People in liberal societies tend to feel a little uncomfortable talking about male genital cutting, but generally do not think it is morally abhorrent. But female genital cutting is widely consider...

Once described as hermaphrodites and later as intersex people, individuals born with intersex variations are routinely subject to so-called “normalizing” medical interventions, often in childhood. Opposition to such practices has been met by attempts to discredit critics and reasserted clinical authority over the bodies of women and men with “disorders of sex development.” However, claims of clinical consensus have been selectively constructed and applied and lack evidence. Limited transparency and lack of access to justice have helped to perpetuate forced interventions. (...) At the same time, associated with the diffusion of distinct concepts of sex and gender, intersex has been constructed as a third legal sex classification, accompanied by pious hopes and unwarranted expectations of consequences. The existence of intersex has also been instrumentalized for the benefit of other, intersecting, populations. The creation of gender categories associated with intersex bodies has created profound risks: a paradoxically narrowed and normative gender binary, maintenance of medical authority over the bodies of “disordered” females and males, and claims that transgressions of social roles ascribed to a third gender are deceptive. Claims that medicalization saves intersex people from “othering,” or that legal othering saves intersex people from medicalization, are contradictory and empty rhetoric. In practice, intersex bodies remain “normalized” or eliminated by medicine, while society and the law “others” intersex identities. That is, medicine constructs intersex bodies as either female or male, while law and society construct intersex identities as neither female nor male. Australian attempts at reforms to recognize the rights of intersex people have either failed to adequately comprehend the population affected or lacked implementation. An emerging human rights consensus demands an end to social prejudice, stigma, and forced medical interventions, focusing on the right to bodily integrity and principles of self-determination. (shrink)

This study in moral, political, and legal philosophy contends that it is morally impermissible to circumcise male minors without a medical indication (nontherapeutic circumcision). Male minors have a moral anticipatory autonomy right-in-trust not to be circumcised. This right depends on norms of autonomy and bodily integrity. These norms generate three direct non-consequentialist arguments against nontherapeutic circumcision: (1) the loss of nonrenewable functional tissue, (2) genital salience, and (3) limits on a parental right to permanently modify their sons' bodies. An indirect (...) argument holds (4) that if it is morally impermissible to remove the female prepuce (clitoral hood), then it is also morally impermissible to remove the male prepuce (foreskin). Although there is debate across medical cultures, a reasonable understanding supports the claim that nontherapeutic circumcision causes some harms and imposes unwarranted risks on male minors. The overall moral case applies to secular circumcisions and, with some qualifications, to religious circumcisions in Judaism and Islam. Arguments of political philosophy that invoke the freedom of religion, toleration, multiculturalism, and social meaning qualify somewhat, but do not eliminate, the case against circumcising male minors without a medical indication. Nevertheless, the arguments deployed in this study do not warrant legal interference at this time with secular and religious practices of nontherapeutic circumcision. (shrink)

Circumcision is often claimed to be simpler, safer and more cost-effective when performed in the neonatal period as opposed to later in life, with a greater benefit-to-risk ratio. In the first part of this paper, we critically examine the evidence base for these claims, and find that it is not as robust as is commonly assumed. In the second part, we demonstrate that, even if one simply grants these claims for the sake of argument, it still does not follow that (...) neonatal circumcision is ethically permissible absent urgent medical necessity. Based on a careful consideration of the relevant evidence, arguments and counterarguments, we conclude that medically unnecessary penile circumcision—like other medically unnecessary genital procedures, such as ‘cosmetic’ labiaplasty—should not be performed on individuals who are too young (or otherwise unable) to provide meaningful consent to the procedure. (shrink)