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It’s official: There will be no more Boy Scouts.

Don’t panic: There will still be Scouts who are boys. There will also be Scouts who are girls.

There will also continue to be Girl Scouts who are boys, so long as they identify as girls. And there will still be Girl Scouts who are biological girls.

Just no more Boy Scouts.

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On Tuesday, Boy Scouts of America, an organization which existed for 114 years before feeling the need to publicly distance itself from the word “Boy,” announced that as of February 8, 2025, its corporate name will change to Scouting America.

The announcement comes a year after Boy Scouts of America agreed to pay nearly $2.5 billion to settle sexual-abuse claims made against scoutmasters and adult volunteers by over 80,000 former Boy Scouts whom I’ll presume were all biological boys at the time of their molestation. That massive payout was agreed to after Boy Scouts of America filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in February 2020 so they could provide “equitable compensation” for abuse survivors.

It should come as no surprise that an organization which routinely allows adult males to take young boys into the wilderness for camping excursions might attract pederasts. A 2012 NPR article announcing that the “Boy Scouts’ Confidential ‘Perversion Files’” were made public as a result of a court order alleged that

[t]he organization, founded in 1910, had been targeted by sexual predators from its earliest days. The Scouts began keeping a secret list of accused predators back in 1919, but the national organization didn’t share the information with local chapters so suspected sexual predators could move from troop to troop.

Among the alleged child-molesters caught in the Boy Scouts’ wide but mostly private dragnet over the years were men with intensely pedophilic-sounding names such as Floyd David Slusher and Garth David Snively.

In light of all that boy-diddling, perhaps Cruising America would have been a more appropriate name change than Scouting America.

A 1991 Washington Times exposé about sexual-abuse scandals in the organization noted:

The Boy Scouts are a magnet for men who want to have sexual relations with children. . . . Pedophiles join the Scouts for a simple reason: it’s where the boys are.

But after Tuesday’s announcement, the organization that was known for over a century as Boy Scouts of America will be where the boys were. Again, there will still be boys. And there will still likely be men who join “Scouting America” to molest boys. But in what is being described as “an effort to emphasize inclusion,” the word “Boy” will be excluded from the organization’s official branding.

There’s been a gradual process of creeping inclusion before Boy Scouts of America decided to get rid of all the “Boys.” In 2017, it announced that girls could join the Cub Scouts as well as become regular Scouts who vied for titles such as Eagle Scout. In 2019 the organization’s flagship program, which was known as “Boy Scouting,” subtly changed its name to “Scouting BSA.” The “B” in “BSA” still stood for “Boy,” although it snipped away the “oy” as if it were an unwanted foreskin.

In retaliation, the Girl Scouts of the United States of America filed an ultimately unsuccessful trademark infringement lawsuit against Boy Scouts of America in 2018 “for dropping the word ‘boy’ from its flagship program in an effort to attract girls.”

The Boy Scouts of America and the Girl Scouts of the United States of America have always been completely different corporate entities, but since the dawn of the new millennium, both groups have gradually warmed up to gays and trannies.

In 2004, the Boy Scouts of America adopted a policy that forbade adult leaders from continuing to hold their positions if they came out as “open and avowed homosexuals.” But then, after corporate giants such as UPS, Intel, and Merck cut financial ties with the Boy Scouts for their flamingly homophobic policies, the Boy Scouts allowed gay youth to join in 2013 and ended their ban on gay adult leaders two years later. In 2017, Boy Scouts of America allowed female-to-male trannies to join their “boys-only programs,” a decision that came two years after the Girl Scouts of the United States of America opened its arms to “transgender girls.”

The only true act of “exclusion” in the past couple of decades has been this week’s decision to exclude the word “Boy” from “Boy Scouts.” The Girl Scouts, though, will stubbornly retain the word “Girl” in their name.

I was both a Cub Scout, then a Webelo, and then a Boy Scout back in the early 1970s, when the only officially sanctioned “transition” was the Webelos-to-Scouts Transition. Because we were immature boys who were obsessed with faggotry, but from a safe and ironically disapproving distance, we thought the designation “Webelo” (pronounced “We Blow”) was absolutely hysterical.

I also remember that at our weeklong summer camp in Bushkill, Pennsylvania, the various troops held a sanctioned poolside drag competition where boys dressed in wigs, bikinis, high heels, and makeup, and everyone thought it was hilarious. But I can’t recall anyone back then who thought that a boy could actually become a girl.

Perched there on the cusp of adolescence with our hormones ready to change our entire life path, we viewed the idea of having sex with females with a mystical, yearning awe. Even the suggestion that one of us had ripped out a picture of some big-boobed all-American girl from his dad’s Playboy and was willing to share it with everyone else was greeted with a hushed sort of religious reverence. I remember being stuck in my tent during one camping trip while cold rains outside pelted everything into mud as I nuzzled up with my air mattress, pretended it was Julie “Catwoman” Newmar, and softly kissed it. We would have loved if they allowed Girl Scouts to camp out with us.

Weekly Scout meetings were held on Friday nights in the basement of a Presbyterian church that sat at the top of my block. There were four patrols in Troop 111: the Buffalos, Beavers, Eagles, and Panthers. The Buffalo patrol was the coolest, and I was of course the leader.

I can’t recall even the hint of man-boy molestation occurring, although there was a rather squirrelly older scoutmaster named Mr. Smith who seemed effeminate and would have been the likeliest suspect. I recall a car ride en route to an encampment when Mr. Smith told us that the filthiest word he’d ever heard was “motherfucker,” which was used exclusively by black Scouts he knew in Philly.

But this was the early 1970s, and America had already started its slow decline. Most of the kids in Troop 111 had long hair, foul mouths, and loved rock ‘n’ roll. I spent dozens of hours in my room poring over my older brother Johnny’s copy of the 1959 Boy Scout Handbook, which remains one of my all-time favorite publications. If you want a sobering and heartbreakingly wholesome glimpse of what the United States looked like before “progress” came along in the 1960s and waylaid the whole project, leaf through the pages of that link.

But now, by official decree, there will be no more Boy Scouts. Instead, the Presbyterian church up the block where Troop 111 held its meetings 50 years ago will occasionally employ a female pastor.