Dear Ms. Grose,
In your recent essay for the Times, ("Kennedy's Comments on Circumcision Are Only Going to Confuse and Shame Parents," Oct. 15, 2025), you wrote, "Let me say upfront that on the issue of circumcision, I am Switzerland." Let me say up front that if you're Switzerland, I'm Ukraine. I say this not to trivialize the monumental suffering and horrendous loss of life among the Ukrainian people nor to equate the harm that was done to my body with the harms that have been done to thousands of Ukrainians but simply to illustrate, in a way that is consistent with your own metaphor, a few important points about your approach to the topic of forced circumcision. After all, even though there are no credible reports that it has been used in Putin's war against Ukraine, forced circumcision is, in fact, considered a war crime and a crime against humanity and is a tactic with a long history of use in conflicts around the world, including as recently as 2007 in Kenya. (What does it say about a practice that in one context is viewed as a parent's "choice" but that, in another, is considered a war crime?)
But, to your metaphor - first, as you are no doubt aware, Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has repeatedly been excluded by Trump from his discussions with Putin, who is incontrovertibly the aggressor in Russia's war of conquest against its much smaller neighbor. I think we can agree that it defies reason and the basic principles of conflict resolution - to say nothing of justice - for bilateral talks to include an aggressor nation (Russia) and a third party (the United States) but not the invaded nation itself (Ukraine). Yet, this is exactly how you approach the topic of forced circumcision in your essay. Your concern is exclusively for how parents may be made to feel ("confused" and "ashamed") by HHS Secretary Kennedy's assertions concerning a conjectured (and unproved) link between acetaminophen and autism in the context of post-circumcision pain-reduction. Completely absent is any concern for the infants themselves or for the boys, men, and transwomen that such infants inevitably become and how we might feel about having been circumcised against our will. If only you had the same concern for our bodies and our right to bodily autonomy that you have for parents' feelings. Excluding our voices (failing even to acknowledge that they exist) from any consideration of the topic of forced circumcision is like excluding Ukraine from negotiations to end the war.
Second, you profess neutrality on forced circumcision yet, immediately after doing so, you make a categorical statement in support of it (". . . there are real health benefits to the procedure. . . ."). And while there have been numerous peer-reviewed, scientific and academic papers and professional medical position statements raising serious ethical, medical, and epidemiological objections to forced circumcision, you fail to acknowledge any of these in your essay. An impartial treatment of the topic (even one in which the topic of forced circumcision is almost tangential since Kennedy's comments were primarily about acetaminophen) would have included, at the very least, an acknowledgement that there is (and has been for a long time) a robust body of criticism of forced circumcision (to say nothing of providing links to some of these sources) by legal scholars, medical researchers, ethicists and physicians themselves. Instead, the only published academic works to which your article links are those supporting forced circumcision. That's not Switzerland.
At the same time, following the example set by Mark Joseph Stern - whom you quote at length and to whose essay criticizing intactivism your essay links - you lump all forced-circumcision opponents together under the label of "intactivists" whom you characterize as "entrenched and aggressive internet partisans" and whom Stern, as you paraphrase him, has accused of making "untrue and exaggerated claims." Let us assume, if only for the sake of argument, that everything you (and Mr. Stern) say in disparagement of the most hardcore intactivists is true: pointing to internet trolling and portraying intactivist keyboard warriors as the sole representatives of the movement to end non-therapeutic, forced penile circumcision (which, you should know, is but one part of a broader genital autonomy movement that includes efforts to eradicate female genital cutting and medically unnecessary intersex surgeries) is merely a way of discrediting that movement. This rhetorical technique is first cousin to a straw-man argument. Focusing solely on extremist spokespeople for a cause makes it easy to delegitimize the cause altogether and saves one the trouble of having to engage with its more temperate emissaries on the actual merits of their position. Thus does your essay depict forced-circumcision opponents to your readers (many of whom are likely unfamiliar with the mainstream medical and ethical objections to this practice) as being invariably hyperbolic, "anti-establishment," unscientific, and unreasonable in contrast to forced-circumcision advocates whom you represent as "reasonable." This oppositional and highly unbalanced framing strongly suggests a bias against the former and in favor of the latter. That's not Switzerland, either. If anything (and to stretch the Switzerland/Ukraine analogy a bit), it's Belarus.
You wondered whether "it's useful . . . to get into the wacky statements Kennedy makes" (and by the way, I happen to agree that they are not only "wacky" but dangerous) but ultimately concluded that "it's necessary because his public statements have so much power and reach." You might not have quite the platform that Kennedy has but much the same can be said of you, which is why I'm writing this open letter. After all, 50 to 100 million people visit the New York Times each week. That's an awful lot of potential readers of an article that greatly mischaracterizes and even misrepresents the truth about forced circumcision, about those who support it and about those who oppose it. So allow me to attempt to undo some of the damage by correcting, both in a general way and specifically, some of the misinformation in your essay.
First, since your approach to this topic at least to some extent mirrors that of Mark Joseph Stern (though without the contumely), I think you should be aware of a point-by-point rebuttal to Stern that was written by Brian D. Earp not long after Stern's piece came out in Slate. Dr. Earp is a widely respected bioethicist who has written extensively on this topic. He currently serves as an Associate Professor of Biomedical Ethics at the National University of Singapore and is also a Research Associate of the Uehiro Oxford Institute of the University of Oxford. Not coincidentally, Dr. Earp was a finalist for the John Maddox Prize (in 2020). This is known, informally, as the "Standing Up for Science" Prize and is awarded jointly by Sense About Science and Nature. The Maddox Prize recognizes "researchers who stand up and speak out for science and evidence-based policy [my emphasis], advancing public discussion around difficult topics, despite challenges or hostility, and successfully making a change in public discourse or policy." Earp, to put it simply, is the antithesis of the stereotype of intactivists that you presented to your readers. He cannot be dismissed as an "entrenched and aggressive internet partisan" nor does he make "untrue and exaggerated claims." On the contrary, one need not resort to such polemical excesses in order to refute, as I believe Earp has successfully done, Stern's opinion piece in Slate. Rather than reinvent the wheel, therefore, I will simply encourage you - nay, I implore you - to read Earp's "An Open Letter to the Author of 'How Circumcision Broke the Internet.'" Everything Earp says there applies to your recent essay, as well.
Second, your readers deserve to know a thing or two about the authors you cite in support of forced circumcision and whose opinions and conclusions you treat as dispositive. The first of these is Aaron A. Tobian, MD, PhD, to whose paper, "The Medical Benefits of Male Circumcision" your article links with the statement "there are real health benefits to the procedure." According to Retraction Watch, which reports retractions in scientific journals and which is a project of The Center for Scientific Integrity (itself the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation grant in 2014), Tobian was the "sole reviewer" of a 2016 article in support of medical circumcision by Brian Morris (with whom Tobian is a "frequent collaborator") co-authored by John N. Krieger and Jeffrey D. Klausner in the World Journal of Clinical Pediatrics. As RW reported, because of the inherent conflict of interest (Tobian's having reviewed the article notwithstanding his prior collaboration and ongoing association with Morris), the article should have been retracted. The publisher of WJCP, however, refused to pull the article and, as a result, its editor resigned in protest. When RW contacted Tobian, "he declined to comment, saying 'I am conflicted.'" RW notes in its reporting on this episode that there were two comments on Morris's article, one by "circumcision critic John Dalton and the other a response by Morris." RW then includes part of Dalton's comment, which provides context for anyone who wants to evaluate the merits of any pro-circumcision article written by Dr. Tobian:
Morris, Krieger, Klausner and reviewer Tobian are members of an authorship cartel who seek to promote circumcision by co-authoring papers and reviewing each other's work. They also seek to repress papers with opposing views by writing damning reviews.
Your readers should have been informed, therefore, that the authority whom you cite in support of forced circumcision is every bit as much a partisan as the intactivists you criticize for their partisanship. Incidentally, do the tactics of Tobian et al. described here - "seek[ing] to repress papers with opposing views by writing damning reviews" - differ substantially from the online tactics of intactivists that you (and others linked through your article) decry?
As for Brian Morris, since his name has come up, although you did not cite him directly nor link to any of his published "studies," Stern does in his screed against intactivists that you cite in your essay. Responding to Stern, Earp likewise provides some context about Brian Morris:
. . . Professor Morris runs a pro-circumcision advocacy website, has founded a highly active circumcision lobby group (some of whose board members derive a substantial income from performing circumcisions), and has recently been profiled in the International Journal of Epidemiology as being engaged in systematically distorting the academic literature on circumcision [hyperlinks in original]. . . .
The point of all this is that, while calling yourself Switzerland, you very clearly apply a double standard to the antipodes in the forced-circumcision controversy. Those who oppose it you dismiss as "[v]ery loud anticircumcision partisans [who] have been flooding the comments of articles and social media posts about the procedure for over a decade." Those who support it, on the other hand, you cite uncritically as measured, disinterested authorities - the "adults in the room," if you will. The result, if not the intent (or is it?), of this disparate treatment is to present opposition to forced circumcision as inherently irrational and support of it as valid by default. Again, that's not Switzerland.
Consistent with this approach, the other ostensibly neutral but arguably pro-forced-circumcision authority that you cite is the American Academy of Pediatrics. Quoting the AAP's defunct 2012 Circumcision Policy Statement (a document that expired years ago and that should be regarded as having only as much relevance as is consistent with that status) you write that it "seems reasonable" to claim that "'parents ultimately should decide whether circumcision is in the best interests of their male child'" and that "'they will need to weigh medical information in the context of their own religious, ethical and cultural beliefs and practices [my emphasis].'" Only in a nation where male genital cutting is a deeply entrenched social custom - one in which male genital cutting has been normalized and medicalized - could an otherwise thoughtful journalist write in the New York Times that it "seems reasonable" to claim that "religious, ethical and cultural beliefs and practices" are valid criteria on the basis of which a parent may decide to subject a child to a medically unnecessary genital surgery. Or, to put that more bluntly (and at the risk of appearing to be one of those internet partisans), that it "seems reasonable" for the AAP to cite "religious, ethical and cultural beliefs and practices" in support of a parental right to visit upon a child precisely the same act that in another context is considered a war crime. That's also not Switzerland.
If this "seems reasonable" to you, the reason it does - to give you the benefit of the doubt - may simply be that you are writing from the perspective of someone who is a product - as we all are - of a male-genital-cutting culture. To me, however, someone who was subjected to this genital surgery without my consent and who has had to live with the consequences of it, the AAP's 2012 Policy Statement is anything but reasonable. On the contrary, I don't see how it is any different from arguing that it is the prerogative of parents to decide that female genital cutting (but let's call it "labiaplasty" or, better still, "female circumcision") is in "the best interests" of their female child after weighing the "medical information in the context of their own religious, ethical and cultural beliefs and practices." This "medical information," after all, could include the opinions of medical professionals who actually claim that female circumcision has health benefits ("It has been proven scientifically that women are healthier if they are circumcised," according to one Egyptian gynecologist as reported by Amy Wright Glen in 2015), or it could simply include the (implied) medical imprimatur for female circumcision that one may reasonably infer from the fact that more than 25 percent of female genital cutting procedures worldwide are now performed by healthcare providers. What about parents who decide to withhold medical treatment from their children after weighing the "medical information in the context of their own religious, ethical and cultural beliefs and practices"? What about parents who choose "conversion therapy" for their gay or gender-non-conforming child after weighing the "medical information in the context of their own religious, ethical and cultural beliefs and practices"? How is any of this different from anti-vaxxers (to get back to Kennedy) who withhold life-saving vaccines from their children because vaccines violate "their own religious, ethical and cultural beliefs and practices"?
The problem with this approach, as should be obvious from all of these examples, is that, in attempting to justify "access to [forced circumcison] for families who choose it" the AAP was inviting parents to compare apples to oranges or, more specifically, to weigh matters from two distinct and mutually exclusive "non-overlapping magisteria," as Steven Jay Gould put it. Gould reconciled the seeming incompatibility and not-infrequent conflicts between religion and science by ceding to each only that which is properly in the domain of each:
The net of science covers the empirical universe: what it is made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value. These magesteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry. . . . [W]e get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages. . . .
What, then, would it actually mean to come to a decision about forced circumcision by "weigh[ing] medical information in the context of . . . religious, ethical and cultural beliefs and practices"? The classic image that comes to mind of the figurative use of "weigh" in this sense is that of Lady Justice holding a double-pan balance scale - like this one:
- in which facts or evidence supporting one point of view are placed in one pan and facts or evidence supporting an opposing point of view are placed in the other. While Gould was speaking specifically about religious beliefs, I think it's fair to say - broadly speaking - that "cultural beliefs and practices," as well as religious beliefs, are not facts and they are not evidence. The AAP does not specify the amounts of each (that is, how much weight to give them) that should go into the pans or even which pan they should go into. Were the authors of the AAP 2012 Policy Statement saying that scientific evidence should go in one pan and religion in the other? Or did they mean that conflicting scientific evidence should go into opposite pans but that the religious and cultural context in which the weighing of evidence occurs should be permitted to alter the gravitational field (to skew the results, that is) so that the scale agrees with a religiously- and culturally-desired outcome? However the items from these non-overlapping magisteria are distributed, what the AAP asserted in its 2012 statement was nothing less than the radical (and pre-Enlightenment) idea that, in the case of forced circumcision - but only in the case of forced circumcision - whether or not to subject an infant (and only if that infant has a penis) to genital-modification surgery is not a decision that need be made strictly on the basis of medical evidence and in strict conformity with standard, well-established medical ethics (as opposed to personal and culture-specific ethics) and informed by contemporary universal principles of bodily autonomy and individual rights but, rather, is one in which the parents' personal religious, ethical and cultural beliefs and practices may be given as much or even more weight. That's not science, it's not medicine, and it's anything but "reasonable."
Don't take my word for it. Almost as soon as it came out, the AAP's 2012 Policy Statement was widely criticized - not just by "entrenched and aggressive internet partisans" but by, among others, physicians from numerous technologically advanced nations with widely respected healthcare systems. Their response, which, to its credit, the AAP published in its journal Pediatrics, not only criticized the AAP's policy statement on scientific, medical, and ethical grounds but, significantly, concluded that "Cultural bias [in the AAP Policy Statement] reflecting the normality of nontherapeutic male circumcision in the United States seems obvious." Because it would appear that you are not familiar with this rebuttal to the AAP Policy Statement that you defend as "reasonable" in your article, an extended quotation is warranted here:
The conclusions of the AAP Technical Report and Policy Statement are far from those reached by physicians in most other Western countries. As mentioned, only [one] of the aforementioned arguments has some theoretical relevance in relation to infant male circumcision; namely, the questionable argument of UTI prevention in infant boys. [A condition that, as the authors note elsewhere, can easily be treated with antibiotics and, in any case, is so rare that approximately 100 circumcisions would need to be performed in order to prevent a single case of UTI.] The other claimed benefits are also questionable, weak, and likely to have little public health relevance in a Western context, and they do not represent compelling reasons for surgery before boys are old enough to decide for themselves. Circumcision fails to meet the commonly accepted criteria for the justification of preventive medical procedures in children. . . .
The AAP report lacks a serious discussion of the central ethical dilemma with, on [one] side, parents' right to act in the best interest of the child on the basis of cultural, religious, and health-related beliefs and wishes and, on the other side, infant boys' basic right to physical integrity in the absence of compelling reasons for surgery. Physical integrity is [one] of the most fundamental and inalienable rights a child has. Physicians have a professional duty to protect this right, irrespective of the gender of the child.
There is a growing consensus among physicians, including those in the United States, that physicians should discourage parents from circumcising their healthy infant boys because nontherapeutic circumcision of underage boys in Western societies has no compelling health benefits, causes postoperative pain, can have serious long-term consequences, constitutes a violation of the United Nations' Declaration of the Rights of the Child, and conflicts with the Hippocratic oath: primum non nocere: First, do no harm.
Several years after this critique of the AAP's 2012 Policy Statement was published, one of the lead authors of the Policy Statement itself, Andrew L. Freedman, MD, FAAP, published another commentary in Pediatrics in which he as much as conceded the cultural bias for which the AAP had been criticized. In "The Circumcision Debate: Beyond Benefits and Risks," Dr. Freedman wrote,
To understand the [AAP's 2012] recommendations, one has to acknowledge that when parents decide on circumcision, the health issues are only one small piece of the puzzle. In much of the world, newborn circumcision is not primarily a medical decision. Most circumcisions are done due to religious and cultural tradition. In the West, although parents may use the conflicting medical literature to buttress their own beliefs and desires, for the most part parents choose what they want for a variety of nonmedical reasons. There can be no doubt that religion, culture, aesthetic preference, familial identity, and personal experience all factor into their decision. Few parents when really questioned are doing it solely to lower the risk of urinary tract infections or ulcerative sexually transmitted infections. Given the role of the phallus in our culture, it is not illegitimate to consider these realms of a person's life in making this nontherapeutic, only partially medical decision.
. . .
In circumcision, what we have is a messy, immeasurable choice that we leave to parents to process and decide for themselves rather than dictate to them. . . .
[W]e have to accept that there likely will never be a knockout punch that will end the debate. It is inconceivable that there will ever be a study whose results are so overwhelming as to mandate or abolish circumcision for everyone, overriding all deeply held religious and cultural beliefs.
You were right to point out that the AAP "stops short of a universal recommendation" of forced circumcision but the way that you did so (again, not Switzerland) blurs the distinction between medical practice and social custom. Yes, "the issue is complex," as you say, but it's not medically complex. The reason the AAP stopped short of making a universal recommendation is because one simply cannot be justified by the medical evidence. Yet despite this, the AAP still wanted to preserve "access to [forced circumcision] for families who choose it." "Protecting this option," Freedman wrote in 2016, "was not an idle concern at a time when there are serious efforts in both the United States and Europe to ban the procedure outright."
If there were any doubt as to the lack of a medical justification for forced circumcision sufficient to override (or usurp, more properly) the right to physical integrity and the right to bodily autonomy of people who have been (and continue to be) subjected to it, perhaps it will now be dispelled once and for all by the even more candid admissions by Dr. Freedman and another one of the authors of the AAP's 2012 Policy Statement, Douglas S. Diekema, MD, MPH, in a recently published article in the Journal of Medical Ethics by Max Buckler. For this paper ("As controversies mount, circumcision policies need a rethink"), Buckler interviewed Freedman and Diekema and both now explicitly acknowledge that, on balance, forced circumcision cannot be justified on medical grounds. "When you look at all the data," Diekema explains, "I don't think you can honestly say in a recommendation that the benefits outweigh the risks." Of the 2012 Policy Statement, Diekema now says
"My feeling was that there was not sufficient data to suggest that this is a procedure that should be outlawed, particularly given that there were multiple religious communities for whom this was an important practice. But I also didn't think paediatricians should be recommending it.". . . "The only situation in which I would give a recommendation is to the parent who is on the fence. To them I would say they are probably better off not doing the procedure."
For his part, Freedman likewise acknowledges unambiguously that forced circumcision
"is a non-therapeutic procedure. If it can be called a preventative medicine, it is at the very weakest level. . . . [Y]ou cannot recommend circumcision based on the medical benefit alone." . . . "[T]he best analogy is that the AAP guidelines are a 'permission slip' for those who want to circumcise their children so that society cannot say they are bad parents or outlaw the practice." . . . [But] . . . "it's not really a medical practice. It's only a 'medical procedure' in the sense that medical professionals are performing it."
By that definition, of course, female genital cutting is also a "medical procedure" because medical professionals are performing it.
One can only hope that this will prove to be the final nail in the coffin of medicalized male genital cutting in our society. It's not, however, the final thing I wanted to mention in relation to your article. There remains one more non-Switzerland-like passage that I need to address because it epitomizes the rhetorical technique that I have been criticizing here. Namely, the repetition of the bluntest and most sensational claims of intactivists in order to represent objections to forced circumcision (and by the principle of guilt by association, all objections to forced circumcision) as outlandish and hyperbolic. Not surprisingly, it is one of your quotations of Mark Joseph Stern, so credit (or blame) goes to him.
"Check any internet message board, and you'll find the same ideas peddled as unimpeachable fact: Circumcision is amputation, a brutally cruel and despicable form of abuse. It damages penises and violates human rights. And it irrevocably, undeniably ruins male sexuality for life. . . ."
These ideas do seem shocking on their face. I can imagine that they would seem especially so to someone who, like Stern - and you, and me, and your readers - was raised in a male-genital-cutting culture. But the "problem with these arguments" is not, as Stern goes on to say in his Slate essay, "that they're either entirely made up or thoroughly disproven." The problem, rather, is that they're mostly true.
My medical dictionary (Mosby's Medical, Nursing, & Allied Health Dictionary) defines "amputation" as "the surgical removal of a part of the body or a limb or part of a limb." The prepuce, or "foreskin" is a part of the body and an integral part of the penis. Ergo, removing it surgically is, by definition, an amputation. While there are those who prefer to categorize circumcision as an "ablation," Mosbys' first definition of "ablation" is simply that it is a synonym for "amputation." In its second sense, "ablation" is differentiated from "amputation" by defining the former as "an excision of any part of the body or a removal of a growth or harmful substance." Given that the male prepuce has been devalued in our culture and is often regarded as mere "excess skin," I can see how "ablation" might be the preferred term to describe its removal among those who share the view that the prepuce is an extraneous "growth." Similarly, because the penile prepuce has been pathologized for over 150 years (Peter Charles Remondino, for example, referred to the prepuce as a "malign influence" and another popular nineteenth-century source called it a "mark of Satan"), I can see how "ablation" of the foreskin fits with the view of the penile prepuce as a "harmful substance." But no matter how you slice it (to be tastelessly apposite) circumcision is, medically-speaking, an amputation.
As for whether or not forced circumcision "damages penises," given what study after study after study after study have all demonstrated about the sensory and functional properties of the penile prepuce and how critical it is to the overall natural functions of the penis, it goes without saying that removing it "damages" the penis. That would be true of any body part: removing an ear would damage one's hearing; removing a finger damages the hand; removing a finger nail damages a finger. Only in the case of the penile prepuce is an exception so often made to this rule of bodily integrity such that removing it is not held to be damaging but, rather, is treated as benign at worst and downright beneficial, at best. But, again, this is a cultural view of the penile prepuce as a worthless or even a "malign" appendage. (If it's worthless, how can the penis be damaged by removing it?) It is not the view of the penile prepuce, however, that is supported by science, including the sciences of anatomy, physiology, and medicine.
Forced circumcision "violates human rights." Yes, it does. Most emphatically it does. Several important human-rights instruments, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, include language under which forced, nontherapeutic penile circumcision cannot be viewed as anything other than a human rights violation. As Frisch et al. have pointed out, forced circumcision "constitutes a violation of the United Nations' Declaration of the Rights of the Child." Cutting off part of an infant's or child's normal, healthy genitals - whatever their sex or gender may be - before they can consent or effectively object is a human rights violation. That should be obvious to anyone who values bodily integrity and subscribes to the belief that every human being has an innate and inviolable right to bodily self-ownership.
As for the claim that forced circumcision "ruins male sexuality for life," that's a subjective determination, which means that if it cannot be proved that it does, neither can it be proved that it doesn't. Stern cites the examples of men who exercised a (presumably) informed choice to undergo circumcision who didn't regret doing so but ignores other similarly situated men who did come to regret it, citing, among other things, diminished sexual sensation and function. Speaking for myself only, I was in my 50s before it even dawned on me that PIV intercourse is supposed to be physically pleasurable for the male partner. Having compared my experience with other men who were subjected to circumcision and contrasted it with others who were not, there is no doubt in my mind at all that what I experience or don't experience in the way of sensation is due entirely to the fact that I was subjected to circumcision. On the principle of Occam's Razor, the fact that the primary sensory part of my penis was removed shortly after birth is the explanation for this that is most likely to be the right one. Can I prove what I feel or don't feel? Of course not. But the fact remains that, because I was subjected to circumcision at birth, I have no way of knowing what intercourse might feel like otherwise. More to the point, I will never know what sex is supposed to feel like because what was done to me cannot be undone. Was my sexuality "ruined"? Not completely. But it was definitely harmed and that harm has been present throughout my life and will last for the remainder of my life.
As for the claim that forced circumcision is a "a brutally cruel and despicable form of abuse," as I have mentioned already, forced circumcision is considered a war crime and a crime against humanity. Calling it "a brutally cruel and despicable form of abuse," therefore, does not seem so far-fetched or out of bounds. If a comparable act of genital cutting were committed against any adult of any sex (that is, female, intersex or male), it would be treated under the law as a criminal assault. If one is disposed to regard the forced circumcision of an infant or child as fundamentally different from the forced circumcision of an adult, it may be illuminating to watch a video (at 10:20 in this presentation) of this "procedure."
Having said this, I do not share the view that forced circumcision, as routinely practiced, is intended as "a brutally cruel and despicable form of abuse," nor is that the view of most mainstream opponents of forced circumcision. I have no doubt that, for the most part, parents who subject their children to circumcision believe that this particular form of genital cutting is not something they do to their children so much as something they do for them. But that doesn't make it right or any less harmful. Nor does it make it any less of a human rights violation. After all, this is exactly the view of parents who subject their children to female genital cutting in those societies where this practice is still prevalent. They don't view female genital cutting as "mutilation." They view it as culturally significant, socially important and, in some cases, religiously mandated. They also love their daughters every bit as much as we love our sons. So, while there are certainly some intactivists who go out of their way to ascribe evil intent to those who impose genital cutting on their children, most opponents of genital cutting of all types, including forced circumcision, do not and, instead, prefer to live by the motto, "When we know better, we do better."
It's not hard to understand why Stern was so triggered by the claims of intactivists. As with any deeply entrenched cultural practice, forced circumcision is not just "normal" but normative, which is to say that the state of being circumcised is accepted as an unquestionable good and the practice of circumcising is regarded as sacrosanct. Moreover, because it has been so thoroughly normalized in our culture, the state of being circumcised is treated as the default and the state of being intact is regarded as a deviation from the norm (hence, "uncircumcised," rather than "intact"). To someone who is of and a part of our own male-genital-cutting culture, any criticisms of forced circumcision are bound to seem like exaggerations and the critics themselves are bound to seem like extremists. Forced circumcision is probably even more a special case among cultural practices because of the nature of the practice itself, including its involving an act of ritualized cutting and an act of cutting that which is regarded universally as intimate sexual anatomy. Having it questioned, therefore, to say nothing of hearing it attacked in the "unfiltered" language that intactivists are wont to use, could easily lead to cognitive dissonance, the mental discomfort that results when new information conflicts with one's deeply held, preexisting beliefs. That could explain the over-the-top scorn for intactivists that Stern displayed in his Slate essay. This phenomenon, as it plays out in the case of society's coming to terms with forced circumcision, has been distilled into a few simple lines (which have been attributed to Marilyn Milos but also to Gabor Maté) : "No parent wants to believe that he has harmed his son, no man wants to believe that he was harmed, and no physician wants to believe that he has harmed a patient."
I hope you will revisit and revise your views on forced circumcision - both in your heart and in your column - and become less like Switzerland (to take you at your word) and more like Iceland (ranked number one in human rights). (Not surprisingly, Iceland has come closer than almost any nation on Earth to banning the forced circumcision of anyone under 18 when not absolutely medically necessary.) In time, if you view all the medical evidence in its totality, I believe you will come to agree with the medical professionals who have stated that forced "[c]ircumcision fails to meet the commonly accepted criteria for the justification of preventive medical procedures in children," that it "is a non-therapeutic procedure" and that parents "are probably better off not doing" it. What's more, I hope you will weigh any medical evidence that you may find in support of forced circumcision not "in the context of . . . religious, ethical and cultural beliefs and practices" that tilt the scales in favor of male genital cutting but, rather, in the context of contemporary standards of universal human rights which, by default, would result in an overwhelming preponderance of weight in favor of bodily integrity and personal bodily autonomy. If you do this, I believe that you will conclude, as so many establishment medical professionals, legal scholars, bioetchicists, and, yes, intactivists, have concluded, that physical integrity, self-defined boundaries, and autonomy deserve to be defended. You know, like Ukraine.
David Balashinsky
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About me: I'm originally from New York City and now live near the Finger Lakes region of New York. I'm a licensed physical therapist and I write about bodily autonomy and human rights, gender, culture, and politics. I currently serve on the board of directors for the Genital Autonomy Legal Defense & Education Fund, (GALDEF), the board of directors and advisors for Doctors Opposing Circumcision and the leadership team for Bruchim.
