Get your child’s ears pierced and you’d probably attract a certain degree of scorn. Tattoo that child, and you’d likely bring the attention of social services.
But if you permanently surgically alter your little boy’s sex organs, then, at least in some communities, that’s considered perfectly normal.
This article from the other day tells the sorry tale of a man who caved in to his wife’s demands to have their son circumcised because she personally finds foreskins unappealing.
(She doesn’t seem nearly as concerned by the fact that her – uncut – husband appears to lack any testicles.)
Her own aesthetic view is, or ought to be, irrelevant. A woman who views her offspring as a troll doll on which it’s fine to chop and change the parts until they’re more to her liking is entirely unfit to be a parent. She is a custodian of the human being that she created: not his owner.
Compare: some US states have passed laws requiring women seeking abortions to undergo a “transvaginal ultrasound”, a name that doesn’t make immediately clear the real nature of the procedure: the insertion of an object into a woman’s vagina, irrespective of her consent, for no good medical reason – in fact, for no reason at all other than that the Republican Party thinks it’s a neat idea. Critics have correctly equated it to state-sponsored rape.
The difference between the two? There is none.
No parent, or cleric, has any right whatsoever to make permanent, medically unnecessary alterations to another person’s body without his consent. To do so is not simply cultural practice that’s up for debate: it’s an assault.
