As a stunning window into the postmodern, relativist, rabidly self-loathing leftist Western mind, the British Medical Journal recently came out with a full-throated endorsement — ironically, in its “Journal of Medical Ethics” — of the tradition of female genital mutilation among certain North African cultures, which it euphemistically rebranded as “female genital practices.”
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The main thesis of this extremely lengthy manifesto is that opposition to the mangling of female infants’ sex organs — a practice historically confined mostly to the horn of Africa but recently imported en masse to the West due to torrential migration — is merely due to intolerance of Diversity™, a symptom of White Supremacy™.
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White racists, they argue, despite the practice of mangling infant girls’ genitals with no medical justification conferring “potential benefits,” simply can’t appreciate this particular fruit of Diversity™ because their ethnocentrism blinds them.
Via BMJ Journal of Medical Ethics (emphasis added):
“In cultures around the world, people have, for millennia, engaged in a wide range of practices to modify human genitalia: through pricking or piercing; adornment with jewellery; stretching, cutting or excising tissues; or more recently, through surgical reshaping in a medicalised context. These practices may affect people of a wide range of ethnic identities and backgrounds; religious and secular people; people in the Global North and South; and people of a wide range of ages, from infancy to adulthood. They may be medicalised or unmedicalised; voluntary or non-voluntary; and associated with different types or degrees of risk, as well as different potential benefits. These benefits—including perceived social benefits, such as a feeling of heightened connection to one’s group—are commonly reported. They need to be understood and acknowledged if one is to account for some groups’ or individuals’ commitment to take on or reproduce these genital practices.
Each of these various genital practices may elicit starkly different attitudes—from enthusiastic endorsement to harsh condemnation depending on one’s values and point of view. For example, some people strongly support transgender surgeries, including for legal minors (in select cases)*, but passionately object to physically similar surgeries in children born with intersex traits. Some people express outrage at ritual practices involving a ‘prick’ to the vulva of prepubescent girls, but show little concern for the ritual penile circumcision of newborn boys. Some people see cosmetic labiaplasty as an appropriate option for older adolescents, as long as they have parental permission, whereas others see the same practice as harmful and oppressive, even for consenting adults.Different moral reasons—for and against these different practices—are also offered to justify certain positions. Some of these reasons focus on contested claims of harm or benefit; others focus on children’s rights, consent and bodily autonomy; still others are grounded in notions of parental decision-making authority and the value of family privacy.
Such debates and disagreements apply even to the present authors. Some of us, for example, are morally opposed to all genital ‘cutting’ practices that are neither strictly voluntary nor medically necessary, irrespective of the person’s sex or gender. Others believe that religious or customary practices for boys, but not girls, should be allowed. Still others maintain it is up to parents to decide what is best for their children, and that the state should refrain from interfering with any culturally significant practices unless they can be shown to involve serious harm.
Despite our diverse disciplinary expertise in anthropology, sociology, psychology, criminology, law, gender studies, medicine and bioethics, we are united by one shared concern. This common ground has inspired us to collaborate across disciplines and perspectives to write this paper. Our primary concern here is to draw attention to the harms that may be caused by the lack of accuracy, objectivity, fairness and balance in public representations of these diverse practices.
Among other things, we are concerned that, out of all the genital practices alluded to above—carried out across cultures, age ranges, sexes and genders—there has been a systematic tendency to cordon off and single out, for purposes of condemnation and critique, only those practices affecting non-intersex females, and among these, only those that are customary in the Global South, especially in Africa (or in diaspora communities), while ignoring similar practices that have long been customary in powerful countries of the Global North.”
*Consider what the legitimization of child genital mutilation in the name of affirming gender diversity in the West has wrought: opening an avenue to justify all other manner of child genital mutilation.
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As mentioned at the top, the authors explain here that the term “female genital mutilation” implies moral condemnation — who could support mutilation? — and, accordingly, is inherently “sensational” and racist.
To remedy their evil white racism, the authors opt for the banal alternative, “female genital practices.”
Continuing:
“These female-only, Global South-associated practices have been collectively labelled by the WHO and various activist groups as ‘Female Genital Mutilation’ or ‘FGM’. The label and its acronym thus conflate multiple distinct practices carried out by different groups for different reasons, while expressing a uniformly condemnatory judgement irrespective of harm level, medicalisation, religious or cultural significance to the family or community, or even the capacity of the individual to consent…
Acknowledging ongoing controversies surrounding appropriate terminology (eg, female genital mutilation vs modification vs cutting vs surgery vs circumcision, and so on, all of which have their adamant defenders), we adopt the more neutral expression ‘female genital practices’ throughout this paper. This term allows us to refer inclusively and descriptively to a diverse set of practices without prejudging their ethical, medical or cultural status. We also use broader qualifiers such as ‘African’, ‘South Asian’, ‘non-Western’ or ‘Global South’ to indicate the sociocultural and geographical contexts in which these practices are commonly found. When citing laws, WHO classifications, advocacy campaigns or other sources that employ the term ‘FGM’, we retain their original language, placing ‘FGM’ in quotation marks to reflect its status as a contested and politicised label.
The most common explanations for why female-only, primarily African, practices should be treated categorically differently from all other comparable practices, whether on children or adults in the Global North or South, are based in large part on misleading, often racialised, stereotypes, unrepresentative extreme examples, Western sensationalism and cultural exceptionalism, exaggerations of risk, and not a small amount of misinformation.”
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The shoe-on-the-other-foot thought experiment is sort of played out and obvious, and I apologize for subjecting you to it, but consider whether these people at the British Medical Journal would go out of their way to justify the exact same practice of children genital mangling if the ones perpetrating it were Norwegian and not Eritrean.
Of course, they’d do the exact opposite: condemn it as a relic of The Patriarchy™, an immoral social control mechanism to prevent women from ever enjoying sex in order to limit their sexuality to within the confines of a marriage — which, despite the elaborate rouse that it’s all an “aesthetic” thing, it obviously is for the Ethiopians and Eritreans who practice it.
Hence the “relativist” descripts at the outset. There exist no universal standards; moral praise or condemnation is dispensed on the basis of whether the group to be praised or condemned is a treasured minority or evil white people, respectively.
