There is a clear pattern in Woke discourse on any enormity associated with whatever groups currently sit at the pinnacle of their Victim Totem Pole. Step 1: It’s not happening. Step 2: Yeah, it’s happening, but it’s not a big deal. Step 3: It’s a good thing, actually. Step 4: The people objecting to it are the real problem.
We’ve seen the pattern repeated, time and again.
Migrant rape, for example. Take the specific case of the mass-rapes in Germany and France on New Year’s Eve of 2015–16. Step 1: German police spent days denying that anything had happened. But the videos and victim testimonies piled up, and “police officers who had been deployed began to talk”. So the Kraut Keystone Kops pivoted to Step 2: downplaying it as “sexual harassment”. It took days more for police to even admit that men “from appearance largely from the North African or Arab world” had committed “a very large number of sexual assaults”. Skipping Step 3 entirely, the German media and feminists immediately went to Step 4: “Instrumentalized by the Trump campaign” bellowed DW. German feminists screeched, “Nazis out, refugees welcome”. Other media interviewed Africans who whined about feeling unsafe in Germany – he “doesn’t know why or what for”.
Study any lefty cause du jour (a difficult ask, as the causes change more often than their social media badges). Trannies prowling in women and girls’ spaces: not happening! Okay, it is, but it’s not a problem. In fact, it’s good that children are ‘exposed to kink’. If you object, you’re just a far-right bigot.
Perhaps you’re thinking, well if there’s anything you wouldn’t expect the Wokesters to defend, it’s female genital mutilation.
Oh, you sweet summer child.
A paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics (yes, really) has now completed the full cycle. After an entire generation of gay and autistic children were steered into ‘gender-affirming’ genital mutilation, the same intellectual apparatus is using that industrial-scale mutilation as cover for the traditional kind performed on little girls.
This paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics draws a comparison between female genital mutilation and “gender affirming” surgeries – and uses the latter as justification for the former.
The authors lament the global campaign against FGM. They complain that the “standard tale” of harm is too crude, that it is “heavily racialised and ethnocentric” and that it produces the usual progressive bugbears: eroded trust, silenced community voices and racial profiling of migrant families. Most tellingly, they detect a “troubling double standard” that permits comparable genital surgeries in the West while condemning the same thing when done by non-Westerners.
Moreover, we highlight a troubling double standard that legitimises comparable genital surgeries in Western contexts while condemning similar procedures in others. We call for more balanced and evidence-based journalism, policy and public discourse – ones that account for cultural complexity and avoid the reductive and stigmatising force of the term ‘mutilation’.
There it is, Step 3 in academic dress: FGM is not mutilation, merely a “traditional female genital practice” whose diversity of meanings we must respect. The term itself is the real violence.
The paper leans heavily on the old equivalence with male circumcision. That comparison only works if you ignore two inconvenient facts. First, plenty of men object to the routine circumcision of infant boys and have done so for decades. Second, the procedures are not remotely equivalent. Male circumcision removes the foreskin: a relatively minor operation that heals quickly and leaves the organ intact and functional. Female genital mutilation, in its common forms, removes part or all of the clitoris itself. In many variants the vagina is then surgically sealed, sometimes with wire, to be cut open again on the wedding night. It’s not uncommon for the poor women to be wired shut again should the husband be absent for an extended period. One is a cosmetic or religious modification. The other is the deliberate destruction of sexual function and the imposition of lifelong pain.
Cultural practice is no defence. Stoning adulterers, honour killings, female infanticide and ritual cannibalism are also long-standing cultural practices. We do not host academic symposia demanding that Westerners “account for their complexity” before condemning them. We simply stop the people doing them when they try to continue the custom on our soil. Just as the Raj-era British, for all their faults, delude themselves that setting fire to widows required “nuanced” discussion: they simply stamped it out.
Now, once a group occupies a high enough rung on the Victim Totem Pole, even the most grotesque customs become protected heritage. Object and you are the problem: racist, ethnocentric, Islamophobic, the usual package. The Journal of Medical Ethics has merely made the progression official. First they told us cutting up children’s genitals for gender reasons was healthcare. Now they tell us cutting up little girls’ genitals for tradition is cultural nuance.
And Step 4? Oh, they’re already on it: the paper explicitly calls objecting to hacking at little girls’ clitorises ‘racism’.
