: 11pt”>In a way, FGM is another circle of horror — a cultural practice whose victims feel compelled to assist in its perpetuation to others partly in order to make sense of what’s been done to themselves, because the moment it stops continuing to happen, it becomes clear that the custom has no medical justification outside of itself.
….with the benefit of an outside perspective we can see very clearly that there’s no direct medical necessity to remove parts of women & girls’ clitorises and labia, and that whatever supposed benefits this practice confers to such victims — I will never call them “patients” or “subjects” or any other word besides victims, no matter how “medicalized” these atrocities are presented to be — it’s entirely dependent on the cultural/social landscape: the domain of social hierarchies and taboos and superstitions and rituals, and the foul effluvium of woman-hatred that clouds the senses of those within it.
Now, imagine there was a report that analyzed the efficacy of female genital mutilation strictly in terms of short-to-medium term self-reported mental health outcomes without ever addressing the question of why the practice had begun in the first place. Wouldn’t that be outrageous?!
To be clear, I’m not trying to say that the Cass report is outrageous — far from it; I think it’s a powerful and necessary report, which is already proving to be greatly beneficial to the struggle to put the “trans kids” scandal behind us. But it’s a sign of how outrageous our current social climate is, how mired in the bog we are, that we can’t be allowed to step all the way back and point out the true horror of the big picture.
No human female is born with an innate medical condition in which she is doomed to suffer unless otherwise healthy parts of her genitals are sliced off of her body. This should be self-evident.
Likewise, no human of either sex is born with an innate medical condition in which they will suffer from such dire psychological distress they might die of suicide unless their otherwise healthy reproductive organs and breasts are removed, their puberty suppressed, a host of other cosmetic medical treatments are given, and that all of society is compelled to collude together to suppress all evidence of the sex of these poor innocents.
Worth a read.
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