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A new paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics argues that the major harms of female genital mutilation (or FGM) do not come from the practices themselves, but from those who oppose those evil practices, painting anti-FGM efforts as a “heavily racialized and ethnocentric framework.
But female genital mutilation is not a harmless practice. It subjects girls, who are not old enough to consent, to the cutting and removal of parts of their genitals. This is done to enforce social conformity and control female sexuality under the pressure of tradition. This can range from removal of the clitoral hood to the entire removal of the clitoris and parts of the labia and even the sewing of the vaginal opening. Predominant in the Global South, such as Africa and the Middle East, FGM causes a multitude of lifelong physical and psychological harms.
Throughout the paper, the authors ignore these harms and place blame on those fighting FGM, and in the process, employ six moral evils to justify the practice.
1 – The first moral evil arises when the paper uses cultural relativism to undermine universal protections for children.
In other words, if the culture accepts it, then it must be okay. For example, the authors describe how women who experienced FGM in the global south often report perceived social benefits, such as a feeling of heightened connection to one’s group, or that despite the pain, it was celebratory, exciting, and important. This conflates cultural endorsement of the practice with it being morally acceptable.
2 – Minimizes harms through selective skepticism.
The authors repeatedly question claims of trauma or sexual harm caused by FGM, but do not apply equivalent skepticism to the self-reported claims of empowerment or aesthetic benefit.
3 – Dismisses psychological trauma as socially constructed.
The paper argues that trauma around FGM is culturally constructed through Western PTSD frameworks and that the main cause of distress is due to anti-FGM narratives.
4 – Morally inverts responsibility.
The paper emphasizes supposed harms caused by anti-FGM discourse while minimizing the moral evil of the practice itself.
5 – Frames opposition to FGM as racist.
The paper claims that strong opposition to FGM is motivated by Western-centered morality that reinforces colonial power on the Global South.
6 – Erases the child as an individual with rights.
Throughout the paper, the authors emphasize the importance of the community, of the culture, of the traditions, of the adults’ opinions, but nowhere are the child’s needs discussed.
[Ed: And the fact that the West is also condoning similar mutilating practices under the label of cosmetic surgery or as part of ‘gender affirmation’ does not make traditional FGM any less bad.]
Source: Academics Defend FGM in the Journal of Medical Ethics | Paradox Proofs
Trickery was used with a friend of mine women abandonned her it was wrong nothing positive in making women accessories to a form of rape
I have nothing but admiration for the bioethicists and cultural anthropologists–and yes, African women themselves–calling out the moral hypocrisy of western-law frameworks surrounding traditional genital-cutting practices.
The west makes a fetish of male circumcision, but criminalizes its female counterpart. But the very notion that male and female circumcision are categorically different in kind, is a thoroughly western conceit. Its origins may be traced to that arch-misogynistic male fertility cult, primeval Judaism (e.g. Genesis 17).
By design, existing legal frameworks surrounding FGM have accomplished anything but genital autonomy–especially for women of African, Middle Eastern, Asian and Australasian cultural backgrounds. Even worse, the crusade against FGM has effectively extinguished the principle of universal genital autonomy, which demands that the same moral and legal consideration be extended to all children, whether they be born male, female or intersex, and irrespective of the religion or ethnicity of their parents.
We are beholden to Critical Race Theory for mad ideas like this one.
I saw it in young social workers I’d interview when I ran the department. I’d ask a question about what they’d do if they had a cultural practice that they found out about such as FGM and they’d say that they would not intrude on a culture that wasn’t their own as that would be seen as cultural imperialism.
Those ones did not get the job.
It’s not culturally safe, for any social or health worker, to refer to traditional cultural practices as “mutilation”–otherwise, we should call out forced male circumcision for precisely what it is. Women immigrants from countries where genital cutting is the norm, indicate a strong preference for the traditional term, “female circumcision.” Such women will be hard-pressed to find allies among western liberal feminists, who have over-invested in a moral cum legal paradigm that doesn’t bear the slightest bit of critical (anatomical, anthropological, bioethical, legal) scrutiny. Western crusaders against FGM who truly believe in sexual equality before the law, or universal children’s rights, are few and far between.
Up is down, day is night, in is out. Academics aren’t what they used to be. Would these so-called academics, with a dysfunctional moral compass, also defend the Holocaust under the same framework? If not, why not? Relativism is relativism no matter where.
It’s ironic that an anti-FGM crusader would accuse anyone–least of all advocates for universal genital atuonomy–of moral relativism. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander! Any consenting adult woman should be allowed to surgically reshape her genitals–e.g. for reasons of personal aesthetics–just as any consenting adult male remains perfectly free to do so. To grant western women this right (under the rubric of female cosmetic genital surgery) but simultaneously deny it to women of colour (under the rubric of FGM) is both ethically and legally objectionable. Every body–including all children (male, female, intersex)–should be protected from non-consensual, non-therapeutic genital surgery. There is nothing outlandish about the academic claims being advanced on behalf of universal genital autonomy. On the contrary: its proponents argue for nothing more–or less!–than legal and moral consistency. All of this will seem highly counterintuitive to reactionary, anti-FGM dogmatists (unwitting victims of their own discursive success). But hopefully this will have answered your (entirely inappropriate) questions about the Holocaust.
With all due respect I have to raise a couple of points here about the relative importance of culture versus bodily autonomy. Some of the outcomes will be hard to hear as they tend to clash against hard held beliefs but bear with me.
It’s a question of which trumps which. Does the concept of ‘culture’ trump the concept of bodily autonomy and safety or is physical autonomy and safety more important?
Is an African woman who cuts off her baby girls external genitals and then sews her vagina up leaving only a tiny hole that will need to be ripped open by her husband on her wedding night to be provided with all respect and protection? Or do we decide that the little girl needs to be taken into to care asap to be kept safe until she is 18 and can decide for herself how she wants to be?
And if we see African Muslim Society as a patriachial system, how does that change our outlook? Would this then be a ‘feminist issue’? If not why not?
Concepts such as ‘universal genital autonomy’ seem to be hatched deep within social philosophical schools of thought in universities far from the reality of the agonised screams of the little girls who undergo this ‘right to autonomy’ and the mothers who do it to them. Or the screams of the little girl, now grown up who is ripped open on her wedding night and then sewn up again after birth until the next time her husband wishes to procreate.
it’s like the Australian system now of Aboriginal placements where the child is placed with the family if at all possible. So rather than allowing the child to go to a middle classs white family (which may or may not be a good thing) it is ensured that the child will go to a family in the same culture crisis as its own parents, which may or may not be a good thing. The central concept is that of culture vs what is best for the child.
When we look at our own culture we see we are not perfect. That things like mutilation or branding which were normal in the past are out lawed now. As is the lash. As is DV as is rape in marriage.
Are we to be blind to the flaws of other cultures? And of those same flaws when they are resident in our country?
To whom is our greatest loyalty to be? The culture or the biological elements of it?
When we look at the trans sexual phenomonon we see a system of genital mutilation unparralleled in our own society. So allien that it challenges all societal norms. That surgeons will actually do this stuff is, in my opinion, directly against their Hippocratic oath. That the patients are physically healthy people who are having disfiguring and steralizing surgical proceedures and taking hormonal medicaction the long term effects of which are unknown but logically dire, is an anathma to me.
I predict that within 20 years we will see a tsunami of legal cases against those who promoted and mutilated these people who are, by any mental health defininition unwell. And again the effects are more profound on women, with transmale intrusion into spaces etc.
Clearly any male who is castrated and on hormones is at terrible risk of sexual dysfunction etc etc etc.
Culture is a beast that needs to be carefully assessed else it may well end up as a hollocaust…
It would be typical of an anti-FGM crusader to deploy the worst-case scenario (infibulation) which represents only a fraction of procedures criminalized as “FGM.” On global average, 80 percent of FGM cases take the form of a ritual nick to the clitoral hood, entailing no loss of tissue or bodily function. On closer anatomical scrutiny, all forms of male circumcision are inherently more harmful than most forms of FGM. Is penile flaying–a minority cultural practice that involves cutting from navel to perineum–morally superior to infibulation? I don’t think so. Any ethical rationale for the abolition of female circumcision applies equally to male genitalia. Only cultural politics and language–the deployment of dysphemisms like “mutilation” versus euphemisms like “circumcision” and “foreskin”–distort the truth beyond recognition, at least in the popular (reactionary) imagination, and certainly among transnational elites.
As late as 1992, it was still perfectly acceptable for Australian journalists writing in the national broadsheet, to discuss “female circumcision” as the west’s quaint, anthropological other. What changed at the end of 1993 was a wave of anti-African immigration hysteria, and by the mid-90s, state and territory Attorneys-General had duly complied with Commonwealth expectations, and criminalized what would henceforth be known as FGM. This was despite a rich, precolonial history of male and female genital cutting rites, a point readily conceded by the Australian Law Reform Commission. Nevertheless, most state and territory FGM provisions are lifted almost verbatim from UK legislation (i.e. a jurisdiction where female cutting traditions are unknown). The fact that Australian lawmakers occupy stolen land, in a post-Mabo context (“native title” with its legal test of cultural continuity), only complicates the situation for we colonials, immeasurably.
“Universal genital autonomy” is not some conspiracy “hatched” in some rarefied corner of academia (LOL, bitterly). “Intactivism” is a grassroots movement, supported by scholars from various disciplines (law, medicine, anthropology, biology) which simply takes the doctrine of universal human rights to its inevitable conclusion. Universal genital autonomy is merely the articulation, in finer detail, of our pre-existing, unalienable rights to physical integrity and bodily autonomy. Forced circumcision of either sex entails negation and/or violation of a bundle of human and children’s rights (the child’s own freedom of religion, their freedom from torture, rights to property, etc.). Forget presumed “cultural rights”–not even parental rights trump the child’s rights when it comes to the issue of non-consensual, non-therapeutic circumcision. Only a politically reactionary, right-wing parliament would overrule a valid court decision to that effect (Cologne, 2012).
If patriarchalism is to be the litmus test for feminist response, then how does feminism reconcile itself with the Abrahamic innovation of exclusively male, infant circumcision? Genesis 17 shows circumcision to be the hallmark of a profoundly misogynistic “male fertility” cult. Jewish females are excluded from the Abrahamic covenant–and the male child’s circumcision delayed for seven days–precisely because female genital blood is considered to be ritually unclean, a spiritual defilement and affront to God. Male genital blood, by contrast, is construed to be salvific: witness current ill-fated attempts to recolonize Africa in the name of global health and HIV prevention. 32 million circumcisions (and counting) directly funded via the Office of the President of the United States, delivers an astronomical bang for the buck in terms of biotechnological expropriation and soft diplomacy (an Americanized penis, and all that that implies–not least for heterosexual female partners whose risk of HIV is paradoxically increased).
It occurs to me that western medicine takes such profound liberties with the bodies of “transgender” children, only because it has allowed the abysmal cult of forced male circumcision to go unchecked. More than ever, the principle of universal genital autonomy is sorely needed, by a wounded body politic. It’s a useful tool for thinking through complex ethical issues that are anything but cut and dried (pardon the pun). The principle of freely given, adequately informed consent–not whether one happens to have been born with male or female external genitalia (or some admixture of the two)–should remain the legal and bioethical crux of the matter. Her body, her choice. His body, his choice. Their body, their choice. What’s so difficult about that?
Hey, you’ve convinced me. It’s a great idea! I’ll get my girls lined up for it. I know most of them will just get the mini cut stuff done but maybe 1 in 4 will go the full deal?
In any case I’ll be able to sleep tight at night knowing I’ve stood up for African Muslim women in their milenial long quest for genital autonomy…
The 2012 Hastings Center report, “Seven Things to Know About Female Genital Surgeries in Africa,” is perhaps a more direct and accessible entry-point to the African feminist/anthropological critique of western “FGM” discourse. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/hast.81
PS since the amputation of healthy, functional tissue is inherently harmful, any doctor performing “routine” male circumcision directly violates the Hippocratic Oath, together with all five foundational principles of modern bioethics (see Doctors Opposing Circumcision website for details). On human-rights and common-law objections to the practice, visit Attorneys for the Rights of the Child (or any bona fide children’s rights organization). The fact that Australia is the only federal jurisdiction to publicly subsidize forced male circumcision should give us pause for concern. Circumcision providers brazenly defraud the Commonwealth by claiming therapeutic benefit where none is professionally acknowledged, as of 1971. Lawmakers in Anglophone settler societies, alas, have consistently turned a blind eye to the scourge of male genital mutilation–ostensibly, in the interests of Australian “multiculturalism” (i.e. keeping the peace with powerful political lobby groups, such as ECAJ).
I agree that circumcision of male infants is also barbaric unless medically necessary. I am not aware that feminists have approved of this practice – I certainly do not.
You may want to have a look at the central Aus indigenous practice of subinscision where a stick is placed in the uretha and then the penis is cut lengthways and urination takes place from the base.
I don’t think the young boys getting this done are actually consenting…