by David Balashinsky
David Balashinsky is originally from New York City and now lives near the Finger Lakes region of New York. He is a licensed physical therapist and writes about bodily autonomy and human rights, gender, culture, and politics. He currently serves 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.
I welcome the June 26th, 2015 Supreme Court decision recognizing the right of same-sex couples to marry not only because I believe in marriage equality and equal rights for all human beings but because, as an advocate for the right of minors not to have their genitals surgically altered without their consent, I find this turn of events hugely inspiring. The gay-rights movement, which has now culminated in recognition of same-sex marriage as the law of the land (which is not to suggest that full equality for LGBTQ persons has been achieved and discrimination against them eradicated) can provide a road-map for the genital-autonomy movement.
The gay rights movement is a paradigm of how to wage a struggle for both legal, medical, and social change. It was not too long ago that homosexuality itself - to say nothing of gay rights - was widely and routinely suppressed. Homosexuality was considered, at best, an illness and was only removed from the category of "psychiatric disorders" in the DSM II (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in 1973 (but reclassified as a "sexual orientation disturbance") after considerable effort by gay-rights advocates. It was not until 2013 that homosexuality was removed altogether from the DSM-5. At worst, homosexuality was considered deviant or evil. More recently, as the bigots have been deprived of their traditional justifications for discriminating against LGBTQ persons, they have devised the ostensibly neutral but no-less delegitimizing phrase, "lifestyle choice." But the essence of the gay rights movement has always been a simple demand for recognition of the legitimacy of lesbians and gays as fully-defined and fully normal people, and that demand for medical, legal, and social acceptance has led inexorably to the recognition of a constitutional right to marry. Thus, from Stonewall, just a few decades ago, to this: it reassures me that ending the practice of non-therapeutic penile circumcision is not only possible but inevitable.
As I have suggested, there are several parallels between the gay rights movement and the cause of ending genital cutting, which includes female genital cutting (FGC), male genital cutting (MGC), and the binary sexual assignment surgery routinely imposed on intersex infants. Both the gay-rights and the genital-autonomy movements have been and continue to be waged on three fronts: legally (including legislation and tort law), within medical practice, and socially.
It goes without saying that there is considerable overlap among these three domains. There has probably never been a time when the practice of medicine was determined by purely scientific and unbiased views of anatomy, particularly with respect to innate biological differences in sex. Rather, medicine, as with any other human endeavor, has been shaped by the prevailing cultural attitudes regarding gender. These attitudes have, of course, influenced medicine's treatment not just of women and women's bodies but, as noted above, its treatment of gay people. Parallel to psychiatry's rethinking of what it means to be gay has been an arduous campaign of securing legal rights for LGBTQ persons. At the same time, the Supreme Court's recognition of the right of same-sex couples to marry is not just an important legal development but also reflects a growing societal acceptance of same-sex marriage and of LGBTQ rights more broadly.
As for genital cutting, legally, headway has been made in ending FGC in the United States, since it has been banned here since 1996. (The federal statute banning FGC was ruled unconstitutional in 2018. Two years later, congress revised and reinstated the statute with the STOP FGM Act of 2020.) Within the domain of medical practice, MGC is increasingly being questioned and falling out of favor. Socially, too, MGC is losing its once hallowed status within religious practice and its popular acceptance is also on the wane.
But it is particularly in this regard - MGC's social acceptance - that the language of the current Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges) is so encouraging. As Justice Kennedy writes in his opinion, "The nature of injustice is that we may not always see it in our own times [my emphasis]. . . ." That is exactly the case with male genital cutting: it is an injustice that much of our society still does not see as an injustice. It is because MGC has been and continues to be a deeply-entrenched cultural norm (just as bias and discrimination against LGBTQ persons has been) and because there continue to be many within the medical profession who actively defend MGC as being, at least in some cases, "in the best interest of the child") that so many Americans fail to recognize MGC as the human-rights violation that it is. Yet, at the same time, it is because cultures can change - as this momentous and immensely righteous decision by the Supreme Court demonstrates - that I take from it renewed hope for the cause of genital autonomy.
Just as the right of gay people to live openly, freely, with dignity, and to marry were once a distant vision of a better future, so a world into which every infant may be born without violence being done to its genitals remains the beacon that inspires and guides us in the cause of genital autonomy. The Obergefell decision renews my faith that change is possible and justice achievable.
Revised 24 June 2023
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