In 1984, I was Middlesbrough’s most eager Brownie. Such was my enthusiasm, I happily chomped my way through raw potatoes after an older girl, having failed to light the campfire, ordered us to tell Brown Owl: ‘This is how we like them!’ That was sisterhood, and I was deeply committed.
So imagine my horror upon discovering, a few years ago, that Brownies and Guides were now admitting boys. Not the rough and tough fun kind who probably could have got a fire started, no problem at all. But the drippy ones who like to wear dresses and call themselves girls. I was horrified, but not surprised. The organisation’s woke capture became clear when the promise I made, ‘to do my duty to God’, was replaced by the insipid pledge ‘to be true to myself and develop my beliefs’.
This updated promise comes hand in hand with Girlguiding’s inclusive mission ‘to make guiding a safe space for LGBTQ+ members’ by ‘attending Pride events all over the UK’. As such, I am not getting carried away in celebrating this week’s announcement that ‘trans girls and young women, and others not recorded female at birth, will no longer be able to join Girlguiding as new young members.’
Men who think they are women can still don a frock and call themselves Brown Owl
It is good news, of course, that girls will no longer be forced to share changing rooms, showers and tents with boys, just as they are negotiating puberty and periods. But boys who identify as girls and are already signed up to the Brownies or Guides have a free pass to remain, at least for the time being. The new ruling applies only to new members. More disturbingly, men who think they are women can still don a frock and call themselves Brown Owl.
What’s troubling for those of us who believe young girls should experience female bonding, or at the very least, have privacy and safety, is the apologetic tone adopted by Girlguiding UK. The association’s trustees have said the rule change was a ‘difficult decision’ and one taken with a ‘heavy heart’: ‘This is a decision we would have preferred not to make, and we know that this may be upsetting for members of our community’.
Upsetting for members of our community? I’m guessing many will be cock-a-hoop at the news. Helen Watts, along with twenty other rebel Guide leaders, raised the alarm about boys in the Brownies in 2018. Back then, parents Lindsay and Richard, whose daughter was about to go away on her first camp, told the Sunday Times: ‘You are putting the onus on a young girl to say whether or not she is uncomfortable sharing with a boy.’ ‘It could lead to her being labelled transphobic if she says she is unhappy,’ they added. Yet rather than their concerns being taken seriously, Watts was expelled from her leadership role after being involved with Girlguiding for 26 years. ‘I absolutely love the Girl Guides, but I feel utterly betrayed by them because of this,’ she said at the time.
Now, despite the Guide’s volte-face, it seems all the ‘heavy heart’ and ‘difficult decision’ guff is a way of apologising to the boys, not women like Watts. We are forced to conclude that the association’s decision to return to being exclusively for biological girls has not been taken because trustees have woken up to the risks of allowing teenage boys and girls to share toilets and dormitories, or that there is a newfound sense of the importance of simply letting girls be girls away from the male gaze. Apparently, all that has prompted the change of heart is the need to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling that women are, indeed, biologically female.
We should, at least, be grateful for one thing. Watching news readers tie themselves in knots as they try to cover stories of organisations coming to terms with biological reality is my new favourite pastime. Radio 4’s ten o’clock news, read last night by Neil Nunes, was a classic of the genre. ‘The Girlguiding organisation says that girls and young women who identify as trans will no longer be allowed to join as new members,’ enunciated Nunes.
But this is utter rot, of course. Girls and young women can carry on guiding all they like – presumably even the ones who ‘identify as trans’ and are, therefore, biological females convinced they are boys. It is boys and young men who can no longer join. This, it seems, is a truth too stark for the sensitive folk at the BBC to wrap their heads around.
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