Should Scouting Be Coed?
A decade after Scouting America opened its ranks to girls, troop leaders and former scouts are still arguing over whether the change strengthened the institution or eroded what mad
By Cassius "Broadside" Quill
A quiet argument about Scouting America — the organization long known as the Boy Scouts of America — has flared up again this week, prompted by essays from troop leaders reflecting on what has changed since the group opened its doors to girls. The policy itself dates to 2019, when the BSA began admitting girls into its flagship Scout program (Cub Scouts and the older Scouts BSA), and it deepened in 2024 when the organization dropped "Boy" from its name entirely. But the underlying question the recent commentary raises is not really about paperwork or branding. It's about what scouting is for, and whether a century-old model of single-sex character formation is strengthened or diluted by going coed.
The case for coed scouting
Advocates for the change, including troop leaders who have spent years running mixed units, argue the results speak for themselves: girls who join Scouts BSA earn the same badges, hike the same trails, and in growing numbers reach Eagle Scout, the program's highest rank, under the same standards as boys. Proponents say this isn't a lowering of the bar but an extension of it — an acknowledgment that leadership, self-reliance, and outdoor skill have never been the exclusive province of boys, and that artificially fencing girls out of the most prestigious version of scouting (Girl Scouts, critics note, is a separate organization with a different program and fewer wilderness-skill requirements) denied them opportunities without any compensating benefit.
There's also a practical argument: membership in scouting organizations has declined for decades, and expanding eligibility to half the population that had previously been excluded gives the movement a chance to rebuild its ranks and its relevance. Supporters describe troops that function well specifically because they are mixed — older girls and boys mentoring younger scouts together, patrols organized in single-sex units within a coed troop so kids get both the camaraderie of peers and the challenge of a broader group. For families with siblings of different sexes, one unified program means one troop, one calendar, one set of parent volunteers, rather than two parallel bureaucracies. And supporters argue that scouting's stated values — trustworthy, loyal, helpful, brave — were never gendered in the first place, so a program built around them shouldn't be either.
The case against coed scouting
Critics, including many who spent their own childhoods in Boy Scouts and initially welcomed girls' participation with hope, argue that something real has been lost. Single-sex organizations, they say, serve a developmental purpose that coed ones structurally cannot: boys, especially adolescent boys, often open up, take physical risks, and form deep friendships differently in the absence of girls, and the reverse holds true for all-girl spaces. Girl Scouts itself was founded on the premise that girls benefit from a program tailored to them rather than one retrofitted from a boys' organization, and some who favor sex-separated scouting would rather see investment go toward strengthening that alternative than merging everyone into one model.
There are also concerns raised by troop leaders and parents about logistics that sound mundane but matter in practice: separate tenting and shower arrangements on camping trips, adjusted supervision ratios, and cultural friction within longstanding all-boy troops that suddenly had to renegotiate norms built over generations. Some former Scouts argue the 2024 rebrand, dropping "Boy" from the name, symbolically erased an institution's original identity rather than simply expanding it, and that leadership made the change more out of desperation over shrinking membership and a wave of lawsuits than out of a considered judgment about what's best for kids. For this camp, the fact that some individual coed troops work well doesn't settle whether the organization as a whole should have abandoned a model that, for many families, was working fine as it was.
The unresolved tension
Both sides are arguing, at bottom, about what forges character in young people — and neither can fully prove its case with anything but anecdote and tradition. Supporters of coed scouting are right that girls who want the specific challenges of Scouts BSA's outdoor and leadership curriculum now have access to it on equal terms. Critics are right that sex-separated spaces have historically served real developmental and cultural functions that a merged model can strain or lose, and that institutional survival isn't the same thing as institutional improvement. The open question hanging over Scouting America's experiment is whether, a decade or two from now, coed troops will be remembered as having modernized a fading institution — or as having quietly hollowed out what made it distinct in the first place.
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