Girlguiding is for girls – get over it

Girlguiding – the original UK arm of the girls’ scouting movement – seems to have finally realised what the word ‘girl’ actually means. After seven years of allowing biologically male children to enrol, and biologically male adults to fill women-only volunteer posts, the charity released an official statement this week, announcing the apparently ‘difficult decision’ to restrict its membership to women and girls only.

Formerly known as Girl Guides, Girlguiding is a youth organisation with members between four and 18 years old. Its focus is on outdoor adventure, teambuilding and offering a girl-only space to build confidence and life skills. It began in 1909 – a time when young ladies were discouraged from raising their arms too far above their heads, let alone swimming, hiking and camping – when hundreds of girls gatecrashed a Boy Scout rally at Crystal Palace and demanded an organisation of their own. In response, Boy Scout founder Lieutenant-General Lord Robert Baden-Powell collaborated with his sister, Agnes Baden-Powell, to create a separate, girl-only organisation. No doubt both the Baden-Powells – and those ballsy girls who first managed to muscle in on the Scout movement – would have been deeply disturbed to hear what had happened to it in recent years.

In 2018, Girlguiding came out as proudly ‘trans inclusive’. Subsequently, when Guiding group leader Katie Alcock dared to question these updated guidelines on a Facebook group of 11 mums in 2022, she was expelled from the organisation. Girlguiding, having taken advice from trans-activist group Stonewall, paid a professional employment investigator to compile a file on her. When Alcock was eventually banned from all Girlguiding meetings, her young daughter was also banned by proxy, as she now had no one eligible to accompany her to Rainbows (the Girlguiding group for under-sevens). ‘I was in tears… I felt so disappointed that she couldn’t belong to this movement that I’d been part of since I was a girl’, said Alcock of the experience. ‘Other local Guiders stopped speaking to me. They still ignore me today.’

As if to rub salt in the wound, the same year as Alcock was expelled, the Girlguiding magazine published an article about a seven-year-old trans child called Rainbow, who had ‘lived as a girl’ since the age of five. The piece was written by Rainbow’s parents, who said that ‘trans girls feel like girls [they] should be treated as such… They are the same on the inside, where it counts.’

Currently, Girlguiding is facing legal action from a parent over its former trans policy. In a pre-action letter, the parent states that the admittance of biological boys encouraged ‘unwanted conduct which violates [the girls’] dignity’ and ‘an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment’. The letter went on to allege that this included, but was not limited to ‘sharing toilets, showers or changing facilities with boys, contact sports with boys, and sharing accommodation with boys, all without their prior knowledge or consent’.

It is deeply disappointing to hear how let down young girls have been by an organisation founded specifically to support them. Indeed, even today, there is no shortage of need for what Girlguiding claims to offer. Girls are still twice as likely to drop out of sports by age 14 than boys are. What’s more, being an awkward teen girl around awkward teen boys can be exhaustingly embarrassing most of the time. Do girls not deserve a bit of space away from that? And why should girls’ rights be compromised because some parents cruelly insist their sons have been ‘born in the wrong body’? Or worse, because an adult male wants to volunteer in a supervisory role that’s intended for women only?

‘While Girlguiding may feel a little different going forward’, the charity’s statement concluded, ‘we remain committed to treating everyone with dignity and respect, particularly those from marginalised groups that have felt the biggest impact of this decision’. As you’ve probably come to expect, it makes no mention of the little girls who have been ‘feeling the impact’ of adult cowardice for the past seven years.

However reluctant, Girlguiding’s turnaround feels like a tentative shift back to sanity. Now, we must ask ourselves why we ever subjected children to this insanity in the first place. Girlguiding is quite obviously for girls – and always should be.

Georgina Mumford is an editorial assistant at spiked.