After existing over 100 years, the Boy Scouts Ditches the Word Boy "To Be More Inclusive", Now Allows Girls

After 108 years, the Boy Scouts are ditching the whole “boy” thing.



In an effort to be more inclusive, the Boy Scouts of America are dropping the “Boy” from the name of their lead program, the Boy Scouts. In October 2017, the Boy Scouts unanimously voted to begin allowing girls to join, starting in 2018. The program’s rebranding as the Scouts BSA, they announced Wednesday.



“We wanted to land on something that evokes the past but also conveys the inclusive nature of the program going forward,” Boy Scouts Chief Scout Executive Mike Surbaugh said. “We’re trying to find the right way to say we’re here for both young men and young women.”



The Boy Scouts have been slowly dying for years because people insist girls should be able to join — much to the Girl Scouts’ chagrin. The race for inclusivity at any cost started with Boy Scouts having a policy against gay staff members — a policy that quickly died.



The group accepted its first “transgender” scout in 2017 — a nine-year-old. In doing so, they officially ditched the policy of determining gender by birth certificate.



With Wednesday’s change, the national organization is still called Boy Scouts of America — at least for now — but kids who join the program will just be scouts, not Boy Scouts.