Spiderman.

@SolidMamI understand that you want to protect your son, and you love him, etc.
But you do know that the world doesn’t revolve around him?
You’re doing him no favours by behaving like this, and basically telling him that everyone else is alright with it, and that no one can tell that he’s male.

Your son is going to be told ‘no’ a lot in his lifetime, and Joe Public doesn’t care about the (elephant in the room) lie you’ve told him.

I’m sure the statement from GG was hurtful to you, but the so-called ‘trans inclusive’ policy wasn’t legal, in the first place.

I wonder that as well. I’m a third generation guide, and had I had girls instead of boys, probably would have been a third generation Brown owl or guide leader (and fourth generation Brownie/guide in the family). I’m so glad (with a joyful heart) that the organisation has gone back to its roots.

I scrolled on TikTok last night and my FYP was full of people handwringing about how awful the GG decision is, and the comment sections were full of parents and leaders claiming they’re leaving and/or dragging their daughters out of GG. I have to admit, I wasn’t brave enough to argue with any of them though I personally am thrilled at the decision yet disappointed they have had to explain how sad they are to make it!

I like GG because it is girls only. I chose it for my daughter because it is girls only. Despite her having two older brothers who went through Beavers, Cubs and Scouts. I saw how difficult it was for the leaders of those groups to control the boys because they naturally wanted to run and climb and play and not come to the circle at the end of the session. And I was happy for my boys to go somewhere where they were supported to be active and a bit feral, but I knew my daughter would not enjoy it as much. Because having worked with children all my adult life, with some exceptions to the rule, little boys and little girls are quite different to each other. I personally would have been happy with Scouting staying single sex for males. By the time my youngest finished Cubs there were a lot more girls in the group and the activities were changing to more craft based and I thought that was a shame as that wasn’t what the majority of the boys wanted to do.

I home educate my daughter and in various HE groups I have come across various boys who you don’t necessarily know are boys because of long hair and bright clothes and shoes. Which is fair enough. But after observing them for a short while I can always tell if they’re actually boys or girls because generally the girls want to find other children to make connections with and play cooperatively with and the boys want to find other children they can race, or have sword fights with or be generally very active with. I have come across one child who I was told was transgender and wanted to be a girl. That boy was no different to any of the other boys other than the dress he wore. He charged around with the other boys and played in a very loud and physical way. He was very stereotypically a little boy.

In every other group my daughter attends the boys dominate. Brownies, where they are all girls, is the only group where there isn’t a stand out child dominating things.

In actual fact my daughter, for a whole year between age 2 and 3, said she was a boy. Insisted upon it and argued back when I told her she was a girl. But I didn’t take that as fact she was transgender. I took it as fact that she was a girl with two brothers at an age when she was just starting to understand the differences between boys and girls. Eventually she stopped saying it and aged 8 is happy with being a girl. She’s not particularly ‘girly.’ Most of her her t shirts come from the ‘boys’ section of shops as she likes Minecraft and Pokemon and tops with those on are assumed to be for boys. She’s not bothered about skin care or pretty hair or shoes or anything else stereotypically ‘girly’ but none of that makes her anything other than a girl (and actually she’s just naturally like me who lives in jeans and t shirts, has short hair, wears no make up yet is happily married to a man and identifies as a woman because I am one no matter what I look like or wear).

Yes - this explains very well why we both responded (jinx!) with:

"I don't demand anything. I'm simply asking you to respect our sex. In my view, the erasure of women is a huge problem and that erasure starts with language."

I do think our version, above, is far more convincing than OP's original, on the basis that transgirls do actually have a noun of their own, while girls in the collective "immature female" sense no longer do (including, as they must, transgirls). We have, instead, been forced into the reductively biological-sounding "female" (which is then duly used against us, as we're accused of "essentialism" 🙄). And in threads like this, we feel like we have to explain and hedge and qualify our views throughout, because the language we used to have has been taken away, with nothing left but uncomfortable phrasing we never wanted to be forced into using to describe ourselves. Trans girls may prefer not to use the qualifier "trans" and instead be included in "girl" - but this preference fades into insignificance when set against another oppressed group - girls and women - not being left any word to themselves any more. I mean, even animals - cows, vixen and hens - are allowed this! But we're not?!?

Both concessions are upsetting, for both groups. But I know which I think is more "cruel", leading as it does to an inability to even articulate a group's needs. I RESENT that I can no longer refer to the number of women and girls killed at the hands of men without being misunderstood. That I've literally seen children understand the women of Afghanistan to mean a group identifying as women, including males. To not be able to name your oppression really is the ultimate form of oppression. It really, REALLY distresses me.

@SolidMam

my personal take here is that the debate is not being reduced to sex organs, more that you cannot see the impact on others of your son telling you he is female, and expecting to take part in female activities

This may work now, but won’t as soon as your child hits puberty, and are you seriously saying that you expect teen females to get changed in front of your male child ? Can you not see how unacceptable that is?

I fully accept that it is difficult for you and your child, and you will both have to navigate a different world to that of most children, but it is not acceptable that your one child is put ahead of hundreds, if not thousands of female children and I am really disappointed that you, and other parents of trans children can’t see that

"That I've literally seen children understand the women of Afghanistan to mean a group identifying as women, including males."

This is really grim to read, Catiette.

However, it is exactly where this control of language through emotional coercion leads. It is interesting to note that in that Brownie group, no female child was asked how they felt and considering how I have been told how cruel I am amongst other things, I have no doubt that no female child would have expressed any discomfort in that group.

The demonisation of people who reject the language demands is really a sign of the authoritarian and totalitarian approach that extreme transgender activists have taken.

I obviously have to qualify that with the proviso that I do mean 'extreme' to be those people who demand that a male person is treated as if they are female even when sex matters. I don't refer to transgender activists who are advocating for finding equitable solutions for issues and for protection of their rights when those rights do not negatively impact on any other group's rights.

"We have, instead, been forced into the reductively biological-sounding "female" (which is then duly used against us, as we're accused of "essentialism" 🙄)"

Yes. I reckon it could be described as DARVO in how it works, as I have said plenty of times before. We have been forced to use particular language terms for accuracy and clarity, and then we are abused because we use those terms while the person demanding that female language is used for male people claims to be a victim because people reject that demand.