Navigating Gender Stereotypes and the Circumcision Imperative

Article here. Excerpt:

'What I hadn’t expected was how many people would assume that we were having a boy (perhaps because boys are still preferred, even in this supposedly modern time) and would then instruct us about how essential it was to get this hypothetical child circumcised. We heard all the usual arguments: circumcision is necessary due to the laws of Judaism; it is cleaner; it is healthier; it is wrong and even harmful not to circumcise; a Jewish boy will feel “left out” if not circumcised; it’s against our forefathers and everything they went through to not do it; and so on. I was, frankly, stunned by all this. Such comments felt like an attack, and a very personal one too.
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Eventually, exhausted by these conversations, I asked that we stop talking about it. I said my wife and I understood their point of view, but we’d made the decision not to circumcise, and we hoped everyone else could accept and respect it. There was a brief time when relatives stopped bringing it up.

But then the offensive mounted new attacks by emailing us anecdotes from men, including non-Jews, who said they were “glad” and “grateful” that their parents circumcised them. We were also sent scanned pages from books and articles about the importance of circumcision. My irritation increased, so in retaliation, I began photocopying pages from books too and sending links to medical research. I said I was happy for those men who were grateful to be circumcised but that not everyone was appreciative of such a major decision being made on their behalf when they were infants; we reminded people about various medical and legal cases where men had physical, mental, emotional, or sexual damage from their circumcisions.
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When our little girl was born, one of my relatives said to me, “You knew all along she was a girl and yet you had all those arguments about circumcision. Why? Wasn’t that annoying?” I said it was annoying and we could have saved ourselves a lot of stress and bother, but it was beneficial for a couple of reasons. On a personal level, I learned to stand up for the decisions we were making about rearing our children. But on a larger, societal level, I felt that potentially my wife and I were giving some stubborn people new ways of considering the issue of circumcision. Maybe somehow a few of the facts or ideas we offered would sink in, and perhaps could help prevent other babies from being unnecessarily circumcised in the future.

Pregnant women and their babies can often seem like pawns in cultural and religious wars, and that shouldn’t be the case, but perhaps sometimes we can occasionally use them to win a battle or two, in the hope that eventually the war will end.'