Do you remember the day your long-awaited infant daughter was born, and you held her perfect little naked body in your loving arms? You marvelled at the perfection of her body, including the fold between her legs, which like a dewy pink rosebud in springtime, held the promise of an exquisite creation to come.
I would stake my life that you would fight to the death, like the ferocious gladiator Spartacus in the Flavian Amphitheatre of ancient Rome, to protect her from harm or deny her the dream of bearing her own precious child. Yet, for ages, girls’ genitals and reproductive organs have been butchered in cold blooded, remorseless cultural practices, though they are someone’s irreplaceable darling daughter.
The horrific, excruciatingly painful, intentional circumcision of females, often young teenagers, is called female genital mutilation, or FMG. Origins are unknown, but predominant theories hold that it started in ancient Egypt, as the oldest known surgical practice. It can involve the total or partial excision of the clitoris, the removal of the labia minora and the labia majora, the narrowing and sealing of the vaginal opening, and other procedures like scraping, piercing, pricking, or cauterizing.
In primitive settings, a senior female practitioner may do it, using crude dull cutting tools, without anesthetic. The vaginal area is closed with woven sticks creating a tiny cavity allowing urine and menstrual blood to exit. It is opened by the husband upon marriage, for intercourse and reproduction. Females often experience trauma, depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, reduced trust in caregivers, and assorted chronic, painful health problems as collateral damage.
The horrific gender-based practice occurs because of social, cultural, and traditional beliefs. They are generated by feelings that FGM make women better wives, that uncut girls are unsuitable for marriage, and that body parts are unclean or ugly. Sometimes, it is a rite of passage with widespread social pressure to comply. It can be linked to family honour or certain religious beliefs. And patriarchies everywhere are reinforced by perpetuating this appalling mutilation.
International condemnation of this grotesque violation of human rights against females is widespread, including the acknowledgement that there are no medical benefits.
Concurrently, gender ideology flourishes. Perhaps gender chaos would be a more apt name. While it is difficult to define, Jay W. Richards, Ph.D., director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Centre for Human Flourishing and a William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, says: “You can be quite sure you’re not dealing with sound science or sound philosophy, but an incoherent kludge of concepts that we may rightly call gender ideology.”
Current beliefs that there are many genders and that gender change is possible are sanctioned by elites in academia, medicine, education, and the media. These beliefs are taught in schools, incorporated into laws, and promoted by medical professionals. This has brought about so-called gender-affirming care, which includes the gruesome surgical butchering of females who believe or feel they should be males (and males who believe they should be females).
In “gender-affirming care,” mastectomies and phalloplasties are performed by qualified doctors on females. Some are teenagers who, in Ontario, cannot buy an alcoholic beverage before they are 19 years of age, yet they can consent to these invasive and life-changing procedures. Other procedures remove female reproductive organs with vaginectomies and hysterectomies. Reconstructive surgeries are performed too, with the consent of minor children, just kids who need parental permission to take a day off school.
Educators arrange consultations for teenagers. Social workers remove children with gender dysphoria from long-term Christian foster homes because of the foster parents’ objections to treatment. Loving parents allow female minors to be mutilated and hormonally treated, with insufficient knowledge of future ancillary damage. They do it willingly, knowing it will deny them sexual pleasure, doom them to infertility, and cause irreversible changes to their developing anatomy. Doting grandparents are complicit, as silent bystanders.
Ontario policymakers say minors aged 14 and older can consent to this “health care,” and neither parents nor a substitute decision-maker can override it. Yet, reputable professional permanent body art studios require written parental consent for a simple tattoo.
How can any of us willingly participate in the cruel, painful mutilation of our children because of a feeling or a belief not based on science and for no critical, life-threatening, valid medical reason?
Are we any different than the perpetrators of female genital mutilation practiced for thousands of years for socially constructed reasons that billions have believed? Could it be that gender-affirming care is just one more perpetuated savage assault on female genitalia and mammary glands?
Perhaps it is like “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” a parable about a vain emperor, obsessed with lavish, expensive clothing. Two grifters offer to create magnificent clothes, so utterly fantastic that they are invisible to people who are stupid or incompetent. The foolish emperor parades buck naked through town, thinking he is fashionably dressed. The peasants cheer, believing the very same ridiculous thing.
The moral is that it takes courage to tell the truth, to speak it to authority, and that humans fear being ostracized for not going along with the crowd. It shows how easily people can be fooled by pretending to know something they do not. Finally, it teaches the value of authenticity, thinking for oneself and not blindly running with the pack.
I throw down the gauntlet for adults to bring an immediate halt to gender-affirming care. Norway, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and the province of Alberta, among many other jurisdictions, have restricted “gender-affirming care” for minors.
Unquestionably, there are formidable hurdles to eradicating the mutilation of our females but it is time to expose the foolishness of emperors in medicine, academia, politics, and law. Let’s cover their unfit naked bodies in clothes of reality and truth, bought perhaps at Value Village, then spend the extra taxpayers’ money on premium bifocals for every man, woman, and child capable of rational thought, who can change the status quo.