At first, I thought this was an Onion article that fooled the masses, but no.
Colorado Girl Scouts say boy welcome to join
The kid is seven. Personally, I’d think it odd, but…7? Maybe I have a hard time separating gender and sexuality, I donno. But if that were my boy? Sure, dress like you want, but no, I’m enrolling you in Girl Scouts.
Here’s the 9 News link.
I was going to put this in IMHO, but I think it’ll end up here.
Not at all. Of the two, I think the Girl Scouts is the more interesting organization and, as I understand it, the less fucked up. (I have issues with the BSA and their homophobia, among other things.) I would prefer a nongendered Scouts group, but as usual the US is way behind in that regard. Whatever boy scout techniques my kids want to learn, I’ll teach them or we’ll find out together.
Yeah, but isn’t Girl Scouts supposed to be for girls? There’s nothing wrong with segregated youth organizations. Not a fan of Boy Scouts, though.
Trangenderidisdm is real. There is no doubt about that. There are documented differences between the brains of transgendered people and cisgendered people. If you want to believe it isn’t real, you can, but you’d be believing it against all scientific evidence.
Most transgendered people know it when they are small children, just like you and I had a pretty good idea of what gender we were when we were small children.
So the question to ask here is, who does it hurt? I don’t think it really hurts the girls- I mean, it’s a bunch of seven year olds doing crafts, not the college girls swimsuit club. Furthermore, Girl Scouts is totally voluntary, so people who don’t like it for whatever reason are free to join another troop or start their own.
Nor do I see a lot of problems for the kid. If he grows and and figures out that he is a manly man after all, so what? He’ll have a good embarrassing story.
If the troop and the boy and his family are fine with it, I don’t see a problem. Labels are for soupcans, not for people, man.
Because Girl Scouts is for girls and was created for the purpose of being a girl’s organization. It’s supposed to promote positive peer relationships between females, promote values, blabla, self confidence and all that jazz.
And how do you know if the boy is transgendered or in a phase or encouraged or just being seven? There are other co-ed groups he can join. I have no idea if the troop is OK with it, but I’d wager there may be girls who want to keep it girls-only.
Well, I was a Girl Scout, and I’m all for making the lives of the transgendered smoother if it can be so. Body dysmorphia can be downright horrifying. I have several transgender friends, and the stories they’ve told me about the hate, fear and claustrophobia their own bodies caused them to feel when they realized they were being forced to live as the wrong gender is just nightmarish.
If that little boy is actually a little girl, then the Girl Scouts is a darn good place for him to, indeed, get some positive peer relationships with other little girls.
I must live in a bubble. I don’t know a single transgendered person. I know a few people with BDD - anorexics and bulimics, mostly. 
We also haven’t the foggiest idea if he is a girl in a boy’s body. The 9 News article said he was this way ‘since the age of two’. I’m trying to remember if my son was showing a gender preference at two.
Nope.
Just potty training, playing and trying to steal cookies when I wasn’t looking. He had a Cabbage Patch boy doll, trucks, and Fox & the Hound was his favorite movie.
So? Charters can change and the vacuum that existed in 190whenever may not be the hole that GSA feels it needs to fill today. Seriously, Parks and Rec just did an episode on this and how cool is it that a GS troop is so with it that guys want to join?
I don’t think that transgenderism is really an issue here but I do support defying and questioning stereotypes.
I’m female. I’m a teacher. I can say with certainty that my female students need strong female role models.
I was also in support of single-sex schools in that other thread, so maybe I’m just a fuddy duddy.
I see this is my Boy Scout Troop regularly - a younger sibling with a positive relationship with their older one wants to join, and is not interested in the alternative. There are several sisters waiting until they turn 14 so that they can join my Venturing Crew (14 and older coed Scouting under the BSA).
There are many arguments for single gender education and activities, but I would not have an objection if the BSA went coed. My only challenge is that the list of women who are willing to go on long backpacking trips is too short, and the BSA requires both genders represented when camping coed.
I was a GS leader (Daisy- K and Brownie -1&2 grade). Would do it in a heartbeat.
The other issue herre is that the GSA and BSA are not synonymous except for gender. The are not “seperate but equal”. They do a number of different things and have a number of different goals that may make one more attractive then the other, even without gender identity issues coming into play.
When I was in Boy Scouts we had a girl who wanted to join one of the other troops in the area. She was not lesbian or transgendered. She was just a tomboy who was very close to her brothers (one being her fraternal twin) and was more interested in doing a lot of the outdoor activities that the boys were doing and wanted to do them with her brothers. She was not allowed to join, but they got around it by letting her tag along unofficailly on troop activites.
And how would this change these girl’s ability to find strong female role models?
Hell, boys could probably use some strong female role models as well.
Your son knew he was a boy, right? That’s all there is to it.
The vast majority of transgendered people know that there is some kind of mismatch before the age of five. Most transgendered people report that they have been transgendered for as long as they can remember.
And if he’s not transgendered, so what? He can switch to boyscouts, and his mom will have an embarrassing story to threaten to tell to dates.
Again, you are free to believe that transgendered people don’t really exist in a real way, but that would essentially be an irrational belief not supported by any of the scientific evidence. There are real detectable organic structures in the brain related to being transgendered. We don’t know exactly how it works, but we know it is there. Transgendered people have existed through all of history, in every culture. Our culture is a little unique in that we don’t really have a place for them- the Maori, Samoans, Arabs, Central Americans and South Asians, among others, have recognized transgendered people for hundreds or thousands of years.
You probably know plenty of transgendered people. It’s just that most people don’t walk around with neon signs broadcasting what set of genitals they were born with. Most transgendered people are not fabulous drag queens. Mostly they are perfectly boring normal everyday people.
The unfortunately reality is that in the US, being transgendered is very difficult, and it is correlated with an astonishing high suicide rate. We do not have any methods, right now, of changing transgendered people’s brains. Telling them just to suck it up also doesn’t work, as the high suicide rate shows.
What does work, what does improve quality of life and longevity, is allowing transgendered people to live as their identified gender. It’s the best thing we’ve got right now.
At that age, aren’t we talking Cub Scouts and Brownies?
You need to be 11, IIRC, to be in Boy Scouts. Maybe it’s OK at a younger age, but segregating kids by gender after age 11 in these activities is certainly appropriate, unless you want 11 year old boys and girls sharing tents together on camping trips.
I don’t think the question is whether segregating kids by gender is appropriate. It’s whether not segregating them by gender is inappropriate.
While I’m fairly certain no child could really demonstrate a gender preference at the age of two, I’m equally certain this child’s parents are in a better position to determine if he (/she) does than you.
I’ve signed my daughter up for Cub Scouts in the UK. It’s a co-ed organisation now in the UK, but so far we have no girls in the unit I help out with. I can’t see the OPs case being muich different. I understand the desire for a single-sex space, but if the rest of the group are OK with it then there’s no problem.
Just because a 7 year old boy “behaves like a girl” doesn’t mean he’s transgendered. Just because a girl acts like a tomboy does mean she’s a lesbian or transgendered either.
I think it can do a young boy great damage by assuming his unusual sexual orientation or identity and shoehorning him in a direction that will separate him from the social norms of his peers.
Even if he was transgendered, there’s nothing wrong with a 7 year old learning how society works and that your obvious gender entails certain restrictions in society. When he’s older and stronger he’ll be better able to deal with his own situation.
Would I be weirded out?
Not at all.
I guess I wasn’t aware a two year old could have a gender identity issue. To me, gender identity is on a continuum…I have a few lesbian students who are, well, ‘butch’ (for lack of a better word) all the way down to the sagging pants and tough voice. I have never thought, “Well, there’s a boy born in the wrong body.” No - I just see my students for whatever they are and I love them. <shrug> If one came to me and said, “Miss, I think I’m transgender” I’d think, okay, let’s figure this out. What can I do to help you?
But if I were a kindergarten teacher or a preschool teacher and a boy told me he was really a girl, I’d raise an eyebrow. If his mom and grandma were sending him to preschool in girls’ clothes, I’d be extremely suspicious. I’m thinking that this kid gets a lot of attention at home for his, er, predicament. Reinforcing this since he was two? Uh, yeah. Alarm bells.
I guess I’m not convinced that the two to seven year old range is the time to be knowing these things for the long-term. Regardless, Girl Scouts exists as a girls-only organization for a reason and I think it should stay that way. Gah, especially in urban areas.
There is a fledgling organization called Navigators which is largely modeled after scouts but is coed and inclusive. They mostly exist in NYC, but they’ve started branching out. They have a chapter that is starting up in Dallas, of all places, and my seven year old is a junior Navigator. It’s working pretty well so far.
Enjoy,
Steven
