TWIBS: Girlguiding Assembles Team to Solve Self-Made Crisis
The UK girls scouting organization has put together a task force to figure out how they can support trans girls! Without… you know… letting them back in, or anything.
Humor by Aly Gibbs
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s longest running column! Every Friday, Aly Gibbs digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Yet again, dear TWIBSies, I bring you goofy news from the British Isles. It almost feels like cheating sometimes; even when it’s bleak and scary, bad news from the Brits always reads just a touch comical, right? Maybe it’s the funny accents, maybe it’s the silly walks, maybe it’s their fondness for actual baby food, mashed peas. Whatever the secret sauce is, I have to admit, I respect and appreciate the inherent whimsy of our friends across the pond.
So, here’s a riddle for you: If you had recently made the decision to exclude all transgender women from your organization that was ostensibly created to support women, how would you make up for the buffoonish misstep after nearly everybody tells you that you suck and should reverse that decision?
That’s right, obviously you would undo the mistake and welcome trans women back into your organization!
Unless you’re Girlguiding, who have… um… established a task force comprised of a 16 person panel and 500 community members to figure out how, exactly, they can support trans youth. If you’ve already forgotten, you goldfish you, I reported back in December that Girlguiding (a large group who oversee girlguides, a UK staple that functions a lot like the Girl Scouts in the US) had banned trans girls from their organization. The decision was tremendously unpopular, with many girlguides leaders saying in no uncertain terms that they would not enforce this ban in their troupes, and several celebrity ambassadors to the organization stepping down in protest.
Girlguiding defended the decision as a response to the April 2025 Supreme Court of the United Kingdom ruling that legally defined “sex” to mean your assigned sex at birth. Never mind that the UK Charity Commission later confirmed that changes like these were not required, with CEO David Holdsworth urging charities like Girlguiding not to rush to make changes to their inclusivity policies, and legal advocacy group The Good Law Project even offering to represent the organization in court for free should they face legal challenges. The Good Law Project also offered to provide legal representation to another women’s organization, Women’s Institute, who banned trans women from membership in the same week.
So, what is Girlguiding’s illustrious and bold new task force going to accomplish, you ask?
Well, that’s extremely unclear. Their super cool slideshow says they’ve recruited “people with lived experience, volunteers, young people, staff, parents and carers and subject matter experts” to develop ideas to “show support for trans girls, trans women and the trans+ community.” They have promised to keep us updated on the progress of the task force.
Okay. I’m no subject matter expert, and frankly I don’t know what the hell “the trans+ community” is (do we have some sort of premium subscription service that I’ve been blissfully unaware of?), but here’s the first idea I’ve got, just off the top of the old noggin, about how you can support trans girls and women:
LET THEM BACK INTO YOUR ORGANIZATION YOU ABSOLUTE CHUMPS.
Who are you kidding? What support can you possibly provide to a marginalized group of girls who have been told they aren’t allowed to be a part of anything you’re doing? As long as trans girls are denied access to Girlguiding, they will remain excluded from support. As far as I’m concerned, this is an obviously hollow show of “support,” and breathtakingly dense to boot.
Truthfully, though, I don’t think it’s too late for them. Not at all! They’ll always have to carry this stain on their organizational history, but the only thing they have to do to regain the support of the trans community (and perhaps even the premium trans+ community) is reverse their prohibition on trans girls participating, and they can do that immediately right now, with legal support waiting in the wings on the off chance that they are challenged in court.
So go to their Instagram page and share that message, or even contact them directly if you’d like, and let them know that the simplest way to make amends is to provide our community with real support by acknowledging that all girls should be welcome in any organization for girls, no matter how trans they happen to be.
Aly Gibbs (She/They) is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
