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 think it would be a great thing if people who believe that "biology is an ideology" put it on a t-shirt.

I encourage this with gusto.

I reckon it will be great.

"I'm simply asking you to respect her gender."

In asking me to agree that a male person is a girl, you're asking me to accept that what differentiates boys and girls are certain types of feeling - and if you feel the 'wrong" feeling for your body then there is something wrong with your body.

Genuinely, do you not understand what you are requesting that people buy into?

Imagine asking mothers to accept that their anorexic daughter actually was fat because she truly believes it? No doubt the belief is real, but that's because the understanding of what "fat" is is harmful.

So in future, please say these things with the full understanding of what you are asking. Don't stick your fingers in your ears because it might be uncomfortable.

OML

So how come little girls don’t also un-clip their onsie's and make them into a skirt?

They know they are girls right but they don’t have issues with onsies just boys that think their girls.

How truly bizarre

I’m not sure what you mean here. If you have a boy people can acknowledge that.

I'm often reminded by this issue of times and places in which a woman's word or statement has been - or is! - given half, or less, the value of a man's, with two or more women being needed to counter just one man's testimony.

This argument that all the girls accepted the boy's presence, that no one minded, is predicated entirely on the boy's perspective - the girls weren't each, individually asked, and if they had been, they may not have felt able to speak up or even to put complex feelings into words - because, even in the asking of the question, the boy's self-perception was already the starting point and default.

So yes, they absolutely may all have been fine with it. But we don't and can't know. Because, ultimately, the boy's stated perspective - "I am a girl, I belong" - is being used to predict and define what the girls' unstated perspective must inevitably be in the absence of explicit opposition or implicit discomfort.

Trans ideology, fundamentally, gives individual males the power to impose their perception of reality onto multiple females. The moment a transwoman enters a woman-only space, he is projecting his perception of reality ("I am girl/woman, I belong here"), onto any and all women who may encounter him in that context. He is presuming that they, by default, adopt his subjective experience of the world, as the starting point is the assumption that each individual woman must be in agreement about his status as woman - and, by extension, about his perception of what a woman is - what she, herself - is.

It is coercive. The tragedy is that it didn't have to be - it could have remained a polite legal fiction and unspoken social contract in some limited contexts. I, for one, really did start out more than happy to play along in support of a minority of vulnerable individuals. But that wasn't the road taken by the activists.

Instead, I was told what to think and what I am. In a sense, it really is Adam's rib, the male gaze defining, "writing" and creating woman, all over again.

(I am not a spare rib 😅!)

Common sense at last!

[email protected]
020 7592 3970

email to support the descion

Maybe we need a reminder.

No person can understand what something 'feels' like that is not their personal experience. How can they then 'add to' the female experience with their experiences if they are not female at all?

They simply can't.

And no male person can ever experience life as a woman. They can only ever experience life as a male person who believes they are a woman. Or, who 'understands' their experience as being a 'woman's' only because they describe it that way. Not because it materially is a woman's experience.

Even when they 'act' like a woman, they are acting as they believe a 'woman' should act. Even if they are treated 'as a woman' by some people, they are being treated as a 'male who presents as a woman and believes they are a woman'. Because their every reaction is based on that. Not on them being female in any way.

Even when they have extreme body modifications, it is to be their own concept of what a female looks like to them. It is not what a female is.

How can it be?

The only way a person can experience life as a woman, is to have a female body, formed around the production of large gametes, even if it doesn't produce those and to navigate their life based on the decisions they and society makes that revolve around them having that body.

A male can conceptualise what it might be like to be a female, but that is all it ever is - their concept of being female.

They may do it because they don't feel they fit into how they conceptualise how a male person interacts with the world (ie. their own stereotypes around being male) or they do it because they want to be seen as a female (using their own stereotypes of how a female navigates life). It really doesn't matter though. Their motivation is irrelevant to the outcome. And I consider the outcome can only be described as misogyny.

Which is that they will always be just a male who believes they are something they are objectively not.

How can the material reality be any different? This is why someone's gender is only based on someone's philosophical belief. And philosophical beliefs are fine for people to hold, but not one person in the UK has to comply with another's philosophical belief.

The logic cannot be any different than that I am afraid.

Sure a male person might ‘feel’ different than they label a stereotypical male person’s interaction with the world might be, but it is only based on that individual’s labelling behaviours and interactions using their sexist understanding of the world. All they are really doing is incorrectly labelling their own male perspective and interactions because they reject what they, personally, perceive as what being male means.

There is no possible way for someone to have the ‘wrong body’. They can only have the body they don’t want to have.

So, why are female people being ceorced and manipulated into applying female language to any male person? Why is this considered 'kind', yet the people doing the ceorcing are anything but being 'kind' towards female people when they do this?

I sincerely hope that you are not telling your child that there is an operation he can have to change him into a woman. There absolutely is not. The surgeries which are available do not change your sex and often cause severe, life long morbidities as well as guaranteed sterility.

By the by, 'people' do not have these surgeries 'all the time', over 90% of transwomen retain their penis.

This website might be helpful for you https://statsforgender.org/category/medical-transition/ - there are other sites which show the physical reality of so called 'gender affirming' surgeries but I'd advise you to read before you look at any of those.

"This argument that all the girls accepted the boy's presence, that no one minded, is predicated entirely on the boy's perspective - the girls weren't each, individually asked, and if they had been, they may not have felt able to speak up or even to put complex feelings into words - because, even in the asking of the question, the boy's self-perception was already the starting point and default."

Yes.

By assuming what the girls believed, this is actually a safeguarding failure of sorts. Imagine thinking the girls felt they had any choice in this matter. At all!

Plus, of course, as has been discussed on this and the previous thread, this is also a safeguarding failure for protecting those girls because an adult who should have had the girl's interest central to their decisions did not consider the negative impacts of those decisions.

When a girl has been told by an adult they respect that a male person is a female person, this changes their reaction to male people being in places that those female people feel uncomfortable sharing with them. This desensitises them to being alert for male people in places where they previously might not have expected / wanted them and it actively lowers those female people's boundaries.

Perhaps, it is appropriate to say it is conditioning their future reactions to male people being in female single sex provisions to be accepting rather than alert and questioning.

After all, they have a good friend 'x' and they have been told that 'x' is a 'girl' and this must be true because adults treat 'x' as if they were female. Of course, it is ok to be undressing in front of 'x', even as teens because 'x' is female, right?

and so the internal discussion goes.

All because adults who are seen as having knowledge about this have told female children that a male child is a 'girl', just like 'other' girls and to be treated as if they are female.

Good. Boys and men are not, and never can be, girls and women, regardless of how much some would like to pretend that this is the case.

"there are operations that people have all the time, whether they are accepted as women (or trans women) is the key here"

No extreme body modification changes a male person's sex. Ever.

A male person who has extreme body modification is exactly that, a male person who has extreme body modification.

A penis or a piece of intestine that has been inserted as a cavity into a male person's groin is not a vagina in any way. Regardless of what some people call it. It will never have the functionality of a vagina.

No male person should ever consider that they have should be rewarded with acceptance as a female person if they have this brutal extreme body modification. It is an extreme body modification that has been chosen by that male person based on their philosophical belief about themselves when that belief does not reflect material reality. The modification does not change this material reality.

And in fact most trans people don't choose to have these operations because their effectiveness is limited and complications frequent.

Here is Helen Joyce on Jeremy Vine today discussing GG and WI.

And of course, Jeremy Vine asks the 'just a few' fallacy, 'what harm is there in having a very small few in GG vs 'exciling' them'?

Helen discusses the misuse of language used to sell in the policies, similar to the discussion here.

Jeremy Vine also tackles the 'kindness' issue too.

I just listened to the female person from Trans Actual, Shay Brown give her interview with Jeremy Vine.

In it is much of the usual discussion points such as 'where is the harm'. But also she then stated but what about those members where their friends don't know that they, the person, was trans?

Absolutely no consideration towards the female people who might be very negatively impacted by discovering that someone that they had been led to believe was female is a male person. Absolutely no consideration towards female people at all in that discussion.

No consideration for female children's right to be able to consent with full information. I don't believe that those adults who actively allowed this to have happened have given any thought at all to female children and their needs.

I’m sure you’re busy at work now but when you get a chance if you could answer my earlier questions that would be great.

We’re not going to get anywhere in a conversation without common definitions for words, so what do you mean by ‘gender’ or ‘gender identity’ and what does your child think a girl is?

Di you understand that not everyone believes in the concept of ‘gender’ as being an actual thing?

And while we’re at it, what does you define as a ‘trans person’ as we can’t discern their erasure or otherwise if we haven’t got a common understanding of what one is.

@SolidMampls read this. Don’t mislead your dc

How is the erasure of women through language a huge problem, compared to the erasure of 1% of the population?

I'm really not demanding, I'm requesting. And if you deliberately referred to her as a 'girl' in person, I'd request it then too. You're free to disagree but it does make you seem very close minded as to what and who a girl can be.

Now that I'm engaging with the debate on here, I can see why it so easily becomes polarised. Many of the rights (womens/trans) can seem mutually exclusive, depending on the position you take. The girls that might want to allow their trans girl friends in to Brownies won't be protected by this ruling, they'll be sad, confused and frustrated.

I wonder how and if the board at GG consulted with the girl members themselves about the decision? This is common practice across many charity organisations. I know it's a response to a legal change but that simply doesn't make it right or correct.

I suppose that I'm realising through this debate that that I just don't agree that sex based rates need protecting as much as other people clearly do on here. I thought there'd be a wider range of views - but I suppose that's how echo chambers occur.

How is 1% of the population being erased?

No, we're a long way off any medical interventions, thanks for your concern.

Many of the rights (womens/trans) can seem mutually exclusive, depending on the position you take. The girls that might want to allow their trans girl friends in to Brownies won't be protected by this ruling, they'll be sad, confused and frustrated.

They only seem mutually exclusive if you have grossly overstated the right of females to selectively offer out female only spaces to the males they want to be in them. If it's a private group or something, fine. Let a male into the book club you hold at your house with some pals if you like. But for a public organisation like Guides, that is simply not a right that we as women have. You, I, those girls can't consent on behalf of other women.

To the extent that any girls are left sad, confused and frustrated, this is entirely the fault of the people who failed to properly safeguard them in the first place. Not those who are now ensuring that a better job is done of it.

You're free to disagree but it does make you seem very close minded as to what and who a girl can be.

It doesn't matter how open or closed Hellabore's mind is. A girl is female human who has not reached adult maturity and that is the only restriction on what a girl can be.

Re: your last paragraph, please read Invisible Women, Solid. That you don't believe sex-based rights need protecting as much is, to my mind, is just an indication of how much they need protecting. With women not even aware of how much they need the protections they have, and how much more they're owed, the patriarchy really has done a number on us.

Just one example. There are thousands like this, many with similar life and death implications:

Women are 70% or so more likely to be significantly injured in a car accident because car design ignores their needs.

Try substituting any other demographic, and you'll feel the horror more strongly:

Cars are designed in a way that makes People of Colour 70% or so more likely to be injured.

Then ask yourself why you don't feel the same horror about women's increased risk of injury and death. Ask yourself why you didn't even know this.

And ask yourself why, in contrast, it has been drilled into you never to ask an ethnic minority where they're from or to call a transwoman "he". Just take a minute to really feel the difference here: women's physical injury on a massive scale is unacknowledged and unimportant. But ignorant and sometimes intentionally offensive language is gasp-inducingly taboo.

People don't see sex-based oppression in the way that a goldfish doesn't see water.

Paradoxically, that's how feminists know how bad it is.

Edited to add link: https://womeninbalance.org/2025/09/04/are-cars-more-dangerous-for-women-understanding-the-risks-and-how-to-protect-yourself/

Why are you not open to what a boy can be like?

There is only one way to be a girl - biologically.

It is a terrible shame however, that you have taught your son that as a biological male, he's doing it 'wrong'.