By Steve Gorman
Feb 27 (Reuters) – Scouting America has reached an accord with the Pentagon that aims to rid its policies and programs of “radical woke ideology” and restore membership “based solely on biological sex at birth,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Friday.
But in its own statements outlining the same agreement, Scouting America disputed the notion that transgender youth would now be excluded from the organization, formerly known as Boy Scouts of America.
“Our mission and commitment to serving all youth remains unchanged,” Scouting America said in a press release explaining the agreement, which it said was reached with the Defense Department to preserve historically close ties to the U.S. military.
“We have transgender people in our program, and we’ll have transgender people in our program going forward,” Scouting America President and Chief Executive Officer Roger Krone said in a separate statement.
In a series of gender-related changes criticized by social conservatives in recent years, the organization lifted its ban on openly gay adult leaders and employees in 2015, welcomed its first transgender member in 2017 and opened its ranks to girls in 2018. It ceased calling members “Boy Scouts” the following year.
Girl Scouts of the USA remains a separate youth organization.
Hegseth said U.S. armed forces’ continued support for Scouting America, including the use of military bases for national Scout jamborees and other events, was contingent on the organization abiding by the terms of the agreement.
One of the main points he outlined was compliance with President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14173 in January 2025, seeking to end race- and sex-based policy and program preferences instituted in the name of greater “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI.
That means “no more DEI” in Scouting, “zero,” he said.
In a video message released on Friday, Hegseth said Scouting had strayed from its “foundational” mission as an institution that “develops boys into men,” embracing instead “an insidious radical woke ideology that is anti-America and anti-American.”
“They even welcomed the destructive myth of gender fluidity and transgenderism to infiltrate their membership,” he said.
To address this issue, Scouting America would “modify its policy to make clear that membership will be based solely on biological sex at birth and not gender identity,” Hegseth said.
“Any application will have only two sex designations, male and female, and the application must match the applicant’s birth certificate,” he said.
In addition, Hegseth said, “biological boys and girls will not be allowed to occupy intimate spaces together, such as toilets, showers and camping tents.”
Krone said Scouting applicants are already presented with a binary choice of boy or girl on their forms and are already asked about their birth sex.
“We do not put boys and girls together in intimate spaces and in order to do that we need to have some knowledge of who they are,” Krone explained.
Otherwise, Scouting America said it had made various unspecified “programmatic updates to comply with Executive Order 14173.”
Among other changes both sides said were agreed to, Scouting America will discontinue its “Citizenship in Society” merit badge, which Hegseth branded as promoting DEI, and launch a new “Military Service” merit badge instead. Registration fees also will be waived for children of active-duty, Guard and Reserve families, the parties said.
Scouting America, one of the largest youth organizations in the U.S., has served an estimated 130 million young people since its inception in 1910.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles: Editing by Kate Mayberry)
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