Zoe Williams in The Guardian on Girl Guides removing Trans Girls

[Arran2024]

Did she do any research for this article? If so, she should have discovered that it's not as easy as the Guides just "changing their name". It is all about their charitable aims. Anyway, typical pro trans girl inclusion article from ZW.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/27/girlguiding-trans-members-supreme-court?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

If it's for girls, it's bad and should change and be taken from girls in order to be boy centric eh?

The journalist has a problem. Wider than her woeful awareness of the issues at hand and her apparent view of a world that has no purpose or life for women and girls beyond being a stage for special males to express themselves on.

But it's another reminder why girls need legal safeguards to be allowed access and equality that is free of the chains of this kind of sexism and politics. Boys have lots and lots of options. They do not need this one too, they can tolerate girls having just a little corner of the universe of their own, and a little bit of life that isn't all about them.

She went to Godolphin and Latymer school, which is an independent girls school. I wonder if that early experience in an all girls environment is whst has turned her against girls have single sex stuff.

Zoe Williams is one of the reasons I stopped giving money to the Guardian. She just churns out a few hundred words of unresearched, innumerate guff on whatever Kat Viner wants her to. Only equalled in stupidity by Owen Jones.

Ah the arch handmaiden strikes again 🙄

Sean Ingle has written a lovely obituary for Mary Rand in today's Guardian. Mary won Olympic gold in the long jump in Tokyo 1964. She was beaten into the silver position in the Pentathlon by a Russian athlete who retired when Chromosome testing began in 1966.

She has not understand the crux of matter entirely. Did she read the charity status?Changing the name, seriously?
Did she use AI to write the piece?
I genuinely puzzled.

She's a typical Guardian writer.

Extremely privileged upbringing; not very bright; got a well paid job thanks to daddy in which she feels good about herself

She has understood it. She's not that stupid.

She's just pretending not to

🙄🙄🙄

What a performance,🙄

Every article or SM post I've seen on this refers to "trans girls" and never just "boys" which is the actual truth of the matter.
No such thing as a trans girl because children can't transition.

Tbf there are usually 100s of comments pointing this out

Years ago she was very astute but I found her ill informed long before this all became an issue

Honestly, she's thick as mince.

It's not just rebranding. They'd be overturning their entire raison d'être. That's changing their aims as a charity AND meaning any boy whatsoever could join. It would be a mixed sex group like the Scouts.

Let's remember the Scouts didn't do it to be inclusive - they need to because with women and girls they were going to collapse.

It was radical precisely because at no time in history did it insist on the femaleness of its members

And she doesn't know her Guiding history either - badges were heavily gendered, with the Hostess Badge hanging in until 2018 and being brought back branded as Celebrations. It involved napkin folding when I was a kid. My brother in Cubs and Scouts didn't have that.
I failed to get the Embroidery badge twice. It wasn't a gender-free utopia. But it was free of boys.

I got a hostess badge in the 80s. It involved making/ serving tea and biscuits.

🫠🫠🫠

The excellent Audrey Ludwig made this comment - hard agree

I remember that. I'd just done my A-Levels and relaxed by watching as much of the coverage as I could. It was the first Olympics to be televised internationally, though we didn't see all of it live. Satellite transmission was still developing and much coverage was recorded and flown to the UK. Her achievement was huge and justifiably celebrated.

If you scoured the country to find some late teenagers who were in favour of this new rule, they would be more likely to be male, and so wouldn’t have been allowed in the first place.

Well that’s not true is it.

Someone who thinks changing your sex is just a matter of changing your name might well think changing your organization's charitable purpose was also just a name-change away.

Precisely. Well said.

I saw this earlier on SM, my comment was, 'Zoe speaks her branes again'. Even back in the days when I was happily a Guardian reader, she was never taken seriously by most readers, I think.

Like most of the TRAs, she never gave a single thought to "trans" people until it became fashionable.

“Rainbows, harking back to a time (it was named in 1987) when it was considered fun for children to be able to identify bugs and sew things without constantly being reminded how female they were.”

Because being a female is a bad thing???

Woeful Williams.

So "being female" isn't significant, but "being a girl" is?

Yeah, lovely bit of sexism there Zo!

Zoe, sexism doesn't follow the words "woman" and "girl", it follows the people with female bodies.

It's surprising and annoying to discover that privilege still operates despite all the supposed changes to the system.

So yes, finding that people with very poor reasoning or absent critical thinking have risen through life because of the position they were born in, and others are excluded for same reasons, despite loud proclamations of equitable inclusion grates.

In fact it's almost worse. I'd maybe rather they stuck with openly favouring those of Their Kind than the irritating pretence of a meritocracy.

Seems to apply to many areas. Issues of unfairness have been identified, and people have learned how to cover them up to give the appearance of addressing the problem rather than actually doing so.

Another curious example of the technically intelligent - or at least very well spoonfed education - but major issues with actual functional intelligence, such as thinking something through.