BSA Makes Decisive Move For The Transgender Community

This past January, the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) along with schools and other youth organizations confirmed they are going to accept transgender boys into their scout programs. This decision took around 100 years to be concluded and can be considered quite shocking.

It is shocking because young transgender people aged 10 to 18 years old are now being welcomed to BSA regardless of their gender identification, while the Trump administration recently rescinded the federal protection for transgender students granted by the Obama administration, which included using bathrooms of their chosen gender.

This is not the first time that BSA makes an extremely “shocking” decision. In 2013, they began allowing gay boys into their program. Although the main issues here are bathrooms and the boy scouts, we also have to understand why transgender people feel the way they feel.   

According to the transequality.org: “Transgender people are people whose gender identity is different from the gender they were thought to be at birth.” “Trans” is often used as shorthand for transgender.

Before we are even born, a doctor usually determines if we’re male or female based on our anatomy. In many cases, those who were labeled as male at birth turn out to identify as men and the same applies to females who identify as women.

However, there are people whose perception of personal identity differs from the gender they were born with. These people are known as transgender.

Now, since we are talking mind, can being transgender be considered a choice or is it inborn? The answer to this can be really controversial. A lot of people think transgender people have some type of mental health problem. Well, sorry to say this, but being transgender has a correlation with biological bases and psychological facts, meaning that: no, it is not a choice, and no, they are not problematic or trying to call attention to themselves as some people think.

How can we understand this, though? Let’s start by saying that each brain is unique in a certain way. So, when a fetus is forming inside the womb, it will receive a lot of different hormones that later on might have some type of influence on that person’s gender identity.

Nowadays, the suicide rate for transgender people is around 41 percent. What we can learn from the BSA decision is that we should see them as an example of inclusion. Showing transgender people that we care and that maybe, in the future, having to deal with issues such as which restroom to pick will not be a problem anymore.

The BSA members are the men of tomorrow, and dealing with such a big issue in the way they are dealing with it shows that we should be the generation that accepts people not because of the labels that were given to them, but who they really are.