Girlguiding - Supreme Court Decision email

[ProfMummBRaaarrrTheEverLeaking]

Have just had an email from them...

As the parent of a young member in Girlguiding, following April’s Supreme Court decision relating to sex and gender, we wanted to give you an update. Many organisations across the country have been facing complex decisions about what it means for girls and women and for the wider communities affected, including us.

Girlguiding’s governing charity documents set out that the membership and people who benefit from our organisation are girls and women. In April, the Supreme Court ruled that girls and women are defined in the Equality Act 2010 by their biological sex at birth.

Following detailed considerations, expert legal advice and input from senior members, young members and our Council, Girlguiding’s Board of Trustees has made the difficult decision that Girlguiding must change Girlguiding must change, following the Supreme Court’s ruling.

From today, 2 December, it is with a heavy heart that we are announcing trans girls and young women will no longer be able to join Girlguiding. This is a decision we would have preferred not to make, and we know that this may be upsetting for members of our community.

There will be no immediate changes for current young members but more information will be shared next week.

Most adult roles, including unit helpers, district helpers and administrative support, are already open to all, so we are confident that no volunteers will have to leave the organisation.

Girlguiding believes strongly in our value of inclusion, and we will continue to support young people and adults in marginalised groups. Over the next few months, we'll explore opportunities to champion this value and actively support young people who need us.

You can find our full statement and updated policy on our website.

We are proud to be the UK’s largest youth organisation dedicated to girls and is focused on creating an equal world for girls and young women. For over 100 years, we have been a welcoming space for all girls to have new experiences, support their communities, build friendships and grow their confidence.

While Girlguiding may feel a little different going forward, these core aims and principles will always be the same. We remain committed to treating everyone with dignity and respect, particularly those from marginalised groups that have felt the biggest impact of this decision.

If you have any immediate questions, we have our special support team in place, to give volunteers, parents and carers the best support we can. We are asking Girlguiding HQ, trading and country/region staff to refer any volunteer or parent who has questions about this announcement.

There are lots of resources for learning about why people on Mumsnet: Feminism: Sex and Gender discussion boards feel the way that they do about protecting female only spaces to be for female sex people only. I might suggest that if you are genuinely trying to be open minded perhaps drop the language like bigotry when referring to women whose motivation is not anti-trans-identifying people, but pro-protecting women and girls' rights.

There is a thread that explains all the many and varied issues for newcomers to the whole subject. Might I suggest you make a brew and have a good read through before continuing to call us bigots or anything else?

Break it down for me? | Mumsnet
Break it down for me? 2 - General Break it Down archive thread | Mumsnet

No girl ever groped my vulva, but if she had done, one thing I wouldn't have had to worry about was an escalation to rape with a risk of pregnancy.

That fear of escalation to an act that could leave me pregnant was stomach-churning, bone-chilling abject terror. No woman or girl can ever inflict that fear on me, only a man or boy can.

I’m a bit worried about this message, I’d rephrase as might make women who have been a victim of SA by another woman feel like it’s not as bad.
though going through that and what you went through is horrific and I’m sorry it happened to you

🗣️️🗣️ what about the men 🗣️🗣️🗣️ think about the poor excluded men 🗣️🗣️ the untrophied men 🗣️ the under-served men ️🗣️ the waiting men 🗣️️🗣️ the misgendered men 🗣️🗣️🗣️ did I mention the men?

Oh but, you know, we can never tell. They pass so convincingly. 🤨

Oh dear. No such thing as a 'cis' woman it is insulting and demeaning to apply a prefix to women in an attempt to make them a sub category of their own sex.

Trans people in the UK do not have the same rights as everyone else in several concrete ways.

A trans woman (even with a Gender Recognition Certificate) can be legally excluded from women’s refuges, hospital wards, prisons, changing rooms, toilets and support groups whenever the provider wants. A cis woman cannot be excluded from those same spaces.

Correct, transwomen are biologically male, they are men and the comparator for them is other men, not women and as other men are not entitled to access those facilities designated for members of the female sex it follows that transwomen are not either.

A trans woman is banned from competing in the female category of virtually every elite sport. Cis women face no such blanket ban.

Sport is segregated on the basis of sex, female sport is for females.

Trans people under 18 are banned from accessing puberty blockers or hormones on the NHS and now privately too, no matter what doctors or parents think is best. Cis teenagers with medical needs get treatment.

There are very good, well researched medical reasons for not dispensing puberty blockers. There is no right to unsafe medical treatment.

Adult trans people wait five to ten years for a first NHS appointment and many GPs still refuse to prescribe hormones even when told to by a specialist. Cis patients do not face that delay or refusal for comparable healthcare.

What comparable healthcare?

There is still no self-ID. Changing your birth certificate requires a panel, a dysphoria diagnosis and two years of evidence. Most countries in Europe ditched that system years ago.

Nor should there be Self-Id, so what if other countries have done so, a number of them are now finding out how disasterous that has been.

Even with a GRC your legal sex for the purposes of the Equality Act remains your birth sex, as confirmed by the Supreme Court this year. So the certificate changes almost nothing in practice.

No other person in the country can alter an official document which a Birth Certificate is, so trans people actually already have an extra right over and above the rest of the population.

Trans pupils can be forced to use facilities matching their birth sex and schools are now told to prioritise teaching “biological sex” over social transition.
Those are not theoretical gaps. They are daily,
enforceable differences in rights that no cis person has to deal with.

Trans pupils are treated the same as every other member of their sex and have exactly the same rights.

What you are arguing for is extra rights and privileges for trans people and the removal of rights from other groups. Nice to finally see that admitted and spelt out.

In other words - Men don’t have the right to enter women’s spaces.
Tough shit.

You are a disgrace.

This is so despicable that I nearly reported it. Which I almost never do.

But I think it should stand, so that people can see what you are.

Couldn’t read all of this as it was too boring, but my experience of young lesbians is that many of them are now partnered with trans lesbians. There is (tragically) a huge subset of young butch lesbians who sadly succumbed to the lie that it would be better to transition and be straight than to learn to love their healthy bodies and their same-sex attraction.

And the reason so many young lesbians are “trans positive” is because they have been told the lie that women like me, and others on this board are “anti-trans” and must therefore be fought. The reality, of course, is that we are anti-men-in-women’s-spaces. Presumably they also don’t wish to face up to the fact that so many of their female friends have been caught up in a hideous experiment which will eventually be recognized as wholly destructive and have not been helped to find some mysterious “true inner-self”.

They just can't help themselves

Nope. They can't.

And they wonder why women don't want them in our spaces.

FFS.

Adult trans people wait five to ten years for a first NHS appointment and many GPs still refuse to prescribe hormones even when told to by a specialist. Cis patients do not face that delay or refusal for comparable healthcare.

Anyone else with endometriosis or who has suffered because of male centrered healthcare take exception to this or is it just me????

If only it had taken 5 years for my diagnosis I may have avoided the multiple surgeries, the loss of an ovary, loss of jobs, physical and mental health, an ectopic pregnancy and to top it all 6 months on the evil drugs used as puberty blockers which may still have ongoing effects 20 years later.

I have male friends begging for cancer treatment from their nhs trusts but hey ho Trans people have it so much harder than anyone else that we should be kind.

See that creepy men are coming over from Reddit 🤮

Very long, tedious and ageist.

In short: all the lesbians who are actually homosexual have been driven out of LGB spaces, all that's left is the ones submissive to the trans ideology so yes, probably to you it seems as if there aren't any.

The point of the SCJ is that lesbians who do not want men who identify as lesbians in their bars, harassing them for sex and informing them of all the above (good lesbians love straight sex and welcome men) can have a space that men and activists cannot forcible invade, colonise and exclude them from for being homosexual.

And thank God for that.

Women who are happy to believe that men are lesbians and to have sex with them on these terms are unaffected, they can crack on and I wish them well. And those men. Your issue is the power of compulsion over the non consenting women has been lost.

But it is why women need the protection of law. The SCJ specifically mentions the right of lesbian women to be able to meet together on the basis of biological sex. Whatever men and activists think.

Asking what people are so freaked out about.

Males, with penises, in spaces that females, with vulvas, thought would be male-free and entered on that basis. Those females will have entered those spaces in the belief that they couldn't be raped and left pregnant.

And now for a reply from me personally;

I’m saddened by these voices, but genuinely curious about people’s views, perceptions, and knowledge of the trans community.

I work with young people. Around 1/3 of them identify as trans or non-binary. Around 2/4 of them are neurodiverse (as am I) (this is relevant). I am bisexual and have experience of dating men and women and of having non-binary identifying and trans identifying friends. I have experienced having my voice as a member of the LBGT+ shut down and silenced. I have experienced male bodied people who identify as women behaving exactly as you would expect entitled male louts, to behave - towards me and towards the LGBT+ youth who I was responsible for at a Pride event.

I’d like to ask if and why are you afraid of trans people and what threat you think a transgirl poses to a troop.

I'm not afraid of trans identifying people. I believe that it is important for female bodied people (commonly known as women and girls) that they have a right to single-sex groups and spaces.

I’m 50 years old and have known people from all the letters of the LGBTQ+ community most of my life and have not ever felt threatened by them.

I'm 47 years old, a member of the LGBT+ community, and I have. Or don't I count?

To be honest, the so-called allies who think I'm a bigot for having a different opinion from them on what makes somebody female are a much bigger threat to women and girls, in my experience. The trans identifying men "just" threaten me with violence for having a belief that sex is immutable and gender identify doesn't make you female. The "Allies" want to strip me and all women and girls of women's hard-won rights.

No one is trying to ‘convert’ heterosexuals or get people to change their gender.

On the threads that I linked to there are several articles about how some children are being steered towards identifying as transgender because their families can't stomach the idea of them being gay. Sounds unbelievable; is being reported by generally reliable sources. Religious people sometimes really don't want their children to be gay.

Given the current climate of hatred towards trans and gender non-conforming people (stirred up by billionaires, politicians, and the christian right), why would any child, teen, or adult “choose” to be trans?

Honestly, my answer to this is too long and complicated for this post.

Certainly not to “infiltrate” toilets and girl’s only spaces.

Of course there are men who would love an easy loophole to access to female only spaces when women and girls are in a state of undress or vulnerability (e.g. emotional)! Or just because they are entitled men and boys who don't like being told no, you're not allowed in here. They don't have to have gone through any gender reassignment treatment - there is a whole movement, of which you may be a part of, that believes that a man saying that he is a woman should be enough to allow him access to women's only spaces. When men are allowed into women's spaces, those spaces might as well be reclassified into mixed-sex.

Heterosexual cisgender men continue to be the biggest threat to each other, women, trans people…

Trans identifying men (transwomen) offend at the same rate as men.

Do any of you know anyone who is trans, non-binary, intersex?

I know and am friends with several people who are trans ifentifying or non-binary. Nobody that I know is openly intersex. FYI, organisations representing people who are intersex have asked that they stop being used as a puppet to argue about trans-identifying people. One is an identity, the other is a disorder of sexual development. I studied DSDs at university, oddly enough! The overwhelming majority of people (and animals) with DSDs can still be classified as biologically male or female.

Biological sex is not as simple as you’d like it to be. 1.7% of the population is intersex - as common as twins. Approximately 1 in 4500 assigned female at birth women are born without wombs.

As I say, I studied the foetal development of sex, and DSDs at university.

The 1.7% figure is widely disputed.
Sex is a classification based on a number of characteristics.
Variation from binary sex is present in a really tiny proportion of the population.
Most of those people can still be classified as male, or female.

There is currently NO evidence that DSDs are linked to transgender or non-binary identities in the majority of the population who identify as such. "Intersex," or DSDs, and gender identity are two different issues.

Girlguiding doesn't use the term "troop" by the way. They're units. A Rainbow unit, a Brownie unit, a Guide unit, a Ranger unit.

The old terms were a Guide company and a Brownie pack.

Never "troop". That is the term used in Scouting or America.

People with experience of UK guiding generally know that.

That some women appropriate the word "lesbian" to refer to their own bisexuality doesn't change the meaning of lesbian, which is "female homosexual".

I encourage my fellow bisexual women to own their sexual orientation and be proud of being bisexual instead of stealing words from other people.

@OneLoftyPombear ”so please see that you are speaking for Gen Z and my guess is you’re a 50 year old lady behind a keyboard who knows little“

You can fuck right off with your misogynistic ageism.

Do you think that being 50 means a woman doesn’t know anything? Has no life experience or wisdom?

You sound like an immature child, making pig ignorant and lazy assumptions about middle aged women.

Still, it shows us what you are. Hope you get dismissed and belittled when you are 50.

Oh I think @OneLoftyPombear might well get to be a 50 year old.

Getting to be a woman however may be more trifficult...

They wouldn't. The only medical indication for lupron et al in children is to delay precocious puberty, and the bar for doing that is pretty high because of the side effects.

A 2023 Reddit discussion in r/actuallesbians referenced a UK poll where 84 per cent of lesbians supported trans women (higher than any other cis group), and another stat showing 96 per cent of Gen Z lesbians are trans-positive, with a “significant chunk” willing to date trans women if they present femininely.

@OneLoftyPombear Shocking, isn't it, that a survey on platform which widely and wholly rejects and bans people who express gender critical views, should find that the majority of people they surveyed did not, in fact, have gender critical views.

my guess is you’re a 50 year old lady behind a keyboard who knows little.

Here comes the ageism.

Middle-aged lesbians exist.

actuallesbians, the sub where every third post is about girldick. If you were present your query to lesbiangang, a sub whose moderation hasn't been infiltrated by TRAs, you would find considerably less enthusiasm for the transbian moniker.