The Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford has just announced the publication of a landmark article titled “Genital Modifications in Prepubescent Minors: When May Clinicians Ethically Proceed”. The article, published here by the American Journal of Bioethics (AJOB), ostensibly focuses on the performance of genital surgeries on unconsenting intersex children, but it also effectively deals with the U.S. medical ritual of penile circumcision that is imposed on more than one and a quarter million non-intersex (i.e., endosex) male newborns each year in the U.S. alone.

The article grew out Tim Hammond’s conversations with ethicist Brian D. Earp in the summer of 2020 after Hammond wrote a letter congratulating Lurie Children’s Hospital (Chicago) for announcing they would no longer perform genital surgeries on intersex children. He questioned why Lurie continues to perform and promote routine newborn penile circumcision. His letter went unanswered and it was clear to him and Brian that such a double standard needed to be exposed and challenged.

This important article is authored by the Brussells Collaboration on Bodily Integrity (BCBI), of which GALDEF Executive Director Tim Hammond and GALDEF board member David Balashinsky are members. The BCBI, lead by Brian D. Earp,  is composed of over 160 physicians, ethicists, nurse-midwives, public health professionals, legal scholars, human rights advo­cates, political scientists, anthropologists, psychologists, sexol­ogists, sociologists, philosophers, and feminists from Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas with interdisciplinary or experiential expertise in child genital cutting practices across a wide range of cultural contexts. Hammond says it was an honor to have been a part of this publication effort and to see that his two most recent surveys of circumcision sufferers (2017 and 2023) were referenced in the article.

Below is a brief excerpt from this important paper.

In addition to “normalising” surgeries on infants with intersex traits, the study critiques other medically unnecessary practices sometimes performed on prepubertal children by licensed healthcare providers at the request of parents, including “ritual pricking” or other “symbolic” cutting of young girls’ vulvas for sociocultural purposes (defined as “medicalised FGM” by the World Health Organisation) and “routine” newborn penile circumcision performed for non-religious reasons, a medicalised birth custom in the United States.

According to Earp: “Everyone should have the same right to decide what happens to their own sexual anatomy, no matter their skin colour or the size or shape of their genitals.”