Let’s Call It What It Is: Child Breast Mutilation, not “Top Surgery”
In the late-1990s and early 2000s, I worked with feminists and human rights organizations to raise awareness about female genital mutilation (FGM). At various ages, often before a girl is 10, in countries such as Somalia, Guinea, and Egypt, the elders in the village remove her clitoris for “cultural reasons” – as a rite of passage, to make her more marriable, so she would fit in with her peers, so that she wouldn’t experience pleasure from sex, and so her husband would experience more pleasure. Humanitarians argue that this procedure is dangerous and shouldn’t be occurring at all, especially not to children. We encouraged people to call the procedure what it was, not “female circumcision” which sounds medically legitimate and relatively innocuous – but “female genital mutilation”, an irreversible, unnecessary procedure that causes extreme pain, difficulty in child birth, and sometimes death.
In the same way, today’s protectors of our children are calling “top surgery”, which is the very permanent removal of a girl’s healthy breasts, “mutilation” – and we should follow their lead. While the liberal media broadcasts misleading stories about how happy girls are three months after their breast mutilation procedures, IWF’s Ginny Gentles points to the devastating regret of so many woman who feel that they made the wrong choice by mutilating themselves when they were confused children.
There is a whole medical industry marketing to these confused children. Anyone with a child in middle school likely has observed the gender experimentation contagion occurring among young teens, girls in particular. While the transgender and gender dysphoric population used to account for less than one percent of the population, the aggressive push recently for gender fluidity and the pronoun game among teachers, counselors, and peers is increasing that number substantially. Children are trying on gender identities like we did with gothic clothes in the 1990s. In some cases, children are making these experiments permanent without parental consent, via surgical procedures – in an industry that is forecasted to be worth $5 billion by the end of this decade. With laws like SB107, enacted in September 2022, which makes California a “gender affirming sanctuary state”, a growing number of children will be among the consumers in this lucrative industry. It really does make you wonder, who benefits from calling inhumane, permanent procedures pushed on confused girls “top surgery”? Who are the people in our country benefiting from the mutilation of our children? Well-meaning feminists and humanitarians fought hard to protect young girls in many African nations from female genital mutilation, we should be doing the same at home.
