When lies fail
What will the parents who signed their sons up for Girlguiding do next?
I’m very sorry to have gone quiet in the past few weeks – I’ve been overwhelmed with clashing deadlines, a situation that should now ease since I’ve reduced my commitments (not to gender-critical campaigning). Perhaps the most consequential thing that happened while I was too busy to write about it was the decision by Girlguiding to require boys and men to leave the organisation by September. Having been one of the most disgraceful organisations to fall to trans inclusion, it is now, finally and painfully, dragging itself back out again.
This really should never have happened. And not just because it’s wrong and dangerous to include boys “as if” they were girls, and men “as if” they were women, but because Girlguiding is a charity with a Royal Charter that names its beneficiaries as girls. Only girls. Charities are given tax breaks because their charitable objects are recognised as for the public good, and people donate to them in order to pursue their objects. They simply aren’t free to spend money except on those objects, and on their stated beneficiaries. Sometimes that may mean spending money on other people – for example if you’re a charity for children you might put on events for parents – but you do this because you genuinely think this benefits the group you exist to serve. Admitting boys and pretending that they are girls obviously harms girls rather than benefitting them. Doing it was always, to put it bluntly, a type of theft, both from taxpayers and from donors.
Of course Girlguiding denied that this is what it was doing by playing the usual wordgames – insisting that “trans girls are girls”. But whatever about material reality, this was simply never true legally. The UK has never had gender self-ID. The only people who even arguably count as members of the opposite sex for any legal purpose are those with gender-recognition certificates, who must be over 18. The Charity Commission should have stepped in immediately to stop this. But that would mean admitting it had been wrong all along.
