I WOULD appreciate the opportunity to respond to Tim Hopkins’s letter (Dec 31), in which he alleges that I repeat the false claim that “lesbians and gay men are told they must be open to dating people who are not of the same sex”. Mr Hopkins claims there is no evidence of Stonewall or any Scottish LGBT organisation having said this. I can provide that evidence.
By way of background, in terms of the Equality Act, “lesbians” aligns with women (females) with a sexual orientation towards others who are the same, “gay men” aligning with men (males) with a sexual attraction towards others who are the same, all understood in terms of biological sex.
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The Equality Network, perhaps the most well-known Scottish LGBT organisation, part-funded by the Scottish Government, instead defines “sexual orientation” by reference to “gender(s)”, in doing so allowing the terms “lesbians” and “gay men” to be understood as including sexual orientation towards those who are not of the same biological sex. It is easy to see how such thinking might support someone of the opposite sex self-identifying into a same-sex-attracted dating pool.
Stonewall’s CEO responded to reports that lesbians refusing sex with trans-identifying men were being called transphobic by saying “There is no ‘right’ way to be a lesbian”, and “if you find that when dating, you are writing off entire groups of people, like … trans people, then it’s worth considering how societal prejudices may have shaped your attractions.”
Having been an organisation that was part of the struggle for acceptance that homosexuality is not a choice, rather that it is as innate and unavoidable as heterosexuality, I cannot accept that that statement – however gently put – isn’t intended to have homosexuals consider romantic and sexual relations with people who are not of the same biological sex.
Brian Forsyth
Edinburgh
BRIAN Forsyth’s response (Dec 27) to my earlier letter begins by asserting that I have failed to explain why Girlguiding should “admit boys”. This reframing neatly sidesteps the point at issue. The question is not whether Girlguiding should admit boys, but whether trans girls must automatically be treated as boys for safeguarding purposes, and whether that assumption is as self-evident, neutral, or workable as Mr Forsyth suggests.
No-one disputes that sex is a material category, or that it matters in particular contexts. What remains contested is how sex is interpreted in practice, how boundaries are drawn, and what those boundaries are taught to mean.
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Safeguarding does not operate by reciting categories alone. It depends on proportionality, supervision, behavioural expectations, and the capacity of adults to manage difference responsibly.
Mr Forsyth lists camps, toilets, bathing, changing and sleeping arrangements as though their mere mention resolves the question. Yet youth organisations already navigate these situations daily for children at different stages of puberty, with disabilities, trauma histories, neurodivergence, or social vulnerabilities. They do so through rules, supervision and judgement, not by assuming that catering only to one characteristic eradicates the potential for risk entirely. The existence of complexity does not make rules unworkable; it is the reason rules exist.
I did not argue for adjudicating the “inner life of every boy and young man”, as Mr Forsyth suggests. I argued against default assumptions that treat trans girls as a problem category rather than as children whose behaviour, like anyone else’s, is subject to clear expectations and correction where necessary. That is refinement of safeguarding practice, not its abandonment.
Mr Forsyth contends that Girlguiding’s embrace of diversity is properly limited to the “female sex-class”, and that admitting trans girls would reintroduce stereotypes about femininity. Yet this rests on the same contradiction that runs through his previous letters – the stereotyping of trans people as intrinsically threatening.
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Children learn appropriate, respectful behaviour not by being segregated from difference, but by encountering it in structured settings under adult supervision. That is precisely what organisations like Girlguiding are designed to provide.
One relevant fact is missing from Mr Forsyth’s account. Girlguiding previously operated a policy that permitted the inclusion of trans girls. This was lived practice, not a hypothetical experiment. If that inclusion had produced significant safeguarding failures,
one would reasonably expect this to have surfaced through incident reporting or review. The present insistence that exclusion is self-evidently necessary therefore rests not on demonstrated harm, but on precaution in its absence.
Boundaries do not speak for themselves. They are interpreted, justified and taught. Their legitimacy depends on how they function in practice rather than on abstract certainty alone.
When exclusion is thought justified despite the absence of demonstrated harm from inclusion in reality, it is anything but common sense. When complexity is dismissed as mere ideology, children are not being protected from adult projection; they are, as I said in my previous letter, being forced to conform to it.
Ron Lumiere
via email
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