Great work, Guides; you’ve taken some members you had no idea even existed, and expelled them from your organisation with effect from September. This gives trans girls a humane half-year to extricate, because that’s definitely what kids want: to participate for six months in a uniformed, voluntary, social organisation that has explicitly kicked them out, while they look for somewhere more welcoming.

“Like every charity, we have to follow the law,” Girlguiding says in an online info pack whose FAQs are almost comically Stasi-lite. “Will volunteers be expected to carry out additional checks or ask for proof?” (The good news, folks, is that they won’t; the mind boggles at what those additional checks might be that didn’t breach at least some safeguarding protocols.) “How should volunteers check that trans girls have left?” (Some sort of dunking stool? In actuality, again, they won’t check.)

The supreme court ruled unanimously last April that “sex” and “woman” referred to biological sex assigned at birth. It permitted services to be single-sex, but did not require it. Let’s give the charity the benefit of the doubt and say that its board really did fear legal action if it continued to badge itself single-sex, but remained inclusive. An obvious solution would have been to change its name........

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