Erin In The Morning, an excellent Substack about trans issues had this today:
Nine years ago, the Boy Scouts of America announced that it would begin accepting transgender youth into the program. In 2018, it opened its doors to girls, and in 2024, it rebranded as Scouting America. Transgender scouts were welcomed to participate alongside peers matching their gender identity, and the organization built out initiatives to be inclusive to people of all identities and creeds. That all came to a crashing halt today, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the organization would be dropping all diversity initiatives, putting more emphasis on faith, and forcibly outing and segregating transgender scouts from their peers—forcing them to only be acknowledged by their assigned sex at birth and segregating them from peers of their gender.
“After 2012, however, the Boy Scouts lost their way and a once great organization became gravely wounded. Diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI, crept in. The name was changed to Scouting America. Girls were accepted. The focus on God as the ruler of the universe was watered down to include openness to humanism and earth-centered pagan religions… They even welcomed the destructive myth of gender fluidity and transgenderism to infiltrate their membership,” Hegseth said in a video posted to Twitter.
He then announced major changes at the organization, including new anti-transgender policies. “Scouting America has agreed to comply immediately with the provisions of executive order 14173. This includes reviewing and replacing politicized, divisive, and discriminatory language throughout the organization, programs, and all publications. No more DEI. Zero,” Hegseth said. “The Citizen in Society merit badge that encouraged scouts to explore diversity, equity, inclusion, and identity… that badge has been discontinued. Third, Scouting America will modify its policy to make clear that membership will be based solely on biological sex at birth and not gender identity. That means that the application, any application, will have only two sex designations, male and female, and the application must match the applicant’s birth certificate. Scouting will also make clear that biological boys and girls will not be allowed to occupy or share intimate spaces together, toilets, showers, tents, anywhere like that.”
He ended by saying that he wanted them to ban girls in the organization as well so that they will go back to turning boys into men.
I don’t know why Scouts are any of Hegseth’s business in the first place. Who the fuck does he think he is? And why in the world are they capitulating to him in a process that is going to hurt vulnerable, young kids? If I had a child of scouting age I would be forced to conclude that they are mean, nasty people and I wouldn’t want my kids involved with them.
I hope that everyone realizes that we are living through a period of rank, appalling bigotry that it will go down in history as one of the cruelest assaults on a small minority of powerless human beings who are hurting absolutely no one. It is utterly appalling.