Expelled from Girlguiding for putting safeguarding first

[KatieAlcock]

Many of you will remember that Helen Watts and another Guider were expelled from Girlguiding last year. This was me - in Sept 2018 I had my membership of Guiding withdrawn for social media breaches (one FB post in a small private group) and refusing to follow Girlguiding policies on transgender members (saying I'd put safeguarding first, ahead of any policies).
I'm a longstanding Guider and Mumsnetter (naice ham, cancel the cheque, show us the diagram) but I'm anonymous for obvious reasons, generally. I'm coming out now to tell you this story.

I appealed and the former Chief Guide who held the appeal concluded that I had not breached social media guidelines (I should jolly well hope not given that 9 people saw my post!) but that I was still refusing to follow GG policy (I gave the same statement - safeguarding comes first).

My story is in the Mail on Sunday today (if this link doesn't work I'll put a clicky link in the next post).

Mail on Sunday link

I am taking GG to court on the grounds that they have discriminated against me because of my gender critical beliefs by investigating my actions when other Guiders who complain about things are not investigated.
I am asking them for a small amount in damages because though I have not lost any income, I have lost reputation and the investigation was stressful, as you can understand.
And I've asked to be reinstated, and for a full apology and statement that I did nothing wrong.

PS... I spent an hour with their professional photographer telling me "don't smile" and they go with the photo from camp with a big grin on my face, taken by my Guide??!

[Post edited by MNHQ]

I feel really very strongly about GG being and remaining single sex - which surprised me, as if you'd asked me before I was a parent I would have said they were old-fashioned and needed to be more like Scouts and become mixed sex.

You know what, squirrels, I can understand that. There is a case for mixing up girls and boys, to get used to each other, to get them to understand each other.

Firstly, if that's what the guides were doing, it's up to them. They're not. They're saying it is still single sex, and boys who demonstrate regressive stereotypes of girlhood can join. Eliminating, in one fell swoop, their raison d'etre.

And secondly, if nothing demonstrates why girls sometimes need a place of their own, my first point does.

Girls (and women), are not a collection of stereotypes. Female socialisation is something that needs to be fought. And the girl guides should be the ideal place to do it.

They should be recognising and challenging this ideology. Not bloody embracing it.

I'm not saying you don't agree with this, by the way!

But trans girls are girls.

So...... you will not win this argument in the long run. You are now on the wrong side of history.

Are they girls if they have a penis? I think not.

Yes, still a girl.

Without using stereotypes butters

What links me, to the queen, to the babies aborted having never expressed an identity to a trans girl...

All ears.

You are now on the wrong side of history

It's a blip, a dead end. History will not view it favourably.

Oh Butters you are so very silly. No girl has a penis. Learn some basic biology please.

You don’t have to have a uterus to be a woman. It’s not difficult?

www.nytimes.com/2018/10/22/health/transgender-trump-biology.html

So many of you are undermining perhaps genuine issues and queries by being ignorant to the idea that biological sex is not straightforward. No one will take you seriously if you completely disregard what trans actually is to begin with.

If it's not difficult, Butters... what are the defining characteristics of girls/women? What is it differentiates them from men and boys?

Biology is straight forward.

You are male

Or you are female

The rest is personality .

Man and woman are sex classes. Sex cannot be changed.

And sex is pretty damn straightforward when men choose who to rape. What babies to abort. And what baby to dump in the trash and leave to die.

There is no definition of female that can be expanded to include biological men

But trans girls are girls.

What do they have in common with female girls that they don't also have in common with boys?

It's not about what an individual has or does not have. A woman without a uterus still belongs to the reproductive class 'female'. A man who has lost his penis due to cancer or an accident is still a man. Biology has not changed.

I'm sure butters can find responses elsewhere or start their own thread rather than derailing this one!

I think Butter is assuming that the people on this thread are making comments out of ignorance and we just need things explaining and then we will change our views.

Instead of the truth which is many of the posters here are VERY knowledgeable on this subject, have done lots of reading, analysis and in fact know more than some experts.

So making a few predictable, throwaway statements and chucking in links to articles already seen and dissected is unlikely to change any minds.

Indeed. It's the work of a moment, nay, a second, for butters to define the word woman. I'm going to make a wild stab in the dark here, and say they won't. In a million, zillion years.

Woman a) b) and c)

For the sake of everyone's time, expediency and lurkers, butters, are three people women?

Either we keep single-sex spaces as single-sex; do away with the idea of single-sex spaces completely; or define clearly - in a way that can be used in law - who can access single-sex spaces.
I've yet to see a straight answer to that when these threads inevitably get derailed, so I've given up asking.

If I were born female in 1850 but from childhood had a keen interest in politics and a strong, persistent, internal sense of wanting to have a say, to influence the government by voting, maybe to run for office... would that have meant I was a transman? Interested in man things, never feeling right in the role of a woman...

What a shame this wonderful progressive ideology hadn't taken hold back then... All those privileged cis women who were lucky enough to be assigned to the right social role at birth could have been told to stfu, while the brave transmen would surely have been welcomed into the ranks of the decision-makers and power-holders. We could have avoided all that backward terf-ish 'votes for women' nonsense that treated women as if they were a definable group oppressed on the basis of their sex .

A b and c are women. A trans woman does not erase women.

butters83 that article is appalling, and conflates sex and gender.

Sorry re above this was to the wuestion about what links the queen and aborted girls etc the pictures did not load so presumed I was being asked to define them.

I have no idea who those people are in the pictures above although I am sure you have used people who are not actually trans as an example

A b and c are women. A trans woman does not erase women.

You're avoiding the question about what they have in common with other women that they don't have in common with men.