Six year old trans girl ‘tries to cut off her penis’ after Guide ban

[JonesTown]

Quite a disturbing article in this morning’s Observer regarding the impact of the Guides’ ban on trans girls following the Supreme Court ruling.

It reports on the experience of one six year old trans girl named Emily after hearing she could no longer attend Rainbows:

Emily’s parents decided to be honest with their daughter about the situation, and explained that she was no longer able to take part in Rainbows because she was trans. A few hours later Curt said they found her “sobbing in her room” and were “shocked” to find her holding a pair of plastic scissors to her penis.

AIBU to find this a distressing consequence of campaign by anti-trans activists or is it a natural result of allowing such young children to change their gender identity?

No. It is not 'clear' in the way you assert.

What has happened is that a group campaigned to lower the safeguarding principles that Guiding used to exclude all male people from being guides and in leadership roles. This should never have happened because gender identity is based on a subjective belief, one that is only supported by philosophical theories, that a person has about themselves and not based on material reality based on established science.

If you are angry, be angry at the people who first demanded and those who agreed with these safeguarding principles being lowered in the first place. If guiding was always mixed sex, there would never have been an issue. But it was and is again, a female single sex provision.

The parents who have publicised this child's distress are the people who have 'weaponised' him.

I don't believe that Dr Cass has stated that any child should be told they are the opposite sex to what they materially are. And I don't believe that she has stated that society must treat a boy who believes he is a girl as if he was female for the purposes of single sex provision.

She has said somethings about 'weaponising' but she has also been clear that these children do not change sex and that even using pronouns is not a 'neutral act'. I believe that she has not been specific about what should happen to these male children regarding access to female single sex provisions.

So, if any poster has a record of her saying explicitly that little boys who believe they are girls should be included in female single sex provisions, such as guiding, please do post it. Otherwise, this discussion about 'weaponising' that has now moved to include Hilary Cass is just sparple and is, in fact, someone trying to 'weaponise' some of her words to make other posters out to be hateful.

Do you tell your daughter that she is no anorexic? Do you deny the material reality of her situation?

Take it up with the lads parents who, after the Supreme Court Judgement, still knowingly led him to believe that he could join in the first place instead of just signing him up for Scouts.

Parents imposing a mental illness on a boy of 6 are criminally negligent in my view.

No child is “born in the wrong body.”

Let's face it, nobody is born in the wrong body. Your body is yours, just the same as your mind is yours.

"zealots hounding and turfing out 6 year olds"

The hyperbole of posts such as this really do show the level of emotional manipulation that is needed to support one group's demand. That demand being that the group's subjective reality (that is not based on material reality), should be treated as the universal material reality for everyone and that society needs to act as if that subjective reality is materially real when it is not.

Posts such as this demonise people who point out there are legitimate reasons that a boy should not be included in a female single sex provision. And I have yet to see any acknowledgment that there are legitimate reasons.

Shocking. Also shocking that the parents pushed this agenda for a young child, if they’re 6 now they must be living as a girl a year or two.
Why would you allow your 4/5 y.o to change gender.

TRAs will lie to children about who they are and what they can do and then accuse everyone else of weaponising them when reality inevitably hits. They also don't give a shit about the needs and safety of children who need single sex spaces, usually girls although not always. If they had their way, men would be able to identify their way into changing rooms full of undressed children. Plus, they also seem to be hellbent on creating a generation of people who are legally and chronologically 16 or 18, but physically 12. How these people fucking dare attack anyone for "weaponising" kids by defending single sex spaces is insane. But as ever, when you insist women and girls can have penises, you have no limit on absurdity.

Girlguiding began as a response to girls wanting something equivalent to Scouting for boys. That's what you do when the option for you doesn't yet exist; you create a new one. Women have had to do this for nearly everything and that was never seen as a problem, but as soon as men who claim to be women want in, it would be a human rights abuse not only for them to do the same (even though options do exist, they just don't affirm boys as girls) but for women not to go along with the destruction of their spaces, and to be forbidden from creating yet another one.

Plus, Girlguiding began in 1910 and it's only in very recent years, with the rise of this ideology, that we are hearing even unsubstantiated and dubious claims that boys are trying to castrate themselves to join rather than become Scouts.

It's not just this young boy being "turfed out" as you put it. ALL male members of Girlguiding will have to leave by September as the charity follows the Supreme Court judgment and reverts to being the single-sex organisation it was founded to be.

"The IOC have caved into pressure from Trump and the far-right gender critical activists."
"Those who are campaigning against dignity for trans women should be asking themselves if they’re really happy to be on the same side as Trump"

I think you should get better informed. You quite obviously have very little knowledge about this topic and seem to be only keen on repeating trope you have seen on the internet. The female athletes who started campaigning for these changes have been campaigning long before 'Trump' entered the discussion at all. Not only that, but do you simply reject universally proven facts because someone you don't agree with believes that fact? That is the level of your argument here OP. It is really very weak.

Do you think also that a 'far-right' group would be 'gender critical'? Because that seems like an oxymoron there. A far right group being critical of gender stereotypes? Really?

Perhaps rather than simply following a tribalist approach to information, you should read widely and openly and look at arguments and check the integrity of statements, conclusions etc and make an informed decision. From reading your posts on this thread, I don't believe you have done this.

There are loads of groups and activities my children aren't allowed to join because they are too old, too young, live in the wrong place, not eligible for free school meals, don't have the relevant helath conditions or disabilities, aren't young carers. I could go on and on.

It wouldn't be acceptable to lie about any of these things to get into these groups. As a parent my job is to manage expectations.

My autistic son isn't eligible for local disability sports group because they only accept physical disabilities. Strangely enough no one has ever suggested chopping off a leg or pretending to not be able to walk...

This is really interesting.

I knew I should have been a boy at around age 5.

I grew up in the 70s and 80s as a reasonably masc heterosexual, bicurious woman. I hated my breasts and squashed and squeezed them to the extent that they never grew properly ( I actually damaged them). I had it drilled into me that I had to marry (a man, too!). So I did. Several different ones. Not all at once.

Now I have space to be me? I'm female. I dress masc. I have men as partners but can fancy women. I am slightly down on women as I don't much like being one. I'm about as neutral as you can get!

If I'd been born 30 years later though, I could have ended up as what I think would have been a very unhappy trans man.

This OP's example of a trans girl could grow up to be an effeminate man rather than a woman. Who knows?

Nothing is all-or-nothing!

"It wouldn't be acceptable to lie about any of these things to get into these groups."

This is key. If a group has been identified as needing defined category boundaries for eligibility for that category, allowing people to access that group that don't qualify for eligibility needs to be correctly labelled a safeguarding risk. Because, the boundary around that category would not exist if it were not needed and the group would be open to every person who wanted to join.

Safeguarding boundaries are not 'hateful' if they are considered legitimate under law in a democratically elected government that has been carefully audited and monitored so that the law is not considered illegitimately discriminatory. I think that there are many people on this thread who don't quite understand the difference between legitimate and illegitimate discrimination and categorise anything that they don't agree with as 'illegitimate'.

Hence the absurdity of bringing in language such as accusations of siding with 'Trump', 'far right', 'zealots' and on and on. That language really is absurd in the face of what has been decided.

There is a point where society has to have laws that allow legitimate discrimination such as excluding a group for safeguarding purposes from a provision, be that a service or a facility provision. This is not controversial.

If you consider it from a sports perspective, would any of these be acceptable:

A 25 year old competing against a 10 year old in a 10 year old and under category?

A 25 year old competing against a 85 year old in a masters category in the 85 year and over category?

A person who had 90% vision competing with someone with 5% vision in an event specifically for someone with that % of vision impairment?

A person who was a professional standard athlete competing in a novice only event?

A bicycle with an electric engine competing against a 100% human powered bicycle in the Tour de France?

if they are not acceptable, why?

So at what age can we break the news to him that he will always be a boy and cannot be in female only spaces?

Surely getting him used to the idea at a young age is better than waiting until he’s older?

Totally agree with PPs that the only people weaponising this 6 yr old is his parents and OP. It is not ‘weaponising’ any child to point that male children will never become female and should be treated accordingly.

It's really not our fault if the left's current obsession with fucking women and girls over has led them to talk such absurd shite that they've left Donald Trump to be right on point of objective fact when they are not. I could go into a boxing match with the world's biggest bastard, it's still not the referee's or the crowd's fault if I proceed to punch myself in the face on purpose and they don't declare me the winner. Or to go into the crowd and start punching them, while screaming about how they should go along with it so I can win. Somehow.

The fact that these people are still shouting at us for refusing to be sacrificed frankly shows just how much they ever gave a shit about women and girls to start with.

The bit you may have missed is that she also acknowledges that there is no reliable way of telling which children will persist and which won’t.

Current desistance after 5 years is 75% in the latest research, so without any means of identifying which kids will persist past 5 years, affirmation is harmful to at least 75% of children. And that’s not taking into account the kids that will desist at a later date.

No one has yet looked at the psychological harm done to a child who is affirmed as the opposite sex at a very young age (like 6) and who then discovers the truth as they mature.

It does seem that some people have only selectively read and understood what Cass has said. It actually seems to be contradictory for posters to try and present Dr Hilary Cass’ words as any type of support for male people being included in female single sex provision. To do that would be simply inaccurate.

Yes, I think anger is going to be experienced by more people - especially parents who, even with the best intentions, have unfortunately listened to the advice of the trans activists and are now slowly waking up to the reality of the harm it’s doing to their children.

I think in the short term we are going to see a lot of this anger directed at us for telling the obvious truths but maybe at some point they will understand that we have only ever come at this with a view to reduce harm and protect all children.

I agree, it's utterly tragic. Trans girls ARE girls and the decision to exclude them from guides (or any other gendered institution) is plain wrong.

Münchhausen's by proxy, I should think.

Also, if a small boy wants to dress in a princess dress or wear high heels ... nowadays, to the zealots, this means he's trans.

But I always think it's quite logical for a small child to want to "dress like mummy" - boy or girl. A boy spends a lot of his early life in a pretty female and feminine world. Most DC are still cared for mostly by women - mothers are seen - still- as the default parent & primary carer in the first couple of years of a child's life. Most nursery staff are women.

It's not so startling that a boy in this atmosphere, connected to & dependent mostly on his mother and other women , would want to be like them, is it?

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with raising boys in this female-centred atmosphere. Just that it shouldn't surprise us when our small sons want to wear the princess dress or the tutu or whatever.

Guides is not a gendered institution it's a single sex one for females only. Transgirls are boys so cannot join a female only organisation .

The boy could have joined Scouts

Well no. They're not.

You know that. Why are you engaging with this play pretend?

@TealScroller could you explain, without resorting to sex-based stereotypes, what makes a boy actually and materially a girl?

If they were girls, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.