Female Circumcision in the West: Harmless Sexual Cutting?!

The AAP recommends substituting a threat of castration for actual castration of the clitoris.

Illegal custom: experts say ending female genital mutilation will be a slow process, it certainly won't be accelerated by an increasing western acceptance of this barbaric practice.

(PARIS, France) - The AAP's April 26, 2010 policy statement:

Pediatrics - Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, cannot but seriously shock the psychologist. Indeed, terms like: "types of female genital cutting that pose risks of physical or psychological harm" and: "harmful forms of FGC", assume the existence of harmless "types" or "forms" of surgical intervention on the child's sexual parts.

A statement such as "… the many women who have had their genitals altered and who do not perceive themselves as "mutilated." " is totally unacceptable, since an individual whose genitals have been surgically altered in childhood is unable to appreciate what he or she has lost.

Finally, the assertion:

"Health educators must also be prepared to explain to parents from outside North America why male genital alteration is routinely practiced here but female genital alteration is routinely condemned." shows that the AAP Committee seems unaware of the fact that repression of autosexuality(*), sometimes considered as a sin and harmful, has always been the motive behind sexual mutilation. Sigmund Freud discovered the existence of both the unconscious and infantile sexuality, and that repression of the latter gives rise to the former. He went on to highlight the grave psychological harm caused by the threat of castration:

“The results of the threat of castration are multifarious and incalculable; they affect the whole of a boy’s relations with his father and mother and subsequently with men and women in general.”[1]

And he suggested, in a footnote of the same paragraph of that posthumous work, that circumcision is a threat of castration. Non oral, it is a particularly grave one because it is a beginning of realization, which makes it all the more worrying. So, like the sword of Damocles, it persists lifelong, albeit the most often unconsciously. Then, psychological processes are such that even a slight surgical intervention may take on the dimension of a threat of castration or death. Indeed, like primitive thought, unconscious thought likens the part with the whole. So, in Haiti for example, Voodoo can take possession of a person merely by cutting a lock of hair off, and by this means can drive him or her to prostitution. So, psychoanalysis explains how the least sexual mutilation may provoke a grave trauma, the subsequent neurosis (in the best case) and post-traumatic stress disorders.

Therefore, a declaration like the following:

"This (only pricking or incising the clitoral skin) is no more of an alteration than ear piercing."

shows complete ignorance of elementary psychology.

Surgery should never be undertaken without a compelling therapeutic purpose, particularly on a minor's genitals. Even forced (or not) retraction of the foreskin is unacceptable. Even under anaesthesia, the slightest non justified intervention upon the sexual parts is psychologically harmful; it treats the human person like an object, infantile sexuality as reprehensible and its punishment as normal. Since it is massively perpetrated by adults having authority upon minors, sexual mutilation is a crime against humanity. In the context of a child’s genitals there is no such thing as "a little nick" or a "little snip". Medicine may not confer upon primitive practices the authority of science.

(*) Speaking of ethics, we cannot use the commonly used term, rooted in the Latin "stupratio", which refers to trouble (-turbation) and turpitude; it is scornful and depreciative.

(text and translation revised by Dr John Warren)

(La non violence est aussi fondamentale que la violence, l'amour et la haine, le juste et l'injuste. Mais le pouvoir est au bout de la langue et la douce violence de la parole, si l'on s'en empare, peut faire taire les armes.)

Michel Hervé Navoiseau-Bertaux is also known as Sigismond.