Another Guides one with inappropriate girl guide leader and advisory committee member

[testmatchspecial]

https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15953295/transgender-burlesque-dancer-shaping-future-Girl-Guides-zealot.html

He resigned after the ban but has an advisory role on supporting trans girls and women. It’s not clear when the advisory role started.

Considering

Details of Southin's role on the panel come as whistleblowers describe an atmosphere of intimidation from pro-trans colleagues at Girlguiding's London headquarters, which is just round the corner from Buckingham Palace.

One ex-employee, who asked to remain anonymous, said she realised shortly after joining that 'gender-critical' views – the belief that there are two biological sexes and that sex cannot be changed – were 'simply not welcome'.

And

The whistleblower said she felt unable to express her views at work. 'I just didn't feel psychologically safe in that environment,' she said. 'I had never experienced any organisation like it before.'

She recalls a junior manager effectively telling staff unhappy with the organisation's approach to trans inclusion: 'You've all got to get on board or get out.'

'No one challenged it,' the former employee said. A second whistleblower, who still works for Girlguiding said: 'It is essentially taken as a given within Girlguiding that trans women are women, so any discussion of biological reality is avoided. You simply wouldn't test the water, as there would be no coming back from it.'

I have very little hope for the future of this instance of GG, unless some truly massive upheaval happens. I doubt even a scandal over the burlesque transgender dancer would do it, since it would be easy to cut him off as a single bad apple if it came to that.

The safeguarding holes in GG are very concerning.

I remember talking to the leader of the group I was volunteering for and she told me that all the local leaders worked very hard to make sure they took appropriate care. She said she sometimes would be extra careful around a policy she thought did not protect the girls enough, and that she knew other local group leaders who did the same.

I wasn’t quite sure what she meant at the time and then the group folded just before Sulley was discovered posting on line in his BDSM gear. I never got to ask more about it. I suspect some of the leaders were aware of the significant issues in safeguarding in the policies and decisions coming from head office.

The question you have to ask is: is this a bug or a feature? Are Girlguiding accidentally allowing men with sexual fetishes to volunteer in their organisation or are they deliberately admitting them?

From everything that's emerged about Girlguiding over the past few years, it seems clear that this is a feature, and that the organisation has been infiltrated by people who have decided to make Girlguiding a welcome place for men who want an opportunity to exercise their paraphilias of exhibitionism, voyeurism and worse.

The fact that they have managed to do this so successfully is in itself shocking, and you have to wonder how a female-run organisation that previously had robust safeguards in place for the girls in its charge has allowed this to happen.

We know that Girlguiding took advice from a Stonewall panel that included Aimee Challenor, but that surely is only part of the story.

I believe that Fae /ozimek was also advising GG at one time.

the feature is, I think, that they deliberately allowed those male activists to significantly influence policy. Without once considering the safeguarding consequences. Perhaps they were too focused on gaining stonewall points.

What a surprise, not.

This is from Janet Murray the journalist investigating this :

x.com/jan_murray/status/2073701942702821405?s=46

-start-
I've been sitting on the evidence for this Girlguiding story since March.

Even then, it took months to persuade a mainstream publication to cover this aspect of the investigation.

For an independent journalist, pursuing a story like this without the backing of a national newspaper's legal team carries obvious risks. But I persisted because I believe there is a strong public interest in asking whether organisations entrusted with the care of girls are putting safeguarding first.

This investigation involved months of conversations, verification and painstaking work. Unsurprisingly, some people have suggested that concerns about these issues are exaggerated. That is why I'm sharing some of the publicly available material I found online.

To be absolutely clear, there is no suggestion that this individual has done anything wrong.

Indeed one could argue he has also been failed by a system that affirmed and accepted him as a Girlguiding leader and later appointed him to a 16-person advisory committee - apparently without sufficient scrutiny of his suitability for the role.

The greater failure, however, was towards the girls and women who should never have been expected to accept males in a single-sex organisation.

I hope this story helps explain why many women believe this debate has never simply been about being "kind". It is about safeguarding, boundaries and whose interests are prioritised.

I'm grateful to everyone who helped bring this story to light, including women who spoke to me privately and helped with research. And @Glinner who reminded me how important it was to tell this story.

And I do think we should ask why it was so difficult to secure national coverage of a story that many people would regard as being firmly in the public interest.
-end-

There are images and a video attached to the tweet too.

As always, I wonder which GG trustees and which of their senior management team have trans identified male close relatives. To be this all in it has to be personal

That could be the reason, for sure, but it doesn't have to be the only one.

All it takes is giving just a tiny bit of ground in the name of inclusivity or kindness (so, just a single transgirl among the troops, or just a single transwoman in the leadership), and you're done for, because backing from that will require facing the extreme male aggressivity of transwomen and the extreme harrassment of TRAs, with all the risks inherent to that position, and most people would rather twist themselves into pretzels than do that.

I've personally seen organisations started by and for transmen getting slowly invaded by transwomen, and ending up disbanding when the transwomen made it clear that now it was all about them or not at all. The only time I saw such an attempt fail was on an online forum, and it took stupidly massive efforts to try to get the transwoman to stop going against the rules, only for her to end up getting banned anyway when she wouldn't comply.

I saw a women's illness support group destroyed in the same way (a condition only females can have, which is why it was a target), and an LGB group that was taken to the brink. And the lesbian groups driven underground. 'All about them or not at all' is sadly the rule rather than the exception.

Call me odd, but I don't think this sexualised stuff should be anywhere near little girls. Never mind welcomed in and so strongly protected.

I don't think GG is going to be resuscitatable sadly.

Ah, how odd that disappeared so immediately, Datun. I'm not sure how you broke guidelines, you only described what is in plain sight on the tweet put into social media by the person in question themselves with the intent of sharing it.

How odd that someone was sufficiently ashamed of it and alarmed by it to have reported and deleted it so instantly.

Most local girl guiding is very much a grassroots organisation with fantastic, dedicated volunteers who do loads to empower girls. I've seen GG's demise predicted a number of times on this board, allowing one centralised policy to rubbish the reputation of the whole movement.

I completely agree that the policies were wrong, and am really glad they've been changed (even if in a mealy mouthed way!). I'm just not sure that running down women-led groups, run for girls, is the right way for us to promote women's rights, even with some significant policy mis-steps

I dunno Seeth - I know exactly what you're saying and lord knows we've seen a ton of that - but a lot of organisations are quietly backing away from this madness while GG are continuing to run openly, loudly and enthusiastically towards it. It reminds me a bit of the fox botherer and Joanne Harris - why so much what seems to be genuine enthusiasm to hand over women and girls stuff to men and boys if it's not in some way personal

Wishesandhorses · Today 12:43
Ah, how odd that disappeared so immediately, Datun. I'm not sure how you broke guidelines, you only described what is in plain sight on the tweet put into social media by the person in question themselves with the intent of sharing it.
How odd that someone was sufficiently ashamed of it and alarmed by it to have reported and deleted it so instantly.

Unsurprising, I guess.

I'll try again.

The video and photographs of the man who is the subject of the investigation by the journalist show him dressing up in 'girly' clothes and being sexual and coy and felating a riding crop on stage.

I found it very telling that this behaviour was absolutely no secret.

My musing was how easy it is to spot these men in an all girls environment, including the one in the bath asking if you'd like to see his breasts and sporting another riding crop (and a gun if I remember correctly), and the husband of one of the women at girl guides.

Easy to see, and completely open about wanting to join the girl guides.

What I find harder to understand is all the other people involved.

The only person the journalist talks about is Gemma Benton, head of being a girl or something like that, who, after I looked her up, it seems has invented 72 new guiding badges, including kindness, laughter and calm spaces.

She also advocates for men and boys in the girl guides. I'll rephrase what I said, which is, in my opinion, her attitude demonstrates a complete blindness to safeguarding and is at best naive, and incredibly easy to exploit by anyone with nefarious intent.

Like other people I am shocked how girl guides has fallen so spectacularly.

No one is surprised about why some men want to join, but it's the enabling that gets me.

None of this could happen without the enabling.

My goodness, does no one stand up for girls and women against men with strange fetishes any more?
This is so beyond appropriate I can’t believe it.
How we have allowed this loud set of lobbyist to infiltrate girls and women’s spaces so completely I just don’t know.
It reminds me of the Pakistani rape gang thing where no one would call a spade a spade because they were so afraid of being accused of prejudice, and the people who suffered from that were young girls.
How’s this - trans women are people too and deserve all protection under the law. However they don’t get special access to girls and women’s spaces and races because they are “trans” women not real women. Why is this so hard?

I would hate to see the girl guides disbanded. Truly. It's a fantastic organisation.

And I genuinely believe that given the law is now making it impossible for men to find validation at the guides, it will right itself at some point. At least in this particular aspect.

I've just checked Gemma Benton's job, and it's head of girl experience.

Extraordinary. Being the head of advocating an experience that you can't define.

Inclusion and diversity are hugely valuable. It’s a real worry to me that we’ll lose them because of this farcical misunderstanding about it.
Does anyone know whether Guides have been as active about supporting other types of inclusion? Are lesbians, or people with disabilities, proactively recruited into leadership or advisory groups?

Oh good grief - thanks for sharing. I accidentally watched his ‘burlesque’ performance. Nothing remotely burlesque and just a sleazy little man licking a riding crop on stage. Grim.

Sadly it seems that GG leadership have completely lost their minds and are not fit for purpose in leading an organisation for girls.

It’s quite depressing.

And Phil/Pips Bunce of all people.

It wouldn't surprise me if a senior female figure in GG has a cross dressing husband

Whenever I think about the GG and the WI, as but two examples The Beaumont Society comes to mind. The Beaumont Society was founded in the 1960s to cater to cross dressing men. It held weekend events where men could dress up, socialise and refer to each other as 'she'. It also had a support group for their wives, who were encouraged to be 'liberal' and tolerate their husband's proclivities.

I know. It looked like amateur hour at some seedy kink club.

Why are these women sooo blind to it?

A friend was on a march yesterday to support trans in guides.

She has a very confused child.