Guides: We’ll let boys who say they’re wrong sex shower with girls
TEENAGE boys who believe that they are female are able to share showers, changing rooms and toilets with girls on Girlguiding camping trips, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Official advice to guide leaders also says members who are boys, but identify as girls, should be allowed to sleep in the same tents and cabins as girls when they are away from home on trips.
The controversial move comes after the group, formerly the Girl Guides Association, changed its ‘girls only’ rule to allow transgender girls born male to join.
The advice, which applies to Girl Guides aged from five to 25, is published on the Girlguiding UK website in a section on organising accommodation for residential trips. Under the heading ‘Using Facilities’ it states: ‘The use of gendered facilities, such as toilets, can cause anxiety. Members are allowed to use the facilities of the gender they self-identify as.’ Asked by The Mail on Sunday if this also included showers, toilets and changing rooms, a Guides spokeswoman said: ‘That is correct. ’
Controversially, parents of Guides as young as five would not automatically be told if their daughter was sharing facilities with a boy who thinks that they are the wrong gender.
Last night critics warned that allowing transgender Guides, particularly those in their teens, to share accommodation and personal facilities on trips posed a threat to the safety and privacy of girls.
David Davies, Conservative MP for Monmouth in South Wales, said: ‘If transgender girls who are physically male are going to be sharing facilities, it’s going to make some girls threatened and uncomfortable and the Guides shouldn’t be doing that.’
Left-wing feminist campaigner Julie Bindel added: ‘This is not a moral panic. The concern that I and many feminists have about boys invading bedrooms, tents and showers, is that disproportionately the victims of sexual violence are girls and women, and overwhelmingly, the perpetrators are boys and men. This signifies the end to girl-only space and the safety of girls in single-sex organisations.’
We revealed in January that boys who identified as girls were allowed to join the Guides for the first time. The guidance on arranging trips away was then updated to allow transgender girls, born boys, to ‘share accommodation with other young members if they wish’ and use the same facilities.
At the same time, Guide leaders were discouraged from telling parents their daughters would be sharing facilities with transgender girls, being advised that it is ‘good practice’ not to inform other people that a young person is transgender unless the individual concerned gives permission to do so.
These new rules marked a major departure from the Girl Guides origins, set up 107 years ago as a female-only organisation.
Last year, girls who responded to a survey run by Girlguiding stressed how important it was to have a girl-only safe space. But under its overhauled regime, the advice to Guide leaders is that girlonly spaces should now be open to transgender members.
The group’s gender guidelines state: ‘“Girl” is based on gender identity. This means that any child
‘It’ll make some girls feel threatened’
who self-identifies as a girl should feel safe and welcome in our girl-only space regardless of the sex that they were assigned at birth.’
The Guides say they are not currently recording the number of transgender members who have joined to date. And Girlguiding chief executive Julie Bentley defended the rule changes, saying that the organisation was simply complying with UK equality laws that state people should be treated ‘according to their acquired gender’.
The move comes after the Government’s July announcement to allow adults to legally change their sex without a medical diagnosis. The plan is for an update to the law, to allow those who want to change gender to do so without having to go through the current protracted process.