Culture Boy Scouts to drop ‘Boy’ from name as they allow girls - girl scouts btfo

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For 108 years, the Boy Scouts of America’s flagship program has been known simply as the Boy Scouts. With girls soon entering the ranks, the group says that iconic name will change.

The organization on Wednesday announced a new name for its Boy Scouts program: Scouts BSA. The change will take effect in February.

Chief Scout Executive Mike Surbaugh said many possibilities were considered during lengthy and “incredibly fun” deliberations before the new name was chosen.

“We wanted to land on something that evokes the past but also conveys the inclusive nature of the program going forward,” he said. “We’re trying to find the right way to say we’re here for both young men and young women.”

The parent organization will remain the Boy Scouts of America, and the Cub Scouts — its program serving children from kindergarten through fifth grade — will keep its title, as well.

But the Boy Scouts — the program for 11- to 17-year-olds — will now be Scouts BSA.

The organization already has started admitting girls into the Cub Scouts, and Scouts BSA begins accepting girls next year.

Surbaugh predicted that both boys and girls in Scouts BSA would refer to themselves simply as scouts, rather than adding “boy” or “girl.”

The program for the older boys and girls will largely be divided along gender-lines, with single-sex units pursuing the same types of activities, earning the same array of merit badges and potentially having the same pathway to the coveted Eagle Scout award.

Surbaugh said that having separate units for boys and girls should alleviate concerns that girls joining the BSA for the first time might be at a disadvantage in seeking leadership opportunities.

So far, more than 3,000 girls have joined roughly 170 Cub Scout packs participating in the first phase of the new policy, and the pace will intensify this summer under a nationwide multimedia recruitment campaign titled “Scout Me In.”

The name change comes amid strained relations between the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts of America.

Girl Scout leaders said they were blindsided by the move, and they are gearing up an aggressive campaign to recruit and retain girls as members.

Among the initiatives is creation of numerous new badges that girls can earn, focusing on outdoor activities and on science, engineering, technology and math. The organization is expanding corporate partnerships in both those areas, and developing a Girl Scout Network Page on LinkedIn to support career advancement for former Girl Scouts.

“Girl Scouts is the premier leadership development organization for girls,” said Sylvia Acevedo, the Girl Scouts’ CEO. “We are, and will remain, the first choice for girls and parents who want to provide their girls opportunities to build new skills ... and grow into happy, successful, civically engaged adults.”

The Girl Scouts and the BSA are among several major youth organizations in the U.S. experiencing sharp drops in membership in recent years. Reasons include competition from sports leagues, a perception by some families that they are old-fashioned and busy family schedules.

The Boy Scouts say current youth participation is about 2.3 million, down from 2.6 million in 2013 and more than 4 million in peak years of the past.

The Girl Scouts say they have about 1.76 million girls and more than 780,000 adult members, down from just over 2 million youth members and about 800,000 adult members in 2014.

The overall impact of the BSA’s policy change on Girl Scouts membership won’t be known any time soon. But one regional leader, Fiona Cummings of Girl Scouts of Northern Illinois, believes the BSA’s decision to admit girls is among the factors that have shrunk her council’s youth membership by more than 500 girls so far this year.

She said relations with the Boy Scouts in her region used to be collaborative and now are “very chilly.”

“How do you manage these strategic tensions?” she asked. “We both need to increase our membership numbers.”

Surbaugh said BSA’s national leadership respected the Girl Scouts’ program and hoped both organizations could gain strength.

“If the best fit for your girl is the Girl Scouts, that’s fantastic,” he said. “If it’s not them, it might be us.”

 

[omori]

There's other organizations that allow coed memberships, fuck off.

Also if you want to retain and attract interest in your organization GSA, stop calling hotgluing garbage together an activity and making bitchy soccer moms troop leaders.

 

[8777BB5]

Why don't they just call it Venturing and be done with it? (For those who don't know Venturing is an already existing co-ed branch of the BSA that should've been made the main title when this was declared)

 

[RadicalCentrist]

Girl scouts will continue only admitting girls, and will not be renamed as such.

No double standard here, move along everyone

 

[Derp Potato]

I still never understood why the push to allow girls in to the Boy Scouts other than parents wanted their daughters to do more than sell cookies instead of just...getting the Girl Scouts to do more than just sell cookies....Call them Ranger Girls or some stupid shit. Boom. Keeps the Boy Scouts boy scouts and the Girl scouts girl scouts.

 

[Reynard]

But Girl Scouts already exist. If some young tomboy wants to do what the Boy Scouts do instead of what Girl Scouts do, then just teach her or send her to a summer camp where they do that stuff with anyone regardless of the parts in your pants.

Also, they're ignoring that people seem to think doing masculine things makes you male regardless of what you were born, so all they're doing is fucking with their own description of gender more, essentially showing that women who do masculine things are trans except when they arbitrarily decide not to. Remember when shit someone's gender was simple and not ridiculously complex? When men could be fruity but still be men and women could be butch but were still women and being a tranny went beyond just not conforming to gender stereotypes? I miss those days.

 

[Trash Eater]

Well at least there's no Xir Scouts yet.

 

[Derp Potato]

Are crossdressers even a fucking thing anymore? I remember seeing Eddie Izzard in drag and thought he was weird, but fucking hilarious and not gay.

Now it's either they're a tranny or not. No fucking inbetween.

 

[omori]

No Girl Scout that I know of who ever sold cookies (or had their mom sell them at work for her) ever got a BA in economics. Instead they became a sjw.

 

[skiddlez]

News just in, boys and men aren't allowed to have anything to themselves.

In other news, sky to remain blue.

 

[escapegoat]

Girl scouts will continue only admitting girls, and will not be renamed as such.

No double standard here, move along everyone

The Girl Scouts officially are against this move. A spokesperson basically (and rightly) called the BSA out on this:

"The Boy Scouts' house is on fire," a Girl Scouts spokesperson said Thursday. "Instead of addressing systemic issues of continuing sexual assault, financial mismanagement and deficient programming, BSA's senior management wants to add an accelerant to the house fire by recruiting girls."

The BSA basically crawled so far up the LDS's ass, that this is part of their misguided attempt to fix that.

From the Girls Scout's website:

The benefit of the single-gender environment has been well-documented by educators, scholars, other girl- and youth-serving organizations, and Girl Scouts and their families. Girl Scouts offers a one-of-a-kind experience for girls with a program tailored specifically to their unique developmental needs.

Essentially, they see the Boy Scouts doing this as an attempt to steal from their recruitment pool for cookie sales. The GSA thinks the Boy Scouts should STAY the Boy Scouts. And United Way already has Camp Fire, which was coed a zillion years ago.

Unfortunately, the GSA is very much on the "inclusive" train, hardcore, so they accept boys who identify as girls.

The LDS is already rolling out their new scouting thing. They bailed last year, I think, and moved onto something more Mormon flavored, that they could control directly. Basically, the LDS controlled BSA kept running into gay-trouble and First Amendment trouble, etc, and now what's left of the non-Mormon BSA picked this move as an attempt to salvage the situation.

 

[Coldgrip]

A bunch of 11 to 17 year old boys camping with a bunch of 11 to 17 year old girls? I can't see how this could possibly have any negative consequences at all.

 

[sperginity]

Girl scouts will continue only admitting girls, and will not be renamed as such.

No double standard here, move along everyone

They will admit anyone who identifies as a girl, or whose parents say are a girl, so anyone.

Anyway, girl scouts have no prestige. Making it to eagle scout is a real accomplishment that some people care about. So it matters more than what the girl scouts do imo.

 

[sperginity]

News just in, boys and men aren't allowed to have anything to themselves.

In other news, sky to remain blue.

Don't worry, your bathrooms and locker rooms aren't being converted to gender neutral, troons only care about converting women's rooms. you still have most world religions leadership positions, many recreation clubs (esp golf), schools and colleges, probably other shit I'm forgetting.

 

[escapegoat]

Found a link. https://www.lds.org/church/news/chu...scouting-with-new-activities-program?lang=eng

The new LDS scouts are being rolled into the Aaronic Priesthood, and the church basically demanded that all members leave scouting. This left a giant hole in the BSA and BSA leadership in particular. The LDS basically controlled the BSA for decades. That is why so much of Boy's Life photography was in Utah for such a long time.

 

[skiddlez]

Don't worry, your bathrooms and locker rooms aren't being converted to gender neutral, troons only care about converting women's rooms. you still have most world religions leadership positions, many recreation clubs (esp golf), schools and colleges, probably other shit I'm forgetting.

If women don't like troons in the bathroom they need to deal with feminists who are pushing that shit. There are tons of powerful female leaders especially in the EU. Men only clubs and organizations often lose legal battles because not enough vagina. There are way more women in college and university than men, and the only male-only organizations (fraternities) are supplemented by female-only sororities, plus other clubs that are female only. Don't be an idiot.

 

[Red Sun]

I still never understood why the push to allow girls in to the Boy Scouts other than parents wanted their daughters to do more than sell cookies instead of just...getting the Girl Scouts to do more than just sell cookies....Call them Ranger Girls or some stupid shit. Boom. Keeps the Boy Scouts boy scouts and the Girl scouts girl scouts.

There have been a number of efforts to do things like this in the past, to the extent that id be willing to bet a small amount of money that the name "ranger girls" is already taken by one of them. The problem is that there are very tangible benefits to being part of a large, internationally recognized youth organization that a start-up like the hypothetical ranger girls can't offer.

If you're a boy scout, you can register to stay at any of hundreds of camps in the country, and take part in hundreds of events. 99% of that is of course not going to be worthwhile for some reason or another, but it looks great on paper and the opportunities are there. The rigid, consistent and (most importantly) well-published requirements to become an Eagle Scout in the BSA have allowed that rank to be a genuine influencing factor on things like job applications, and I believe it even counts for a small increase in your starting rank if you join the military. The ranks and awards in a home-grown youth program don't have 108 years of consistent credibility backing them up. Also, the fact that the organization is huge and over a century old means that they have faced and overcome issues with adult leaders being accused of pedophilia and embezzling. Any new group is going to have to go through those same growing pains, and they're fucking rough.

I fully believe that a brand new scouting organization could do better for young women when it comes to the principles of scouting, like outdoorsmanship and ethics, but there's no way to make one that can compete with the BSA in terms of recognition or scale of opportunities. I can totally see why the girls want in on this so badly.

The Girl Scouts have that huge pool of resources and widespread recognition, but they really are just a cookie company with a code of ethics tacked on for the salespeople. The overwhelming majority of their members (and more importantly, their overbearing mothers) have no interest at all in outdoorsmanship or any other scout shit. The organization knows it can't go toe-to-toe with the BSA in the summer camp/trail hiking game, and they'd lose most of the "dainty 10-14 year old girl" demographic that they depend on for selling shit if they tried to do so. They'll never be anything besides what they are right now.

This is all compounded by the fact that the BSA is bleeding money and members, and is pretty desperate for a new demographic to draw from after they pissed off all the Mormons.

 

[Kroster]

Oh this is actually something I know a lot about because I had to write a report on the differences for an old job. This move was inevitable, due to a variety of forces, and nobody comes out smelling like roses. In no particular order, the reasons for this are:
1) Boy Scout's bread and butter was LDS troops for decades. But LDS is making their own youth activity group and leaving Boy Scouts. This is a way to get more members and more money for BSA.

2) Girl Scouts became known as a progressive organization, and conservative, mostly religious, families pulled their girls. There are a few alternate Girl Scouts out there for conservative girls now (American Heritage Girls is the major one I think), but they're all pretty lame. Parents would much rather just bring their daughters to the same meetings they bring their sons to. In many cases they already do, and the girls are already doing the same things the boys are. This has been true with Cub Scouts for years, but is becoming more true for Boy Scouts. The girls can do the same stuff, just can't get the badges (which are only sold to registered troop members), and this pisses them and their parents off.

3) Girl Scout programming sucks. It's based on a troop-centric model, whereas Boy Scouts is based on a national-program model. This means that there's very little support for Girl Scout troops and very little access to the kinds of materials that many Boy Scout troops build up over generations. There's no institutional history at the troop level, and the troop leaders have to devise their own programming for the troop, usually with no experience and very little money. There are badges for Girl Scouts, but they're mostly boring and way below grade level. There's something called Journeys that are supposed to be the national program, but I've never met anyone who likes them.

4) Both Boy and Girl Scouts consolidated regions and camps over the past decade, but Boy Scouts was much smarter about how they did it. They invested heavily in various camps around the country, basically turning them into outdoor-based community centers. This is another money issue: in order to pay for these improvements, they need more kids to participate in programming.

5) They've had plenty of bad publicity for being exclusive, and this is a way to garner good publicity. It's a good way to avoid the transgender issue entirely, but that's probably a tiny reason.

One final thing: Boy and Girl Scouts are totally separate organizations that don't like each other much at the national level. They have nothing to do with each other. BSA is probably pretty happy that this is a big "fuck you" to Girl Scouts and their sanctimony.

Edited to add: this is going to be framed as a progressive, inclusive, snowflake, whatever move, but it's 100% a financial move. BSA desperately needs money. There are girls who don't want to do Girl Scouts who want to give them money. It's as simple as that.

 

[escapegoat]

A bunch of 11 to 17 year old boys camping with a bunch of 11 to 17 year old girls? I can't see how this could possibly have any negative consequences at all.

Camp Fire Girls became Camp Fire Kids in 1975. This is not the first time a scouting org has gone co-ed.

I was in Camp Fire, back in the day. It was fine. Seriously.

 

[Red Sun]

A bunch of 11 to 17 year old boys camping with a bunch of 11 to 17 year old girls? I can't see how this could possibly have any negative consequences at all.

Venturers (coed BSA branch that allows members up to 21 with less supervision than normal troops) don't seem to have a problem with scandalous teen sex happening all the time.

There are many, many valid arguments to be made about how it's important that young men can go to the Scouts for an environment where masculinity is ubiquitous and rewarded, and where boys without positive male role models can find men to look up to in the same troop that they find other boys to share that struggle with. I believe that for a lot of young men, the Scouts were the first place they ever found males worth being friends with or emulating. It's also the only socialization a lot of boys can get where the judgement of potential qt gf material isn't an issue.

Making it all gender-inclusive could potentially compromise that sort of thing if it isn't handled delicately. I don't think that super hot teens banging in the woods all the time is going to be the problem.