The Social Justice™ umbrella is so full of internal and irreconcilable contradictions between the various constituencies that, in order to make sense of the insensible, multi-thousand-word apologetics essays, like the one we’re covering today, are necessary to fit square pegs into round holes.
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In an extremely wordy, roundabout way of saying that concerns over the genital mutilation of infant girls in Africa are founded in white racism and ethnocentrism, the British Medical Journal aggressively defends the practice of lopping off babies’ privates in places like Ethiopia while attacking its critics as — you guessed it — racists.
Via BMJ Journal of Medical Ethics (emphasis added):
In cultures around the world, people have, for millennia, engaged in a wide range of practices to modify human genitalia: through pricking or piercing; adornment with jewellery; stretching, cutting or excising tissues; or more recently, through surgical reshaping in a medicalised context. These practices may affect people of a wide range of ethnic identities and backgrounds; religious and secular people; people in the Global North and South; and people of a wide range of ages, from infancy to adulthood. They may be medicalised or unmedicalised; voluntary or non-voluntary; and associated with different types or degrees of risk, as well as different potential benefits. These benefits—including perceived social benefits, such as a feeling of heightened connection to one’s group—are commonly reported. They need to be understood and acknowledged if one is to account for some groups’ or individuals’ commitment to take on or reproduce these genital practices.
Each of these various genital practices may elicit starkly different attitudes—from enthusiastic endorsement to harsh condemnation depending on one’s values and point of view. For example, some people strongly support transgender surgeries, including for legal minors (in select cases), but passionately object to physically similar surgeries in children born with intersex traits. Some people express outrage at ritual practices involving a ‘prick’ to the vulva of prepubescent girls, but show little concern for the ritual penile circumcision of newborn boys. Some people see cosmetic labiaplasty as an appropriate option for older adolescents, as long as they have parental permission, whereas others see the same practice as harmful and oppressive, even for consenting adults.
Different moral reasons—for and against these different practices—are also offered to justify certain positions. Some of these reasons focus on contested claims of harm or benefit; others focus on children’s rights, consent and bodily autonomy; still others are grounded in notions of parental decision-making authority and the value of family privacy.
Such debates and disagreements apply even to the present authors. Some of us, for example, are morally opposed to all genital ‘cutting’ practices that are neither strictly voluntary nor medically necessary, irrespective of the person’s sex or gender. Others believe that religious or customary practices for boys, but not girls, should be allowed. Still others maintain it is up to parents to decide what is best for their children, and that the state should refrain from interfering with any culturally significant practices unless they can be shown to involve serious harm.
Despite our diverse disciplinary expertise in anthropology, sociology, psychology, criminology, law, gender studies, medicine and bioethics, we are united by one shared concern. This common ground has inspired us to collaborate across disciplines and perspectives to write this paper. Our primary concern here is to draw attention to the harms that may be caused by the lack of accuracy, objectivity, fairness and balance in public representations of these diverse practices.
Among other things, we are concerned that, out of all the genital practices alluded to above—carried out across cultures, age ranges, sexes and genders—there has been a systematic tendency to cordon off and single out, for purposes of condemnation and critique, only those practices affecting non-intersex females, and among these, only those that are customary in the Global South, especially in Africa (or in diaspora communities), while ignoring similar practices that have long been customary in powerful countries of the Global North.
Of course, as the authors note, objecting to the North African brand of female genital mutilation from a critical Western perspective becomes less tenable when virtually the same practice is rampant in the West, only under the guise of “gender-affirming healthcare.”
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Child trannyism hypocrisies notwithstanding, if anything qualifies as a legitimate feminist cause, the mutilation of the genitals of little girls, stripping them of any possibility of ever enjoying sex in order to theoretically discourage infidelity, ought to qualify.
But it doesn’t, because its practitioners are religious and ethnic minorities in the “Global South” and, ergo, as a category cannot ever be accused of wrongdoing, as doing so would be xenophobic.
The authors adopt the euphemism “female genital practices” in lieu of “female genital mutilation,” on the grounds that the latter term is racist and stigmatizing what is, actually, a culturally enriching practice that racist white people in the “Global North” can’t appreciate because they’re white and evil and racist:
These female-only, Global South-associated practices have been collectively labelled by the WHO and various activist groups as ‘Female Genital Mutilation’ or ‘FGM’. The label and its acronym thus conflate multiple distinct practices carried out by different groups for different reasons, while expressing a uniformly condemnatory judgement irrespective of harm level, medicalisation, religious or cultural significance to the family or community, or even the capacity of the individual to consent. The WHO developed a typology loosely based on severity: type 1 affecting the clitoral prepuce and potentially also the clitoris tip; type 2 affecting the labia with or without also affecting the external clitoris, and type 3 including cutting and closure, or infibulation. Type 4 is added for other sorts of ‘non-medical’ procedures to the female genitalia deemed to be harmful, including ‘pricking’ or ‘nicking’ of the vulva without tissue removal
And yet, in virtually all of the societies where there is a high prevalence of ‘female circumcision’, male circumcision is also performed with an equivalent or even higher prevalence, often for comparable reasons, on children of similar ages under broadly similar conditions.
Acknowledging ongoing controversies surrounding appropriate terminology (eg, female genital mutilation vs modification vs cutting vs surgery vs circumcision, and so on, all of which have their adamant defenders), we adopt the more neutral expression ‘female genital practices’ throughout this paper. This term allows us to refer inclusively and descriptively to a diverse set of practices without prejudging their ethical, medical or cultural status. We also use broader qualifiers such as ‘African’, ‘South Asian’, ‘non-Western’ or ‘Global South’ to indicate the sociocultural and geographical contexts in which these practices are commonly found. When citing laws, WHO classifications, advocacy campaigns or other sources that employ the term ‘FGM’, we retain their original language, placing ‘FGM’ in quotation marks to reflect its status as a contested and politicised label.
The most common explanations for why female-only, primarily African, practices should be treated categorically differently from all other comparable practices, whether on children or adults in the Global North or South, are based in large part on misleading, often racialised, stereotypes, unrepresentative extreme examples, Western sensationalism and cultural exceptionalism, exaggerations of risk, and not a small amount of misinformation.
Informed consent is the unequivocal pillar of Western medicine. Of course, that went out the window in effect with the COVID-19 scam, but it’s still on the books, as it were, as the predominant principle of institutionalized medicine.
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Even while acknowledging that these mutilations enacted upon babies are done with no legitimate medical justification, but rather for “aesthetic” purposes, not once do the authors even mention, much less address, the issue of informed consent.
Obviously, babies cannot consent to have their genitals mutilated for “aesthetics” because they can’t talk, much less comprehend what they would be agreeing to, even if they could eke out a one-syllable “yes.”
This is obvious but cannot be plainly stated because, again, the violators of informed consent in this instance are cherished religious and ethnic minorities.
