There’s no silver lining to FGM Cultural relativism is an ethical abyss

[TheywontletmehavethenameIwant]

I don't know how to archive it but it's an interesting article by Kathleen Stock about a recent paper that's been written that wants to 'normalise' FGM, all in the name of progress.

"According to a new article in the Journal of Medical Ethics, we should rebrand this as the less alarming “genital practices”. To use the word “mutilation” is to unfairly stigmatise the vast spectrum of bodily refurbs that exist out there, many of them personally enriching."

Re-naming it and putting it on a spectrum, post-modernism writ large.

There’s no silver lining to FGM - UnHerd

Archive https://unherd.com/2025/12/theres-no-silver-lining-to-fgm/

Christ what will these post modern fuckwits come up with next? I read Julie Bindels article on this. FGM is child abuse and nothing else.

The article in question: jme.bmj.com/content/early/2025/12/14/jme-2025-110961?rss=1

I’m close to despair on the state (lack of) of critical thinking in medical professionals and how inclusivity is being read as anything goes and no one can say otherwise. A position that is - apparently - fully endorsed and encouraged by the BMA and the BMJ.

Out of the 25 authors, allegedly, according to a BTL comment in unherd Stock’s article, One of them – the first one I believe – is a West African woman who went to America as a child, and who went back to Africa in young adulthood specfically to get cut and join the traditions of her people. She claims to know from personal experience that it has no bad effect on your sex life. I am not sure how far I believe her, but no one can deny that she has the experience to talk.

If this is true, for me, it points yet again to how individuals have a need to universalise their individual choices to silence any doubts and to - try to - feel better about those choices. In this case, a likely different kind of choice in having at least a more hygienic and probably less drastic version.

Nevertheless, over and over again we see how universalising the personal happens with damaging outcomes. Especially when the individual in question can twist and turn language to make almost anything sound palatable. Same for genderists. Likewise for’MAPs’. Etc.

Interesting that at the end of the article, it says "Competing interests None declared." Surely having had FGM is a competing interest in defending the practice?

I am hoping someone writes a critique which is also published. It's such a dangerous paper.
There's another thread here
De-colonising FGM a paper in BMJ

www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5459808-5459808-de-colonising-fgm-a-paper-in-bmj?utm_campaign=thread&utm_medium=app_share

She claims to know from personal experience that it has no bad effect on your sex life. I am not sure how far I believe her, but no one can deny that she has the experience to talk.

It part of post modernism, the only truth is the individuals truth.

Her personal experience, now know as 'lived experience', can be used as information to inform a response but just because she doesn't think she suffered any ill effects from FGM, preformed when she was an adult, it doesn't mean her experience can set the standard for everyone else.

I never suffered from Covid, so Covid does not exist, nobody died from it because it doesn't exist, I don't know why everyone's making such a big fuss over something that is entirely mad up. 🤯

I can well imagine that a planned, surgically appropriate, adjustment to your genitals can be fine for an adult, relatively wealthy woman.

Not so much for a petrified, unwitting 5 or 10 year old in a village, pinned down by women who are supposed to love you, no anaesthetic (not to mention not sterile) and then various parts of your vulva chopped away with a razor blade, knife, scissors.

People like that, the wealthy american, make me want to do actual, literal violence.

Well it was made illegal in the UK way back in 1983 , and there has been a number of Acts passed since to shore it up.

Who the fuck do these philosophical fuckwits think they are “thinking” about other women’s reality.

As part of women’s refuge services we often provided a place of safety for women protecting their daughters from family members

gives me the rage….

The woman with the FGM "lived experience" doesn't actually say how she defines an "undamaged sex life." Maybe all it means to her is a lack of pain and willingness to have sex to satisfy someone else.

She obviously hasn't been sewn up with nothing left but a small gap to pass urine and menses. But somehow she thinks she knows that her "genital practice" will work for everyone?

God help us.

So they're basically trying to align it with circumcisions, shameful that medical professionals don't understand or disregard the differences. Then again, it's just the females moaning again so they aren't interested

Of course there’s a silver lining. Men get to enjoy choosing a female who has a nice neat vulva and is much less likely to want sex with another man and to be a virgin.

A video to add to the take down of this sorry excuse for a paper.

From Paradox Institute - A paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics defends female genital mutilation. We respond by exposing their six moral evils.

"Suffering only counts if it fits culturally approved interpretations"

Thanks, a clear critique.

If she hadn't had a sex life before being mutilated she might not realise it has suffered, I suppose?

Hmm I disagree with this however there is a movement amongst women themselves who have experienced fgm and find the “m” to be very distressing when referred to in that way.

I think there is something there about labelling and who is labelling who. Ie white academic women with no lived experience.

i have seen it referred to as fgm/fgc to acknowledge both like victim/survivor and read about work with “cutters” how they are referred within the culture who then become educators instead to others within this group and that this wouldn’t happen with the wests labelling of mutilation.

lots to think about here

I don't think you have to have 'lived experience' to know what something is, and in this country we've decided such things are appalling and are against the law. I don't think we have to change our stance on this just to accommodate the 'feelings' of other cultures.

FMG is not a label. it's a description, and an accurate one at that, if those who are a victim of such actions find the description distressing maybe we should work with them so that they're not. Reducing the terminology to something more acceptable will lead to making the action more acceptable, which it should never been seen as, not by any culture that claims too value women and children.

Totally agree. Moral relativism allows horrors to continue. By all means help victims of this appalling practice. No civilized country should either allow FGM or be apologist over it. No culture that requires and performs it is worthy of the term civilized. FGM is barbaric, misogynistic and anathema to anyone of moral understanding.
We don't have to experience a horror to know that it is a horror.