Genital Cutting as Gender Oppression: Time to Revisit the WHO Paradigm

Article here. Excerpt:

'In response to these concerns, scholars of genital cutting have increasingly undertaken a more comprehensive, cross-cultural and cross-sex comparative approach, particularly in the last several years. For example, in a recent publication, a large group of scholars from diverse countries, cultures, and disciplinary backgrounds highlighted the following shared aspects of non-therapeutic female, male, and intersex child genital cutting (FGC, MGC, and IGC, respectively), that seemed to them to be morally—and perhaps also legally—relevant:

they are all (1) medically unnecessary acts of (2) genital cutting that are (3) overwhelmingly performed on young children (4) on behalf of norms, beliefs, or values that may not be the child's own and which the child may not adopt when of age. Indeed, such norms, beliefs, or values are often controversial in the wider society and hence prone to reevaluation upon later reflection or exposure to other points of view (e.g., the belief that a child's body must conform to a strict gender binary; that surgery is an appropriate means of pursuing hygiene; that one's genitals must be symbolically purified before one can be fully accepted; and so on). In this, they constitute painful intrusions into the “private parts” of the most vulnerable members of society, despite being [of] contested value overall (BCBI, 2019) (p. 21).'