Quakers and Girl Guiding

[ElinorRigby]

Excellent article here by Helen Watts.

Inspired by the Guides? A response to The Friend. by Helen Watts link.medium.com/e3A7fpXTtW.

The Friend is a Quaker magazine and Quakers generally have gone very woke re Trans Women are Women etc...

If anyone reading this is a Quaker with children in the Guides, feel free to DM me, as I'd be happy to hear from you.

I think @FloralBunting is right about regulatory capture. I think the "trusted authority" has been Stonewall. Their complicity in pushing the TRA agenda without due diligence around safeguarding (or considering the unintended consequences of such a massive change in the definition of 'woman') is at the heart of this.

Voices critical of them, such as Simon Fanshawe, need to be amplified.

Quakers are constantly running an internal version of the Mitchell and Webb "are we the baddies?" sketch. We have our own set of memes that do the rounds called "Advices and Queries", things to think about, one of is "consider that you might be mistaken". When I think about this one in the light of this issue I just consider who are my allies and who am I arguing against. Who is threatening violence, using violence, and who is advocating careful considered dialogue? Who is examining the unintended consequences of the proposed changes and who refuses to acknowledge they might happen?

The worrying thing is that employees of the Society, some of whom are not Quakers, have uncritically embraced the TRA position and there is a top down pushing out of the position that many of us are resisting. A very similar position to Guides as @AgnesBadenPowell has noted. I think this is because of the need to ensure compliance with employment law and the equalities act. Organisations, understandably, outsource the training around this to trusted external organisations - and, as we know, those such as Stonewall and Mermaids, most commonly used, push a simplistic and therefore incorrect version of the law, ignoring the existence of the single sex exemptions which are crucial to women's safety and the safeguarding of children.

It could be to do with attracting sources of funding when 'inclusivity' is required by the founders.

It could be about attracting new members. In the case of Quakers, quite a lot of members are quite well on in years....

It could also be to do with the way that lesbian and gay rights - embraced by progressive organisations - have not become part of the LGBT umbrella.

It could be because some people believe what they're told - that the work of feminism has been completed - so there is no need to focus on the rights of women and girls, and it's time to turn our attention to the needs of other groups who are insufficiently understood.

... have NOW become part of the LGBT umbrella....

To illustrate what Gender critical / concerned Quakers are up against, and to inform any quakers reading this who are not in the loop.

Heather Brunskell-Evans is a Quaker.

She is, of course, the co-author of a very good book on Transgender children.

Brunskell-Evans, H and Moore, M. (2018) Transgender Children: Born in Your Own Body. Cambridge Scholars Publishers

The Quaker bookshop (at Friends House in London) has a policy of displaying the work of Quaker authors, and holds events to promote the books

Immediately prior to Heather’s request for an event to promote this book the Bookshop had hosted Christine Burns (transwoman, non-Quaker) re Her book ‘Trans Britain’. The event was also videoed by Friends House staff and Burns shares this video widely on social media, promoting Quakers as very trans friendly

After numerous attempts (emails, letters, discussion, more letters ) the Bookshop will not host an event, put the book on display, or even have copies on the shelves. The most it has done is order a copy as any bookshop would which it keeps under the desk till collection

In contrast these are the books not only on the shelves but on prominent display in the Bookshop.

Please talk about these issues in your meeting, among other quakers. The conversation has to happen, we are not a top down organisation.

For those who aren't Quakers - or in any way religious - it's indicative of the kind of silencing that's going on elsewhere around concerns re the transing of children.

Organisations are keen to position themselves as 'progressive' without really asking the questions. And/or they sideline/do their best to silence those who are asking questions.

Perhaps people from other churches or organisations will want to join the thread and share their experiences.

The preparation material for Yearly Meeting (an annual gathering of Quakers) has four links to organisations or writings that are uncritically pro trans identities. The more critical discussion document is listed but the message seems to be that Quakers should accept the "transwomen are women" mantra.

I just hate this. All these religious groups very sternly assert ‘God is right!’. Along comes the trans movement... ‘God gets it wrong sometimes’

I think @FloralBunting is right about regulatory capture. I think the "trusted authority" has been Stonewall.

I think organisations like this are part of it, and for a lot of people the fact that it was explicitly lumped in with the gay rights movement. And as well, all kinds of different rights movements in the last 50 years have borrowed from each other in terms of arguments and language, and a real implication that this represents some kind of inevitable social progress. The fact that different types of rights have different types of considerations and arguments is often ignored, many people don't seem to realise it.

I think that people who have been part of these movements have often been all too happy to take advantage of that. It wasn't trans rights that coined the idea that people need to be "on the right side of history." It was never a valid thing to say, and maybe there is an element of reaping what we've sowed. Accepting poor arguments without complaint so long as people thought they were convincing, and they brought people to causes we support, that was always a bad idea and maybe that kind of disregard for truth always will work against us eventually.

I've also noticed, in a rather heated discussion I've been having with a very woke friend, that it hasn't just been social organisations pushing these things. She also considers herself totally dedicated to science, evidence based ideas, and empiricism. She's not a scientist though, and so she relies on more popular publications. I had originally thought the science would be a good way to give her a different perspective, but in fact it hasn't been. It's not even just science articles in The Guardian that are supporting this stuff, it's Scientific American, National Geographic, the kind of publication people like her, who think they are science minded but really don't know anything, trust.

The kinds of sources that should be making things more clear to regular people really aren't.

In some ways, regulatory capture as related to purportedly 'scientific' people and publications reminds me strongly of those ridiculous adverts for shampoo or something, where a person in a white coat points at a whizzy diagram of a 'molecule' and mentions a multi-syllabic 'sciencey' word and the clear implication is of trustworthy sciencey stuff.

When anyone paying the slightest actual attention knows its pure hucksterism. But you can fool some of the people all of the time...

Yes. I think what's really given me pause is that these aren't necessarily publications that have been considered poor quality. They were for a popular audience, but they were considered very good publications at one time which did an important job of making good science accesible to intelligent but non-expert people.

So they have had a lot of credibility. I've noticed Scientific American, and some of the popular psychology magazines, becoming much worse for a few years, though I hadn't with NG. But for most people, and organisations, churches and stuff, these are the kinds of publications they trust to give a fairly non-biased perspective. If you say, well, Mermaids is an advocacy org, they are strongly biased, they reasonably reply that organisations like Fair Play for Women could also tend to be biased. But these supposedly neutral good sources are all coming down on one side.

I've stopped from time to time to wonder if I am missing something and I am pretty grounded in some of the relevant topics. It's made me really think about the level of confidence we put in science as something that can operate to educate society.

Seeing as this is a God related thread, for some time now every time I hear about ROGD and the mutilation of young females the term sacrificial virgins comes to mind. But then I had a religious education and my head was stuffed full of the benefits of martyrdom and patient suffering, so I accept that I’m unusual.

There is definitely a pattern emerging and I think the regulatory capture theory sums it up well. I wish I had the time, money and academic ability to go away for a few years and research it properly.

What happening now in the Quaker community is happening in many other institutions, and in every case it is women's voices urging caution and consideration that are being drowned out.

I've been on several Women’s retreats in the past, run by Triratna Buddhists. The sense of community, of spiritual and physical safety, was amazing. There are no locks on the doors, every space is shared (dorms, shared bathrooms). The retreat was very accessible, both physically, spiritually (for most retreats you don't need to be a Buddhist, just supportive) and financially (v low cost for women on low wages or in wages, subsidised by donations from those that can afford to pay more). That retreat is now open to anyone who identifies as a woman. There's no debate. I can't go back (and believe me, I want to after this past year) and I'm sure many other women have just self excluded. I'm not asking for transwomen to be excluded from loving kindness; but it would nice if women who need single sex provision weren't excluded either.

I am so tired of Nice People who bend over backwards to include males, but who not only don't give a damn when women are excluded, but don't even notice when women are excluded. Even when they are told.