by BRIAN D. EARP
Malaysian boys wait for their turn during a mass-circumcision ceremony at the Tuanku Mizan Army hospital in Kuala Lumpur on December 5, 2014. PHOTO by Manan Vatsyayana/AFP/Getty
An un-consenting child, an unnecessary, invasive surgery: is there any moral difference between male and female circumcision?
I try not to talk about my research at dinner parties. I’ll say ‘medical ethics’ if pressed, which will sometimes trigger an unwelcome follow-up: ‘But what about medical ethics? That’s a pretty big field.’
‘I study lots of things,’ I’ll say – and that’s true, I do. ‘But I focus on medically unnecessary surgeries performed on children.’
‘Like what?’
Like what, indeed. It’s rarely a smooth ride from there.
The truth is: I study childhood genital surgeries. Female, male and intersex genital surgeries, specifically, and I make similar arguments about each one. As a general rule, I think that healthy children – whatever their sex or gender – should be free from having parts of their most intimate sexual organs removed before they can understand what’s at stake in such a procedure. There are a number of reasons I’ve come to hold this view, but in some ways it’s pretty simple. ‘Private parts’ are private. They’re personal. Barring some serious disease to treat or physical malfunction to address (for which surgery is the most conservative option), they should probably be left alone.
That turns out to be extremely controversial.
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