An 8-year-old New Jersey girl has been denied entry into the Boy Scouts despite insistence from her family that she is “transgender” and identifies as a boy.
Jodi Maldonado’s mother Kristie, a resident of Secaucus NJ, tried to enter her daughter in the local Boy Scout troop on the grounds that the 8-year-old now thinks she is a boy named Joe. Kristie says she made it clear that her daughter was transgender when she enrolled her.
A month later, Kristie received a call from the Northern New Jersey Council of Boy Scouts’ head counsel saying Jodi did not meet biological criteria for membership in the Boy Scouts.
The third-grader is on record as saying that the decision “made me mad.”
“I had a sad face, but I wasn’t crying. I’m way more angry than sad. My identity is a boy. If I was them, I would let every person in the world go in. It’s right to do,” she said.
“They kicked me out because I am a girl — born a girl,” she said.
The policy of the Boy Scouts of America is to follow the biological gender of applicants. Although the Scouts have accepted homosexual counselors and members, they have held firm on recognizing the sexual identity of persons based on their biology.”
Scouts spokeswoman Effie Delimarkos said in a statement that transgenderism is not the same as sexual orientation.
“No youth may be removed from any of our programs on the basis of his or her sexual orientation,” she said. “Gender identity isn’t related to sexual orientation.”
While the mainstream media insist on referring to Jodi Maldonado as “he,” the child is a biological female who up until recently dressed and identified as a girl.
Jodi’s mother has continued to contest the decision, insisting that her child should be a Boy Scout.
“I felt bad for my son he was having a good time. They had a barbecue, the last day they had a Halloween party, and they did experiments. He really enjoyed it and he was with all of his friends,” said Kristie Maldonado.
In a position paper released in August, the American College of Pediatricians urged educators and legislators to reconsider the social trend toward normalization of “transgenderism,” insisting that “facts – not ideology – determine reality.”
“A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking,” the paper states. “When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such.”
The National Girl Scouts organization, which is not affiliated with the boy scouts, has accepted boys for years, under the condition that they claim to believe they are girls.
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