On October 1, the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) announced that it would accept girls into membership. Beginning next year, Cub Scout programs will admit girls, with the ultimate goal of allowing girls to progress to the rank of Eagle Scout.

You may be forgiven for thinking the BSA is sliding down a very slippery slope. In 2013, the organization voted to allow openly gay members but assured parents that admitting openly gay adults to supervisory roles “was not under consideration.” That position was untenable—those openly gay scouts will grow up and wish to be scoutmasters. Would they be banned? Of course not. And so, in 2015, the Boy Scouts lifted the ban on openly gay adults. In January of this year, the BSA took the inevitable next step by allowing “transgender boys,” whatever that term may signify, into its programs. Whereas previously the organization determined an applicant’s sex by his birth certificate, it would now consider only the sex as marked on the application.

Any fool could see what would happen next. If sex or gender is a subjective concept, a social construct or arbitrary identifier, there is no reason the Boy Scouts shouldn’t also admit girls.

Girl Scouts of the USA is deeply unhappy about this week’s decision, but not owing to any residual cultural conservatism—the girls’ organization has had its own travails with political correctness and began admitting “transgender girls” in 2011. No; the Girl Scouts just don’t want anybody stealing their members. “We’ve had 105 years of supporting girls and a girl-only safe space,” the Girl Scouts’ chief customer officer (you read that right) told the New York Times. “So much of a girl’s life is a life where she is in a coed environment.”

So a girls-only organization that sees gender as fluid and alterable is angered that its boys-only counterpart will allow girls into its ranks. Such is our bizarro world of postmodernity. All distinctions are illusory, strictly a matter of one’s own preference at the moment, but for some reason we go on obsessing and quarreling over them.

We are not ordinarily given to gloomy reflections on cultural decline. But earlier generations would have formed a new organization for the promotion of robust values among boys and girls. Ours simply threatens a lawsuit to force an already existing organization to look like the one we don’t have the drive or the imagination to create.

The Boy Scouts is trying to preempt just such a lawsuit—a legal challenge that would force them to accept total coed integration. But surely they realize that the challenge will come in any case. The gender warriors will not be satisfied with anything less than the total obliteration of any distinction between boys and girls.

We sympathize with the Boy Scouts’ plight, but we would have counseled them to stand their ground. The gender-warriors’ position is an irrational one. Civilization was founded on the distinction between men and women. Modern American liberalism itself is premised on it: Already we see feminists recoiling from the insistence that femininity is nothing but a construct and bona fide progressives sickened by men passing themselves off as women in Olympic sporting events. The transgender movement will fizzle, a victim of its own incoherence.

Boy Scouts officers have put a brave face on this latest move—“It is time to make these outstanding leadership development programs available to girls,” the BSA’s board chairman said in a statement. But decisions like this never satisfy the unreasonable. What they do, alas, is give ordinary Americans the sinking feeling that their country is slowly being taken from them. They may just be right.