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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2436 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 18, 2026

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Via evolving parenthood experience, it's recently come to my attention that the Boy Scouts no longer exist, but rather a co-ed institution called "Scouting America". Boys and girls welcomed equally. No scout troop for males only.

Girl Scouts? Same as it ever was. Girls only.

How is this not a layup discrimination lawsuit? I can't even find any online discourse about it; any attempt to Google the topic simply directs me to the scouts "anti-discrimination" efforts.

edit: I was tragically unaware that Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts are two independent organizations. The naming structure led me to assume that they operated under a common parent organization, and we all know what happens when you assume...

When stuff like this happens, I think back to my time in the boy scouts 30 years ago. Or rather, cub scouts. Our den leader was a woman, and women weren't allowed to lead boy scouts (age 12 up), and the couldn't find a guy to do it, so the whole thing just disbanded once i hit age 12.

It was basically an after school activity. We sang songs, ate snacks, and made crappy home ornaments with glue and paper mache. No woodworking, no camping, definitely no knives or guns. It was very much not a macho activity. I feel like making it coed would have been... completely fine and natural actually?

There's probably a place for a more "hardcore" scouting that's boys only, but that was not my experience with the group.

That's too bad. My cub scout pack was always mostly father-led, and it was mostly the same dads who followed through to become scoutmasters later on. It was an extraordinarily masculine space, but in a terminally uncool way, and including girls would have completely destroyed the dynamic. This was the one place we could let our guards down and not participate in the typical teen social hierarchies. You throw girls into the mix, and that safe space (for lack of a better term) immediately disappears.

The biggest problem with adding girls to Scouts is that it eliminates the scout-lead elements. These were already declining, but this puts the nail in the coffin. When I was 11 and joined the Boy Scouts, the 17 year old Senior Patrol Leader might be forced to be my tentmate, would hang out with me, would supervise me at camp. Is there anyone in the universe crazy enough to leave 15-17 year old boys alone overnight in a tent with 12-14 year old girls? So you substitute "put the boys out in the woods and more or less leave them alone" for "constant adult supervision to make sure Bad Thing doesn't happen."

That said, the whole thing has less to do with Gender Equality crusades than it does with "declining institution seeks to expand its market to support existing infrastructure." Scouting has or had something like 700 camps, and thousands of troops, across the country; five or so camps are closed every year due to declining enrollment. As enrollment declined for a variety of reasons, it's tough to support all that infrastructure. Coed expands the number of scouts that a scouting family can enroll, and makes life easier for parents: instead of dropping my son off at one meeting then my daughter across town at another Monday night, I drop them both off at the same church and go to the grocery store.

Faced with decline an organization can choose death, cut camp programs further, and then see enrollment decline further as they have less to offer to boys. Or they can choose diversity, and try to support all those great programs with a different program and population. Will I want my son to join coed boy scouts? Maybe not. But I also might not bother if the nearest troop is thirty minutes away and Philmont and Seabase have closed due to declining enrollment.

The boys and girls boy scout troops are totally segregated by boy scout policy... for exactly that reason.

They also won't let kids of 17 and 11 share a tent these days, for similar reasons.

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