I've read (or at least skimmed) a roughly similar number of articles and essays concerning the injustice and questionable nature of
male genital mutilation (MGM, or
circumcision) as I have seen materials opposing
female genital mutilation. Possibly this is because I've gone out of my way to look for them both, or possibly it has something to do with the wide range of books and journals I read prior to becoming a
full-time parent and
homemaker. Since i'm a lifetime
NOW member, you'd think I would have seen far more on FGM, if this were as lopsided as it sometimes seems the rhetoric would suggest. Much of what I've read opposed to MGM, by the way, has appeared in feminist and feminist-leaning sources.
So I support those who question the practice, and choose not to subject their children to it, and am thankful that, as someone whose partner is Jewish, but whose children are all apparently female, I haven't been presented with the quandary of needing to negotiate this particular emotional and ethical minefield.
I do tend to feel that there is a qualitative difference, at least between the sort of MGM typical in the U.S. -- performed near birth, usually with some form of anaesthetic (though that was not always the case) and limited in scope and effect, compared to what victims of FGM typically suffer.
I suppose my point in adding anything to this node is to point out that a wrong is a wrong, and that if you are a parent you should consider carefully what you allow caregivers and authority figures to do to your children. Both males and females in contemporary industrial cultures are subjected to many forms of abuse that tend to replicate themselves in further abuse, passed on out of habit, spite or resentment of one's unchosen fate.
I appreciate and do not intend to minimize the injuries done to anyone in "our" culture. But I would ask (perhaps as spark for another node?) what is accomplished by what seems at times to be a tussle over "bragging rights." Perhaps this is only an effort to be heard, and I can accept it as such. But I have a tendency to hear some implicit message never stated, like, perhaps: "I was abused too, dammit, so why don't you just shut up about what was done to you? Life's a shit sandwich, get used to it."
Please understand that this is an attitude that I heard a lot where I grew up, so it very well may be merely an echo in my head that has nothing to do with what you are meaning to say here. But I sense I am not the only one who hears messages like this, implied, when they may not be intended, and perhaps an exchange on those sorts of unspoken, assumed connotations is part of what is needed to help all of us, whatever our sex or gender might be, to get beyond what seems like a sometimes pointless, frustrating kind of struggle.