Girlguiding is not for boys

With all the grace of a sulky teenager, Girlguiding finally issued a statement this week, announcing that it will comply with the law on single-sex spaces. ‘Trans girls’ (aka boys) will have to leave the organisation by 6 September. It might as well have read: ‘The nasty judges made us do it.’ Naturally, there was also a link to mental-health support for those upset by the discovery that boys aren’t allowed in.

Girlguides should always be prepared. But it seems the leadership have been shocked by the mess in which they now find themselves. For most of its existence, Girlguiding didn’t have any policies on trans members or volunteers. That’s because the concept of ‘trans children’ had not been invented. Kids who didn’t conform with sex stereotypes were not thought to have some sort of mismatch between their bodies and their minds, and adults knew better than to pander to childhood fantasies. Meanwhile, cross-dressing men weren’t so bold as to assume they’d be welcome in a role volunteering with teenage girls. In short, there was no ‘trans inclusion’ policy because institutional lying hadn’t been normalised.

Then, in 2017, Girlguiding met with Stonewall and Gendered Intelligence to develop policies to accommodate boys and men who identified as trans. Rank-and-file members were not consulted. Those who raised legitimate concerns were not simply silenced, but publicly smeared and shamed.

In 2018, long-serving guide leaders Katie Alcock and Helen Watts were forced out after being investigated for social-media posts in which they raised safeguarding concerns. Their crime was to have questioned the newly developed trans-inclusion policy, which admitted men and boys on the basis of a self-declared female identity. Watts, a volunteer of 15 years, saw her Rainbows Unit for girls aged five to seven closed. Alcock later reached a financial settlement, telling the Daily Mail that the process was akin to interrogation by ‘the secret police in some totalitarian state’. She claimed to have been ‘treated no differently from a child abuser. Yet all I’d done was say safeguarding should come before anything else.’

By 2022, what had been waved away as hypothetical risk had become embarrassingly concrete. Girlguiding was forced to investigate one of its commissioners, Nottinghamshire bus driver Monica Sulley, who oversaw multiple units, after he posted Instagram images in fetish gear, posing with what appeared to be a replica firearm, a holstered handgun and a sword, with captions including: ‘Now behave yourselves or Mistress will have to punish you #mistress.’

But Girlguiding’s disastrous trans-inclusion policies did more than open the tent flap to creepy men and confused boys: they effectively groomed girls to give up their rights. Last week, Janet Murray, writing in the Telegraph, uncovered a splinter group, Guiders Against Trans Exclusion (GATE), which has provided advice on how leaders can campaign for boys to remain, from lobbying politicians to attending protests. A publicly available briefing directs leaders to buy political badges and introduce ‘trans rights’ materials into their units.

This has been successful. A video from Thatcham Rangers shows girls holding placards reading ‘Trans girls are girls’ and ‘Our story includes trans girls’, while reciting the Girlguiding promise.

We are told children should get off their phones, join clubs and do something wholesome, away from adult concerns. Girlguiding is perfectly placed to offer that. But it is understandable that parents, and girls themselves, want the reassurance that they will be safe, that there will be no horny teenage boys pretending to be teenage girls who are tagging along on camping trips, and that their daughters won’t be accompanied to the loo by adult male volunteers. They also need to be sure that their children won’t be subjected to extremist ideological views, and this includes the fiction that boys are really girls if they say so.

The promise each Girlguiding member makes is schmaltzy but based on decent principles: Do your best, be true to yourself, develop your beliefs, serve the king, your community, and help other people. But in Girlguiding’s pitiful statement, there is no sign of these values. There is neither contrition nor shame from the leaders – not for the women they drove out, not for the families they alienated, and not for the girls they put at risk. They have not done their best, developed their beliefs or served anyone but themselves. It seems the professionals at the top of Girlguiding were too busy polishing their rainbow badges to remember their duty to the girls they were meant to protect.

Jo Bartosch is co-author of Pornocracy. Order it here.