The organization’s approach focused on belonging, safety, and healthy child development, emphasizing the importance of supporting children’s sense of self and well-being, which was met with relief and understanding in communities, even in conservative areas.
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Across the country, policies targeting transgender children are no longer hypothetical. Care is being withdrawn, institutions are retreating, and families are scrambling in real time to understand the rules that now govern their lives. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to issue rulings by late spring or early summer 2026 in two major cases, West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox, which challenge state laws banning transgender girls from participating in school sports. Following arguments in January, the court appears poised to uphold these state bans.
In this hostile climate, it’s worth considering how we got here, and if “here” is where we were always destined to arrive. The fact is, there were — and are — other possibilities. Long before transgender children became a political obsession, there was a small team directly involved in a major American institution confronting the question of transgender inclusion seriously, carefully, and without panic. And it worked.
In 2011, a 7-year-old transgender girl named Bobby Montoya was welcomed into a Girl Scout troop in Colorado. The local council supported her publicly. The story drew national attention. At the time, we worked at the national organization, Girl Scouts of the USA, as Chief Girl and Family Engagement Officer (Andrea) and Vice President of Communications (Josh). When a major conservative outlet signaled it planned to publish identifying details about a minor, alarms went off. Not because of politics, but because of harm. We knew what exposure like that could do to a child.
The organization brought in outside expertise to slow the moment down. Everyone involved insisted on restraint and prioritized minimizing harm over winning a news cycle. The story ran, but it did not metastasize into the kind of anti-trans venom Americans now take for granted. That difference matters. A 7-year-old remained a 7-year-old, not the center of a manufactured national panic.
What followed was not a press release or a symbolic gesture. It was years of work.
Girl Scouts of the USA, a federally chartered youth organization with 112 independent councils operating in every ZIP code in the country, made the decision to develop formal transgender inclusion guidelines. We were part of the small team tasked with doing it, alongside legal counsel. Because the organization is federated, the policy could not be dictated from the top. Nearly every local council participated. Executives across political, religious, and cultural lines weighed in. Medical experts, faith leaders, advocacy groups, families, and transgender people themselves were included. The language evolved through testing, revision, and practical planning for what communities would actually need to implement it responsibly.
The guiding principle was simple: We are not in the business of harming children.
When the policy was finalized, it was not dropped into the world and left to burn. The rollout moved community by community, with in-person conversations explaining it. Often, those conversations happened in churches. People came with questions. Some were uncomfortable. None were hostile. Parents wanted to understand what this meant for their kids. Faith leaders wanted to understand what this meant for their values. When treated like adults, people behaved like adults.
What surprised many inside the organization was that there was not backlash, but relief. Even in deeply conservative communities, people grasped the core idea quickly. This was about belonging, safety, and healthy child development. Not politics. Not ideology. Children.
In the years that followed, other national organizations quietly reached out to learn how the work had been done. The conversations focused on specifics: how to answer parent concerns, how to protect a child’s confidentiality, and which rollout approaches had escalated tensions unnecessarily. Many went on to adapt those guidelines for their own institutions. There were no press releases announcing it. No culture-war theater. Just adults, across sectors, recognizing a responsible approach and choosing to replicate it.
That response was not accidental. It reflected the fact that developmental science is not ambiguous about what young people need in order to thrive. A strong and secure sense of self, feelings of belonging, and protection from chronic stress are not political preferences. They are essential elements of healthy development. Decades of research show that children who are persistently invalidated or treated as problems to be managed experience elevated rates of anxiety, depression, and trauma-related symptoms. The harm does not come from being different or transgender. It comes from being told, repeatedly and by authority figures, that who you are makes you unsafe to be seen.
What became clear was that institutions shape the developmental environment. Policies are not abstract. They signal to children whether the world is predictable, whether adults are trustworthy, whether safety and support are conditional. When an organization sends a clear, calm message that a child belongs, stress decreases, relationships improve, and healthy development is supported, making room for confidence and leadership to grow. When it does the opposite, it teaches insecurity and hypervigilance. These lessons unfortunately last longer than any court rulings.
In 2015, CNN reported publicly that Girl Scouts of the USA had adopted transgender inclusion guidelines. A month later, the organization partnered with NASA and the White House to host a campout for girls on the South Lawn. The administration was aware of the policy. No one flinched. No staffer raised concerns. No official suggested exclusion. It was treated as what it was. Responsible adult leadership. That kind of leadership is not complicated. It is just harder than cruelty.
That moment now feels almost impossible to imagine.
Today, transgender children are no longer discussed as children. They are framed as abstractions, threats, symbols, or proxies for adult grievance. Laws are written about them without listening to them. Court cases are argued as if their bodies are theoretical. Adults project fear and ideology onto kids who are simply trying to exist and families who are just trying to do right by their children. This did not happen because Americans suddenly learned something new. It happened because institutions stopped trusting the public with complexity.
Media incentives began rewarding outrage. Political incentives hardened around recurring outrage cycles and ideological litmus tests. Fringe voices were elevated until they became policy drivers. The work of care was replaced by the performance of outrage. Institutions that once slowed moments down now race to escalate them. Nuance is treated as weakness.
Restraint is treated as cowardice.
The coming Supreme Court decisions will not be the end of this story. If the bans are upheld, they will mark a chapter that policymakers will need to correct later. That work requires memory, not hysteria. It requires record keeping, not denial. It requires remembering that responsible approaches once existed and can exist again.
Girl Scouts of the USA still stands by its transgender inclusion policy. That matters. Institutions that hold their ground become evidence. Evidence becomes precedent. Precedent becomes possibility. This moment will pass. Leadership changes. Courts change. Laws change. What endures is whether we chose to behave like adults when children needed us to.
We have been here before. We once knew how to do this, When the time comes — and it will come soon — we can choose to remember and do it again.
