Anti-FGM campaigner Hibo Wardere comes under attack

This is so vile I'm also fuming, for Hibo and for the women and children girls she fights for.

How dare they! It's really not hateful to talk about women/girls and biology and things that happen to women and girls because of their biology.

I'm with Rawal - the misogyny and gynaephobia is rife and obvious - they aren't even trying to hide it anymore.

Fantastic clip from Hibo there!

👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

I really can’t imagine what people who would oppose her work are thinking. This is an issue about the abuse and oppression of women and girls. Not sure how that is at all hard to understand.

Stopping women talking about their lived experience is not inclusive.

Hibo, and the others who campaign for awareness raising and cultural change are heroes.

That bloke whining on about foreskins is an idiot.

The language police are disgusting.

Good for her, I hope she can let this nonsense wash over her - women and girls need her.

Unbelievable. Hibo is doing amazing work.

When I first became aware of this debate, this was one of the two most upsetting aspects of the self-id campaign. This and the reaction to female victims of male violence who express their need for female-only spaces and are called hateful for it, helped me realise that there is something very wrong going on here.

Very early on I came across another woman who was raising her voice against FGM on Twitter and she was being full on lectured about her language being exclusionary. And I just thought who the fuck does that? Who tells a woman who was mutilated as a little girl in this horrific way, who has gone through suffering too awful to contemplate that she cannot name herself? That she cannot talk about who and what gets cut. That she must censor her words because they upset males? The same sex that demanded girls get cut in the first place.

I thought it was an aberration, some misguided, overly zealous supporters of the self-id campaign. But I've seen it happen too often now to continue to believe that. If I ever had any doubts about being "on the right side of history", these unhinged attacks on victims of FGM blew them away. The right side of history does not vilify women for seeking to stop the suffering of millions of little girls.

I hope Hibo is surrounded by people who love her. I hope she knows how much we love and admire her for her courage and her bravery.

I think a lot of these people are racists as well. They also like to go on about how the term "womxn" is inclusive of black women, as if black women were not women, or are only women in the same way that males who identify as women are.

Finally people are waking up to the misogyny and gynephobia of a movement which is trying to erase women.

Those who send her abuse for refusing to redefine what happens to millions of girls need to really think about who they are doing this too. They want to talk about being the most vulnerable and marginalised, yet they are absolutely not. Not by a long shot, yet they cannot see it. To use their terminology, they are ‘punching down’ but society has told them that no one is more vulnerable or marginalised than them so they take it as permission.

Hibo and the others working on this campaign deserve the highest respect. They are ‘literally’ trying to save the lives of girls who suffer extreme forms of abuse in what they do.

Hibo, if you are reading this, you are an amazing woman who inspires me. That you have to keep going through the hate around the very language you use to describe FGM is shocking.

This issue has become a real touchstone for MRAs. I read a FGM post the other day that didn't have the inevitable 'but what about men' pile on and was genuinely surprised. I guess they just hadn't found it yet.