Girl Scout Cookies: Promoting Acceptance, Angering Bigots

Cookie sales are an unlikely venue for the culture wars, but this year right-wing fear over transgender acceptance has focused on the annual Girl Scout cookie campaign.

The admission of transgender girls into the Girl Scouts has drawn attention from liberals and conservatives alike in recent months. The organization clarified its policy in October—that they gladly accept transgender girls, provided the potential scouts lived as girls—following 7-year-old Bobby Montoya’s initial rejection from a scouting troop. Montoya was re-accepted after a confirmation of her female identity.

But some Girl Scouts and their parents take exception to the organization’s policy of inclusion. A video posted last week by an anonymous Girl Scout calls for a cookie boycott to protest the inclusion of “boys” in scouting; the video also supported a site called Honest Girl Scouts, which complains about the Scouts’ inclusion of sex education and tolerance of LGBT people. The call to action has since drawn both support and fierce condemnation. 

Good magazine Associate Editor Nona Willis Aronowitz pointed out that the Girl Scout in the video had a clear misunderstanding of transgender identity:

Sure, she's urging us to discriminate. But more importantly, she appears not to know what the word "transgender" means. It's clear no one ever sat her down and explained to her that trans women actually define themselves as women, not men in disguise. She makes no distinction between being trans and being a boy, erroneously stating that Girl Scouts has placed "transgender boys"—rather than "girls"—"throughout America without letting everyone know." She seems to think trans people set out to deceive other people, rather than identifying with the gender they feel is right for them. Above all, Taylor's video just proves how badly we need to educate kids about trans issues.

But this makes the charitable assumption that this kind of anti-transgender sentiment could be remedied with simple education, instead of being grounded in the same anti-LGBT worldview that defines many social conservatives. 

For one thing, the unnamed Scout’s concerns about “safety” are unfounded. These concerns about “boys dressed as girls” are a common scare tactic used to deny transgender people access to gender-appropriate spaces from bathrooms to extracurricular activities. They even echo past rhetoric against lesbian and gay acceptance, which insinuated that sexual minorities were so perverse that any exposure to them might result in sexual violence.

The idea that depravation is a defining characteristic of gender and sexual minorities lies at the heart of these attacks; instead of seeing transgender people as what they are—that is, people who are a different gender than they were assumed to be when they were born—they are seen as sick perverts, as people whose desires are so extreme that they must dress up as members of the “opposite sex.” Obviously, exposing children to this aberrance is dangerous.

But people aren’t buying that seven-year-old Montoya, whose first words included a rejection of a male identity, poses a threat to girls nation-wide. Public opinion overwhelmingly favors transgender rights, with the vast majority of respondents to a survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute correctly identifying the meaning of “transgender.”

With the battle-lines drawn, some Girl Scouts are stepping forward to support their transgender sisters. And many non-Scouts are swearing to purchase more cookies to support a progressive organization that provides a safe space to every interested young girl and promotes diversity.

A family friend recently sent me a message, saying that she’d bought cookies specifically from my 14-year-old sister—because of me, her transgender brother.

It’s a good selling point.

Shay O'Reilly is a staff writer with Campus Progress. Follow him on Twitter @shaygabriel.

Related Stories

• Handful of Colorado Lawmakers Stonewall Civil Unions Bill
• VIDEO: President Obama’s Announcement and What’s Next for Marriage Equality
• GRAPHIC: What Obama Said on Gay Marriage
• As North Carolina Amends Constitution to Ban Gay Marriage, Obama Speaks Out
• BREAKING: President Obama Announces Support For Gay Marriage

Story Tags

• LGBTQ Equality