Girlguiding pushing stereotypes and reality-defying nonsense

[Fenlandia]

I couldn’t see a thread on this yet, but saw on Maya’s Twitter that Girlguiding have put out an article called “Rainbow Girl” about a child called Rainbow.

girlguiding.foleon.com/guiding-magazine/guiding-summer-2022/rainbow-girl

“Jane and her husband Mike started noticing that Rainbow identified more with female characters, toys and books when she was 18 months old. ‘Some people suggested we just say no, encourage her to identify with the male characters, but how can you explain that to a young child? To what end? No to playing with toys she loved or characters she loved to pretend to be? It felt cruel to say no, to the say the least.’”

[Or you could just let your kids play with whatever fires their imagination?]

The parents can’t deal with Rainbow’s desire to wear dresses or have long hair, until finally Rainbow comes out with this:

“One day she said to us in a quiet voice, “My real name is Rainbow”.
‘Until you’re in that position as a parent you cannot know how you will react. I could have laughed and said, “No it’s not.” I could have compartmentalised her life: “OK you can be Rainbow at home, but not at school." We didn’t take this route. Instead we asked, “Can you tell us a bit more about how you feel? There are some boys who like all the things that society thinks are for girls but know themselves to be boys, and there are some who feel like they are girls inside."

[I thought real trans wasn’t about adhering to stereotypes of what’s for boys or girls?]

Reading the whole thing, I’m aghast and would get banned if I said what I really thought of how this is being framed. This child just has a personality. They’re 7 years old and being imprinted with a fixed transgender identity by parents who seem confused, to be charitable. And then being put on a pedestal by an organisation set up solely to support women and girls.

Maya’s thread and the many comments on it are worth reading (mobile.twitter.com/MForstater/status/1549864649004285959 ). I’ll pick out this one:

“I am completely agog and aghast at an organisation that has spent so long saying girls can do anything they want now saying that if boys like stereotypically feminine things they are the same as girls.”

Everyone knows that 18 month olds are really consistent and reliable.

There’s absolutely no way they’d ask for a banana and then cry because you gave them a banana, for example.

When DS3 was 18 months, he mostly noticed the ducks in books (ducks come up remarkably often in board books). He’s still keen to point out the ducks (and quack a lot) at nearly 2. Am I supposed to view this as him identifying more with ducks and let him live in a pond?

Please can someone send this thread to GG HQ?

From an exasperated leader, trying to inspire, build up and provide great experiences for girls and young women in my community. Every leader I know think HQ has lost the plot!

Leaders who disagree need to make a stand.
By not doing so they put themselves and the girls at risk.
It's not happening in my group is not good enough. It is happening. I ff your groups wants to attend any event outside of your group, district, county, camp, then what?
The organisation will throw you to the wolves if you don't follow policy.
What about insurance? You won't be covered if you don't follow policy.

it's like they think we can't see them doing it?! "This corner of MN which I successfully ignore so much I swooped in to post a mere two hours after the thread was started"

Sometimes I wonder if the goal is simply to destroy these groups

Yes. When the outcomes are so similar, across the board, it's difficult to see it any other way.

Sadly, yes. This is what is being orchestrated in so many different areas.

Women and girls removed from their own, their very own, societies, associations, sports etc; removed from social life for women and girls; removed from public life unless acquiescent; removed from a free life, removed from the life they choose.

Because of a top-down diktat. By men.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. The more that changes, the more it's the same thing.

It’s a shame that the new programme also seems to be more about crafting and doing quasi-school work (as far as I can tell from DD’s Brownie badges, which seem, eg. archaeologist badge, mostly to involve going on a walk, thinking about things, writing a project about imagining what you would do if you were an archaeologist, and so on, but not actually ding any actual archaeology.)

Not much actual doing involved generally. That doesn’t seem particularly better than learning how to make a cup of tea and serve it on a tray to a visitor in the 70s or 80s (all v sexist; but at least it taught me how to make a cup of tea!)

But my experience of Guide camp in the late 80s and early 90s was of kayaking, abseiling, hillwalking, learning woodcraft, lighting fires, learning knots and teaching ourselves camp cooking, as well as Bovril round the campfire (and the older guides helpfully taught us the racy versions of the campfire songs, which was also great life experience 😂)

I’d be v sad if DD ends up doing “feminine” crafts in a marquee, like a miniature WI from the 1940s.

I mean it’s crazy, given guiding’s history, to go in for this sexist old bollocks about girls’ toys and identifying as female through wearing dresses. What the jeffing hell are they thinking? Even Olave Baden-Powell would turn in her grave, and that’s saying something.

[As an aside, anyone else have the old Brownie Handbook burnt into their brain? I still can’t make a cup of tea without some part of my cerebellum chanting faintly in the background:

“How to make tea without it spoiling? Make sure the water’s really boiling!”]

Men and boys hold all the aces, once more, as always.

Girls and women can't have anything of our own. Because women can't have nice things.

Bollocks.

Women need to exclude boys and men because exclusion can be extremely beneficial when you're excluding the classic historical and current oppressors.

It's really not at all surprising that organisations originally for women and girls have been very heavily targeted by the TQ+.

Who are the actual people who are the Girlguiding high command? Do we know their names?

Who are they, and what are their personal, professional, and political connections and affiliations?

I'm not connected to GG myself, but been following the whole sorry saga for a few years, I'd just like to know the personal names, to know who these people are, who are wrapping up an honourable girls' organisation and sticking it in a bin.

Who are the members of GG high command who are making these decisions? What are their names?

I’ve read on threads before that a lot of this seems to be driven by the trustees, several of whom are very deep into the whole ideology. You can look them up on the website. I don’t know about the management and the central organisation. Does anyone have any inside knowledge?

And here was me thinking very recently that I need to look into getting my daughter enrolled onto Brownies and son onto cubs. I’m not going to bother now having read this. What a shame.

Not an organisation that is opaque in its current management, then?

So what are GG UK trying to hide?

I would avoid.

If Girlguiding, an organisation originally established for the welfare of girls - juveline female humans, obviously - can't actually prioritise girls' welfare but must defer to men and boys - then No. You have betrayed us.

Damn: "juvenile," not "juveline", obvs. Deary me

The former GGUK CEO, who let Stonewall and Challenor in to ruin it, used to be the CEO of Family Planning. She clearly didn't learn much in that job.

www.thirdsector.co.uk/julie-bentley-named-new-chief-executive-girlguiding-uk/management/article/1160058

Current CEO:

www.girlguiding.org.uk/about-us/press-releases/welcome-our-new-ceo-angela-salt-obe/

Current trustees - an impressive bunch who have plenty of brain cells between them, and yet are overseeing this safeguarding shit show like foxes in a chicken house:

www.girlguiding.org.uk/about-us/our-organisation/how-girlguiding-is-run/meet-our-trustees/

I’ve read on threads before that a lot of this seems to be driven by the trustees, several of whom are very deep into the whole ideology.

It's not hard to guess who from the list above. We've also all recently been told we are racist bigots as well - even those of us who are not white and have always had a multi ethnic mix of girls.

So:
www.girlguiding.org.uk/
quote:
"We're the leading UK charity for girls and young women"

It says, "Keeping girls safe is at the heart of everything we do in Girlguiding."

But Girlguiding also appointed Monica Sulley as one of its commissioners.. The links won't be allowed here, on Monica Sulley. But just go and Google. Him. With guns.

They used to say explicitly on the website that it was "a single sex organisation". That disappeared around 2018-19. "Girls and Young Women" means anyone and his horse under the new religion.

To think I've spent most of my conscious life fighting sexism and yet here we still are.

Because of a top-down diktat. By men.

But disappointingly it is women in organisations for women and girls who are so zealous about pushing the “queering” of our organisations. Ime some of them seem to really enjoy the power trip. Suddenly they have permission to be authoritarian and an excuse to bully other women. They get called handmaidens but honestly they seem more like “Aunts” to me. After they have destroyed organisations for women and girls I suppose they will continue on their fervent mission in schools, workplaces, public institutions, hospitals, museums, libraries, theatres even churches which I would have thought could resist the ideology but no the C of E at least is fully on board. I suppose they won’t stop until they have bullied their sisters out of public life all together. Maybe on some level they are doing it for men but mostly it seems they embrace critical theories and the power they gain from them for themselves. To me this is toxic femininity.

This in the end is the most dangerous thing about gender identity, queer theory, critical race theory etc etc it is the same old pernicious and divisive way of doing things which we used to call discrimination and prejudice but repackaged as virtuous. It is like we learned nothing at all from the authoritarian and totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. A new power structure is emerging and surprise surprise it isn’t so different from the old ones. We had relative equality, an idea of valuing everyone equally for such a short period of time. Once again now some people are more worthy than others and it is apparently socially acceptable even desirable to remind the less worthy that they must know their place.

Being stripped of dignity, privacy and safety in bodily functions is such an effective humiliation, it truly makes plain to me my lack of worth, my powerlessness as a woman in this Brave New World.

Every time I am confronted by a man in what was previously respected by men as a woman only space I feel keenly how I am less than him, I must lower my eyes, not provoke him, and just accept that he has power over me. Maybe I will even have to go out of my way to please him for my safety or that of my children. The reality is that not only could he kill me with his bare hands but he could also exert power over me to lose my employment, to be criminalised, to be separated from my children and to be socially ostracised.

When things were bad for women and girls in the past very few men wished to be us, now things are getting so much worse for us but this time men will still want to claim womanhood because this time they can do it whilst retaining all the benefits of being men and even gaining extra power and kudos.

pomegranate** brilliant post. 100% agree.

I thought post-Frozen we were getting to a point where it was ok for little boys to play in dresses and with whatever you they wanted.

There ought to be information for parents on how to deal with this without eventually 'transing' your kid as an explanation/solution.

I wouldn't expect GG to get into this, it's all fun and games (and attention) now, but what about the dark side of Rainbow reaching puberty? And the distress of their emerging v male body? Puberty blockers, hormones, then removal of their bits and pieces and future sexual satisfaction?

Do Rainbow's parents have experience of this themselves? Or were they allowed to be brought up in their own bodies and experience healthy adult sexual relationships?

I hope for Rainbow's sake they question their gender again before they get to this. GG stop normalising this.

Brilliant post, PomegranateOfPersephone . Thank you.

Haven’t RTFT but what a load of regressive bullshit from the GG 🤬

@PomegranateOfPersephone
Excellent post, thank you. Especially the first sentence of your second paragraph: “repackaged as virtuous” 👌

Every time I am confronted by a man in what was previously respected by men as a woman only space I feel keenly how I am less than him, I must lower my eyes, not provoke him, and just accept that he has power over me
I'm out, too over dramatic for me.