Before Robert Baden-Powell started the scouting movement he was a Boys Brigade officer, who became vice president of the organisation in 1903. He did an experiment where some Boys Brigade companies would become Boys Brigade Scouts, later these groups split off to become the Boy Scouts.
One of the reasons for splitting off was that the scouting movement was more progressive for the time, and as far as I know It always has been.
I think the reason I ended up in the BB was because there werenât any scouts nearby. I could walk to and from the local church on my own, but the nearest scouts was a car drive away and my mum couldnât drive at the time (my dad was in the merchant navy and away quite a bit). I would rather have been in the guides but they wouldnât have let a trans girl in back then even if I could have got away with transition.
I havenât found that in the official histories - is there a source? The version I had was that in 1907 or thereabouts B-P organised an experimental Scout camp on Brownsea Island which drew on BB members, Etonians and Harrovians as part of Baden-Powellâs belief in social mixing. It was never exclusively BB. I wonder if the BB has âimprovedâ the story?
âother side of the countryâ âBCTFâ. They are what we mystery reader/writers like to call clues. (Please read this as more lighthearted than nasty⌠that is the intent.). Yes, ON its in the East. Eastern Conferences, Eastern Standard Time, back East. Try to go West of us and you get wet.
I havenât replied and am not going to mention for a couple of reasons.
I realised we were derailing.
I read the post in Fuck Today and I am not going to pile on someone who is having a bad day. I made the original crack before I read that post.
But it wasnât that long ago that an MP declared at a public event that Canada stretched âFrom the Rockies to the Atlanticâ.
The political erasure of BC is a bit of a sensitive / front of mind thing around here right now, because it has cost lives and those lives are now being used by Ottawa as a negotiating tool. Fetanyl has been a crisis for quite a while here, but instead of Federal funding, we saw pleas for help either ignored or dismissed with a side of victim blaming telling us to shut down Insite and pop-up clinics like it that were saving lives. Only when Ontarioâs problems started hitting the news did the Federal monies emerge and they still come with conditions like a province must buy into the federal health care deal, whether it benefits them or not. A lot of people here bought the promises of changing the voting system. FPTP means the government gets chosen before our polls even close. Now weâre told that the system wonât be changing.
So, yeah, we snark about it a bit. Is that not our Grand Canadian Tradition? Laugh at what we are powerless to change?
The inclinations of the Austrian and German officer classes are briefly discussed in Fashion and Fetishism. I think Kunzle wastes too much time on collars, though.
The other side of the country from BC is not Ontario, it is Newfoundland & Labrador. Thatâs over a thousand kilometres past Ontario. I know several Maritimers who would be horrified to be lumped in with Ontario.
And I recall residents of both Vancouver and Victoria pointing out the mountains to me when Iâve visited there in the past. Are those not part of the Rockies? The Okanagan Valley is as Rockies as it gets and thatâs definitely BC.
BCTF is pretty obscure for anyone who is not a) in BC and b) a member or a friend or relative of a member of the BCTF. My immediate family are related to two former members of the OSSTF, but I guarantee they canât remember what it is or what the letters stand for without being reminded.
Tonight Iâm hosting a videoconference with my friend Stephanie Bonvisutto. She is a womenâs studies doctoral student at Stony Brook University, and she is putting together a really great discussion. Itâs about safe spaces in yoga for LGBT but I think whether you are interested in yoga or not, itâs going to be just generally a good discussion about making a space a safe space, and particularly for LGBT people.
When: Jun 20, 2017 9:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
At the risk of a post proclaiming, âItâs not like that here!â (because it is), I do want to share something that Iâve shared elsewhere because it does give me hope. I live in southern Alabama (albeit a university town), and my son has a transgendered friend who he has known since 2nd grade; they are about to enter high school.
Weâve watched and experienced the transition and the pain the family has endured. Iâm not sure thereâs anyplace in America, the place with which Iâm most familiar, that I would recommend raising a transgendered child, but on first glance, Alabama would not pop to mind. However, Iâve been so pleased by my son and his friendsâ reactions to their friend â it is really âno big dealâ to them. This is not to suggest that itâs been âno big dealâ to all the other people in the familyâs life, but I have witnessed the magnet school they attended be overly accepting of his transition.
I guess Iâm sharing to explain that change is possible anywhere and it usually happens through the personal. One child, one family, affected all sorts of people and through the influence of other parents, the damage was less than it could have been and may have affected opinion in ways that the general could not.
Again, Iâm not sharing to defend Alabama or its politics (such a defense is simply not possible). Iâm only sharing to say that Iâve found hope in such personal interactions recently, even in Alabama. The personal, coupled with national and international movements for acceptance, can affect change that is not easily undone.
âUsed to beâ â when I started as a librarian at a large university in Mississippi in 2001 and subsequently got pregnant, I was told I was lucky that I didnât get transferred from public services (aka reference librarian) to technical services (aka catalog the books) after I started showing because that was the unofficial policy until the mid 1990s. A direct quote: âIt was considered too vulgar to have a pregnant woman interacting with the public.â And what individual was going to challenge that, especially pregnant staff members who needed their health insurance?
Thank you for sharing about that. I always found people in Alabama really accepting individually. itâs in the groups where people do thoughtless things. But actually being up North now, I see that the conversations are much quieter here. Itâs almost the opposite where politically people are liberal but at an individual level, conversations arenât happening.
Well, I feel Iâm giving too much credit to people here in deep South. Iâve managed to find pockets of acceptance, and yes, that is reason for hope. But this scorched earth is blanched with such blood and suffering that I mostly fear it will never recover. Thatâs how I feel most of the time.
Okay, I have a question. Itâs always seemed to me that gender expression is socially constructedâhow men and women act, dress, display emotions, and so on are based upon arbitrary cultural norms that are learned from infancy. To say you were born male but, because you identify with the female cultural repertoire, you therefore are female seems kind of essentialist to meâits reinforcing these arbitrary gender norms rather than challenging them. Wouldnât it make more sense to say that youâre a man (by virtue of biology) but that you present in ways that our culture traditionally associates with women? Wouldnât this make it easier for people to just be themselves without having to choose between two arbitrary social categories?
And, just to be clear, I respect peopleâs right to live and identify however they choose, but I feel like thereâs something Iâm just not getting here and maybe somebody can explain it to me.
But, why would you? The problem seems to be that âmaleâ and âfemaleâ simply arenât useful terms outside of biology. They donât correspond to sex; theyâre based upon arbitrary, fluid and ill-defined cultural norms; and itâs not clear how useful they really are. Why create (or reinforce) a dichotomy that is ill-suited to describe what is really more of a spectrum?
I think thatâs asking for people everywhere to discard the concepts of âmaleâ and âfemaleâ and think of gender as constantly fluid, which is a rather tall order.
A good example of what youâre talking about, more or less, is Eddie Izzard. Heâs a man who often presents as female, wearing full makeup, female clothes, nails, heels, etc, but doesnât modify his speech to be less male; heâs heterosexual but has said sometimes he feels more like a woman (his âlesbianâ side, as he puts it) and sometimes more like a man. His identity is fluid.
Most people donât have the luxury or confidence to present differently day-to-day. Society is full of gender norms and at some point in many peopleâs lives they realize theyâre much more comfortable and confident identifying one way versus the other. I think the majority of people are more comfortable fitting into one category or the other rather than thinking of themselves as â3/4 male but 1/4 female, except today, when Iâm 1/2 femaleâ. Theyâd rather go all-in.
If you watch the video and put comments below that, Stephanie will answer you about these questions. There is a conversation happening about how we define gender @Haystack and Stephanie has a lot of information about what the current thoughts on whether we need gender definitions at all or not.
(Please read this as more lighthearted than nasty⌠that is the intent.). Yes, ON its in the East. Eastern Conferences, Eastern Standard Time, back East. Try to go West of us and you get wet. 
However, Iâve been so pleased by my son and his friendsâ reactions to their friend â it is really âno big dealâ to them. This is not to suggest that itâs been âno big dealâ to all the other people in the familyâs life, but I have witnessed the magnet school they attended be overly accepting of his transition.