This assumes that the issue is consensual sexual activity. Sexual assault/harassment is very likely to occur in groups. Most of the times when I was sexually assaulted by boys on a camping trip, it was in groups.
If it helps, think of it more as a bullying thing than a sex thing. The object was to subjugate and humiliate a perceived inferior using sexual acts as a weapon, not to achieve personal erotic satisfaction. That kind of dynamic is worse in groups.
I kind of feel like maybe expecting the national organization to have well thought out trans policies is maybe a bit wishful. Keep in mind that they’ve been dragged into allowing gay people to participate, and only recently allowed girls to participate, and when combined with the child molester lawsuits, they’re going to be extra paranoid and sensitive about people’s concerns/worries with regard to anything sexual like this, unfortunately.
Councils and districts though, they should already be figuring this out, but for whatever reason it seems to me like everyone at those levels are extreme rule-followers and won’t buck the national organization on stuff like that.
The fundamental problem is that they chose to tackle the admission of girls by requiring boys and girls to be separate in an administrative sense, rather than just lay down some common-sense rules for things like bathrooms and tents and other stuff. By segregating the genders, it inadvertently makes trans issues more… prominent(?) because it points up gender differences and allows both genders to sort of lean into their own gender stuff. Mixed troops would be somewhere in between the rather hyper-masculine boy side, and however the girls’ side of things works, and might well be more friendly than single-gender troops would be.
I would think being in a tent with 4-6 other people will lessen the chances considerably versus giving a couple their own single tent to use…
First, good on ya Cheesteak.
Second, WTF? There is such a thing a peer allies. My FtM son took part in the high school retreat sleepovers sharing a cabin with a select group. It was no big deal. Christ almighty, people think trans are prowling the night grooming little kids or are going to be sexually so provacative that boys can’t control themselves. As someone upthread pointed out, they were sexually assaulted as a boy by other boys. It’s a risk that is not gender specific. Some empathy, talking to the kids, talking to the parents, should be able to find a workable solution.
I kinda knew Tim Curran from the UC Berkely radio station. He was the Eagle Scout kicked out of becoming scout leader because he was openly gay and sued: What the Boy Scouts – and I – lost | CNN
I was never a Scout, but they seem to parallel some of the fundamentalist Christians. Have a moral code that is not applicable for the LGBTQ+ community.
As the parent of a trans son, I know personally that acceptance, honest attempt to use proper pronouns and preferred names, safe harbor, non-judgemental attitude, goes a long way to making someone feel included. Raising the boogie man of what might happen is a cheap ass excuse for inaction.
that sucks. I’ve heard it’s far more common than what people think. It was a big problem in the Mormon troops.
I don’t think that the issues of bullying or abuse are uniquely applicable to this situation. It’s not like scouting is a utopia where those things never happen. These issues happen no matter the genders of the kids. A group of cis-boys have the potential to bully and abuse another cis-boy. The same with a group of cis-girls. The same with a mixed group of kids. Having a transgender kid join the troop doesn’t introduce these problems into the troop. They’re already there. I would assume the Boy Scouts have procedures in place to handle those situations when they come up. Presumably, whatever guidelines they have to address these problems with cis-boys would also work for transgender kids.
When thinking about this situation, I think it’s more useful to think of why girls aren’t allowed in Boy Scouts. What issues come up if girls join the troop? What are the important issues and what are ways that those issues can be addressed? Really, the only uniquely problematic issue I can see in this situation is the risk of pregnancy from sexual activity between the kids. And that’s really only an issue when there are things like overnight camping trips. In regular scout meetings where the kids are learning about knots or identifying edible plants, the risk is minimal. It’s pretty much the same as anytime kids are together, like at school, hanging out with friends, etc. So minimize the risk of sexual activity during the overnight trips and it addresses the only true problem with trans boys and girls joining the Boy Scouts.
They are allowed, since 2019, as far as I’m aware. For the BSA, that is, it’s been longer most other places.
Good to hear. I was assuming they weren’t allowed from this mention from above:
Perhaps that was from before 2019. In that case, how are overnight trips handled currently when there are cis-girl and cis-boy campers in the same troop?
Right now it’s basically separate tents or tent areas for cis boys and cis girls. The troops are separate on paper and can be as co-ed as the troops want to be for non camping situations. Activities may be fully integrated until sleeping time.
At our scout camp, we are allowed boys and girls troops sharing a campsite as long as we identify this part is boys and that part is girls.
The only really specific rule is that the girls troop has to have at least one female leader present at all events.
We had one campsite for “The Scout Troop” (we just took the gender out of the name… sneaky, huh?).
We always had at least two men and two women as leaders. That was never a problem, everyone loved getting out of the house for an adventurous weekend.
We had tents that slept two, and the girls put their tents up a ways from the boys.
We didn’t have to suggest that; the girls may have been treating the boys as equal, but they still knew about Boy Cooties.
Our Cub Scout pack has for the most part, just ignored the whole boy den/girl den thing. I mean, on paper we’ve got those, but in practice we’ve got one den at each level.
The Scouts BSA events we’ve attended have been pretty obviously in the “figuring it out” stages- strange “off limits” things for the latrines at the campsites, girls troops having separate tents, etc…
But in the troop my son’s going into, the troop committee, and the courts of honor and most other administrative stuff is combined. Only the actual meetings and campouts are separate.
I feel like had their been girls in scouts when I was a kid, it might have put a brake on our more stupid and assholish tendencies. We wouldn’t have thought throwing rocks at each other was a good idea, nor would we have uncorked the septic tank next to our rival patrol’s campsite. Or any number of other things that were only hilarious to minimally supervised 12-14 year old boys.