Pride Profile: Colleen Baltutis

About a year ago, when Colleen Baltutis officially changed her name, she began the bureaucratic process that many trans people know well: Updating the name on her driver’s license, birth certificate, passport and every other essential document.

Eventually, she arrived at her Eagle Scout certificate. The first place she contacted was the national Scout Shop, where she requested a new Eagle Scout packet with her updated legal name. The request was initially denied, and the Scout Shop suggested that Baltutis contact her local council, so she did.

“The initial response I got back from Northern Star Council was that this was the first time anyone had ever requested that from them,” Baltutis said. They did agree to update the council’s records, but had no control over the national ones. As a compromise, the council scanned and Photoshopped her original Eagle certificate to include her new name, printed it on thick paper and mailed Baltutis a new copy.

“It was really nice of them. It really meant a lot to me,” Baltutis said.

But she wasn’t fully satisfied. Baltutis tried again with the national office, only to be told that Eagle Scout records were a matter of historical record and not subject to modification. She figured she’d have to wait until that policy changed, and just recently, it did.

“Fortunately it wound up being not too long of a wait in the grand scheme of things,” Baltutis said. She requested her new Eagle Scout packet again and received it a couple of weeks ago — a moment she described as anticlimactic.

“It’s one thing to have a shiny new Eagle Scout certificate, but it doesn’t change the fact that my original one still has my dead name on it. It’s a complicated matter of realizing I can’t change the past, I can’t go back and go through Scouts as a girl this time. It’s better than not having it, but it definitely doesn’t feel as good as having the original validate me,” Baltutis said.

Baltutis remembers questioning her gender as early as age 13. There were a lot of factors that convinced her not to come out at that point, but Scouting was a huge part of it. “This was back in 2000, so a very different world back then,” she said. Coming out as trans would have meant giving up Scouting, and she wasn’t willing to make that tradeoff.

As a teenager, Baltutis convinced herself she wasn’t trans at all. She said she was “not so much in the closet as in denial,” a mindset she kept for some 20 years.

It wasn’t until a few years ago, after graduating college and moving back to her native Minneapolis, that she came out to herself fully and decided to transition. She was most nervous about coming out to her troop — the same one she grew up in and where she now volunteers. “Fortunately that went just fine, my troop was very supportive and accommodating,” Baltutis said.

She’s encouraged to see how Scouting has become a more inclusive environment. While there are no openly trans scouts in her troop, one youth recently proposed an Eagle Scout project that would benefit an LGBTQ nonprofit — something Baltutis said would have been rejected in her day. But now, nobody blinked an eye.

Baltutis only wishes that progress would have come sooner, in time for her to live her truth as a youth in Scouting.

“If I had truly been brave and lived up to the Scout Law, I would have been expelled from the Scouts,” she said.