My late mother, always the mistress of the malapropism, once referred to the ‘Gouds and Skites’ when, in fact, she meant to say the Guides and Scouts; what we used to refer to as the Girl Guides and Boy Scouts. The clue to the binary gender distribution between the two movements was in the name. If you were not sure, you just looked in your underpants and off you went in the appropriate direction. Got a winky? Scouts. Sans winky? Guides. But I wonder, after all these years, if my dear old mother wasn’t on to something. After all, these days, it is hard to tell the difference between them. Girls have long been able to join the Scouts (lucky Boy Scouts I say) and, while boys cannot join the Guides, they can if they decide that the appendage between their legs is simply an arbitrary accident of birth and elect to ‘identify as a girl’.
Unsurprisingly, not everyone is happy with this, and an unfortunate Guide leader was sacked in 2019 for raising objections to the Guide movement’s transgender policies. She may be permitted to re-join, but was quite right to raise objections and is probably better off out of a movement that is going this way. Why try, Canute-like, to stem the rising tide of inevitable wokeness?
What could possibly be wrong allowing boys into a movement primarily full of girls and designed for girls, I hear the enlightened among you ask? And how dare I refer to them as boys, ‘them’ being the collective pronoun for boys who think they might like to be girls. Moreover, some boys, well-known for their propensity for pranks, may think it a bit of a laugh to fake it and join the Guides – much kudos down the chip shop for that one amongst their adolescent mates.
But let’s assume young Willy is no longer proud of his winkie and thinks it is time to become Willamina. Young Willy is probably pre- or recently post-pubescent. Can he make his mind up about his gender? Of course, he can’t. Last week he probably wanted to play for Manchester United, the week before to be an astronaut. This week he wants to be a girl and one can only assume he doesn’t know much about girls; just wait until he does. After a few weeks in the Guides, surrounded by pre- and recently post-pubescent girls his inklings might begin to change. He’ll not be so welcome in the changing rooms if he’s walking about with a stiffy; try explaining that one Willamina.
Then there’s the case of a man who became a guide leader. Of course, he identifies as a woman but that did not prevent some highly sexualised pictures of him becoming public. Men as guide leaders? What could possibly go wrong? Only this month another story emerged of a transgender woman (aka a ‘man’) raping a prison inmate and, according to The Times: “Transgender prisoners are five times more likely to carry out sex attacks on inmates at women’s jails than other prisoners”. I know of no cases yet of a Girl Guide being raped by a male leader but, surely, it is only a matter of time.
It is hard to fathom what has gone wrong recently as, in 2018, the Guides decided to ask boys identifying as girls to leave the movement. Also, concerns were raised about men being Guide leaders as they could end up sharing toilet and shower facilities with girls. Female Guide leaders spoke out at the same time but it seems the pressure from the trans lobby was too strong to withstand. According to their most recent guidance issued in 2022, the Guide movement says: “Girlguiding promotes an inclusive and safe environment where all girls and young women, including trans girls and young women, should feel welcome…”. I think this is an example of where the two words ‘safe’ and ‘inclusive’ could become mutually exclusive.
Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.
