I think someone may have posted a link to this earlier, but there are some good sections I'd like to draw your attention to:
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.”
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?”
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.
The Critic Magazine
A good week for girls and women | Josephine Bartosch | The Critic Magazine
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 p...
