Bobby Montoya, a seven-year-old boy living with his mother in Denver, wants to join the Girl Scouts, and the group’s Colorado headquarters says that’s okay. As reported by ABC News, a Girl Scout official originally told Felisha Archuleta that her son could not join a local Girl Scout troop, but, sensing a public relations nightmare, the group quickly changed its mind.
According to Archuleta, her son has believed he was a girl since he was two years old, and the mother has apparently done little to reconcile him to his true gender. “I believe he was born in the wrong body,” she told ABC News. “I thought Bobby would grow out of it. For birthdays, he asked for ponies. He had a princess birthday, and last year when he turned 7, he had a Rapunzel birthday. I have just basically supported him.”
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However, Archuleta had trouble transferring that support to a local Girl Scout leader, who was dumbfounded at the mother’s request to let her son join the girl’s group. She recalled that “the Girl Scout leader told us he can’t join because he has ‘boy parts.’ … But no one would know he’s a boy unless they pulled his pants down.”
After being rejected by the local Girl Scout leader, Archuleta took her request up the chain of command, where Colorado Girl Scout officials explained that the local leader was not aware that the group allows boys who identify as girls to join. “Girl Scouts is an inclusive organization and we accept all girls in Kindergarten through 12th grade as members,” the Girls Scouts said in a statement. “If a child identifies as a girl and the child’s family presents her as a girl, Girl Scouts of Colorado welcomes her as a Girl Scout.”
The statement claimed that “requests for support of transgender kids have grown, and Girl Scouts of Colorado is working to best support these children, their families and the volunteers who serve them.”
As for Bobby Montoya’s case, the statement explained that “an associate delivering our program was not aware of our approach. She contacted her supervisor, who immediately began working with the family to get the child involved and supported in Girl Scouts.”
Girls Scout officials also promised that they were “accelerating our support systems and training so that we’re better able to serve all girls, families and volunteers.”
The national Center for Transgender Equality quickly weighed in on the story, with the group’s leader, Mara Keisling, applauding the Girl Scouts’ change of heart. “One of the things Girls Scouts learn is inclusivity, and civility, and I think they smartly realized that they can’t be uncivil or exclusionary,” Keisling told ABC News.
She insisted that, at seven, Bobby is not too young to decide his gender. “Who is to decide who is a boy and who is a girl?” she said. “We see this all the time.”
But Dr. Judith Reisman, a longtime researcher on sexuality, argued that reenforcing such gender confusion amounts to “child sexual abuse,” calling it a “violation of children’s genetic reality aided by a society that is reverting back to the dark. If he has male parts, he is a male.”
She told Fox News that children reflect the beliefs of the society in which they live. “Until the 1950s the Western world was built and run by adults largely clear about their sexuality and their beliefs,” she recalled. “People used to ask which is stronger, nature or nurture. Now we are so ‘smart’ we don’t even know we have a nature.”
Dr. Keith Ablow, a psychiatrist and Fox News consultant, warned that the Girls Scouts’ politically correct move may serve to confuse, not just the boy involved, but the girls with whom he will interact. “On the face of it, it seems to be expecting far too much psychologically of young girls to ignore the anatomy of a boy and act as though he is a girl,” he said. “The girls are just developing comfort with their own bodies, after all…. This is all [putting] the cart before the horse. We’re conducting social, cultural, sexual experiments on the fly, using our own kids as guinea pigs….”
Photo: A traditional female Girl Scout sells cookies.
