This is a good example of how adding the 'T' for transgender to LGB has caused so many problems.
Transgender is NOT, as Belong To themselves state, a sexual orientation; being lesbian, gay or bisexual is. These are two different issues, two different histories, two different sets of issues.
It's great to have a youth organisation that supports older children who may be questioning their sexual orientation, and in supporting children of all ages who have L or G parents. As a nation, we got well beyond that point years ago.
Then after years of advocacy for body positivity, especially among young people, there was now a movement messaging that you could be 'in the wrong body', you could be transgender if your body doesn't reflect the way you feel about the gender stereotypes that society ascribed to being a boy or being a girl, the the whole sugar and spice/rats and snail thing..
If being transgender meant telling a child that gender stereotyping is wrong and that they should transcend gender stereotyping and just do what they damn well want to do, whether they are a boy or a girl, fair enough.
But telling children that it's not the stereotypes that need changing, it's their bodies is unacceptable; the idea that you need to hide ['tuck' or 'bind'] or alter your otherwise healthy body, take drugs to stop your body going through puberty, or even remove healthy parts of your body, in what is euphemistically called 'top surgery' or 'bottom surgery' - now that's a different thing altogether from telling children they can live and love as they want, and that having two mammies or two daddies is grand.
Objecting to aspects of the T that you find unacceptable, unethical or just plain dangerous to children's health is not the same as objecting to LGB rights. It's not bigotry, it's not homophobia, and if it's inevitably called 'transphobia', well, so be it.
Belong To themselves say 'Trans is not a sexual orientation. Trans people can have any sexual orientation.' so why the T in LGBT? ?
It's a separate issue, and needs to be considered separately from lesbian and gay issues; it was strategically astute to attach it to an existing movement which has already achieved a level of acceptance in Irish society, but that's wearing thin.
Scouting Ireland associating with a LGB youth group, or Scouting Ireland associating with a Transgender youth group, are two different things. It would be easier to form a considered opinion if there were distinct groups, instead of a group like Belong To, which conflates the separate identities and issues into LBGTQI - they also surprisingly add 'I' for intersex, which isn't used any more because it is inaccurate, and offensive to people with disorders of sex development.
Here's an example of what Belong To have to say, judge for yourselves whether they are a good match for a scouting organisation:
Belong-To-Coming-Out-As-Trans.pdf (belongto.org)