All the clocks have been stopped, the telephone cut off and the intern is currently prising a juicy bone from the dog’s jaws. On Tuesday, a period of mourning descended on the headquarters of Girlguiding, as the charity announced that “with a heavy heart” boys would no longer be able to join the single sex group in order to comply with the law. The Women’s Institute (WI) soon joined the funeral cortege, with chief executive Melissa Green delivering the grim tidings on BBC Woman’s Hour that “transgender women” (i.e. men) will, with “sincere regret”, also be excluded from membership.
The message from both organisations was unmistakable: they were merely following orders from the fascist Supreme Court and ought not to be blamed. Their hearts, they insisted, were positively bleeding. If they had their way, those bigoted vagina havers of the rank and file would still be expelled for insufficient kindness, as indeed they were for years.
Back in 2018, guide leaders Katie Alcock and Helen Watts were thrown out of Girlguiding after a four month investigation into their social media posts after they raised safeguarding concerns. The women objected to a policy admitting male children and adults on the basis of a declared female gender identity. Watts had volunteered for 15 years when the unit she ran for girls between the ages of five and seven was closed. Alcock, who later reached a financial settlement with Girlguiding, said the investigation felt like being interrogated by “the secret police in some totalitarian state… I was treated no differently from a child abuser. Yet all I’d done was say safeguarding should come before anything else.”
Just a year earlier, Girlguiding had proudly developed its trans inclusion policies with the help of Stonewall and Gendered Intelligence. Stonewall’s Trans Advisory Group then included the now infamous Aimee Challenor, a Green Party equality spokesman who later slid off to the Lib Dems. Challenor said the decision would “hopefully be another step to normalising trans young people”.
Then in 2022, four years after Alcock and Watts were purged, Girlguiding bosses were forced to investigate one of their Commissioners, Nottinghamshire bus driver Monica Sulley, who oversaw Rainbows, Brownies, Guides and Rangers. Sulley had posted Instagram photos in fetish gear with the caption: “Now behave yourselves or Mistress will have to punish you #mistress.” Another picture showed him in a tight black top posing with what appeared to be a fake assault rifle, a holstered handgun at his waist. A third had him standing with a sword; and a fourth displayed his moobs alongside the question “did you want to see more?”
Despite these catastrophic failures of judgement, Girlguiding pressed on with its mission for trans inclusion. Even now, after begrudgingly admitting that it got the law wrong, the organisation still welcomes men into voluntary positions.
The WI, not to be outdone, also threw the gingham tablecloth to creepy men. Ordinary members objected. Some lobbied, some formed splinter groups, many simply walked away. In 2023, dissenting members set up the Womens’ Institute Declaration, urging the WI to allow a democratic debate and a vote on whether branches should be forced to accept men who identify as women. They were, naturally, ignored.
On the ground, women quietly drifted off. Sarah, a former WI member, told me she joined hoping to meet local women, only to find a man “wearing a dress and lipstick” already installed in the group. “I felt uncomfortable,” she recalls. “Conversation did not flow as well as it usually would in a group of women.”
Ultimately she did not return because, “There is only so long I can spend talking about clothes and make–up.” Like so many women, she kept her misgivings to herself: “It felt embarrassing to admit how uncomfortable he made me feel… I knew everyone was meant to believe ‘trans women are women’, but it had not impacted my life before.”
According to WI chief executive Melissa Green, as a whole the organisation still believes that “transwomen are women”.Yet polls show Green’s view is now in the minority. She told Woman’s Hour that only 67 emails had been received since the ruling in April, as if this proved the issue was a fringe belief rather than that scores of individuals felt strongly enough to write in.
What Green cannot grasp is that after nearly a decade of pushing out any woman who voiced concerns, silence was simply preservation, not consent. Under her tenure, the WI placed Petra Wenham, a 74 year old man, on the cover of the magazine WI Life under the headline “I was welcomed to the sisterhood.” Of course he was — anyone inclined to object had already been taught to keep schtum or risk accusations of bigotry.
Green now insists that “transwomen” will still be welcomed in special “sisterhood” groups, a sort of hobby corner for men who enjoy performing womanhood in front of a captive female audience. She may soon discover what Hampstead Heath swimmers already know: men who demand entry to women-only spaces rarely want equal participation; the thrill is in the trespass into female terrain.
Let men in and you push women out
Girlguiding’s chief executive Angela Salt appears equally oblivious to the wider pattern: the over representation of trans-identified sex offenders in prison; the testimonies of trans widows; the countless women who have learned, the hard way, what happens when you fluff a fetishist. Both leaders represent institutions that spent years valuing attention seeking men over the competent women who kept everything running and arrogantly sought to stifle dissent and enforce conformity,
Ultimately, the leaders of Girlguiding and the WI have squandered the time, talent and goodwill of extraordinary women to appease the demands of greedy, deviant men. Now that reality has finally caught up, they must accept the simple truth: let men in and you push women out. Because while Green and Salt may weep over their doomed inclusion policies, ordinary women, the ones who actually keep things running, are preparing for a jamboree.
