one man's letter

To the Doctor Who Cut Me Without My Consent, 

I doubt you will remember me but when I was an infant you violated my rights and mutilated my body.  I am writing you this letter to make you fully aware of the atrocities that you have committed and my feelings about them.  When I was a newborn infant you held me down and cut my foreskin off of my penis.  You performed an unnecessary cosmetic surgery on my body without my consent and without any way for me to defend myself.  I am extremely upset over what you did to my body.  I consider bodily autonomy to be an extremely important human right and you completely ignored that right.  If we don’t have freedom and control and choice over our own bodies, then how can we say we are free?  Why do you treat infants like objects and not like people?

Your actions have negatively impacted just about every aspect of my life.  You are the cause of my suffering and unrest. [Details of complications omitted to protect the victim's privacy.] Your actions have destroyed my faith, trust, and respect for the medical system and all those who work in it.  You are one of the most horrible kinds of criminals.  You prey on children’s genitals and spread lies to escape any punishment.  Sick, damaging, child mutilators like you deserve to rot behind bars for all the people you hurt.  Instead, through years of medical and societal brainwashing, you have convinced society, and maybe even yourselves, that your actions are harmless.  You live off of money made from mutilating people like me when we were completely helpless.

You can try telling yourself that you did nothing wrong because you had my parents’ consent, but their consent is not my consent.  You wielded a knife against a non-consenting patient with absolutely no need, doing harm.  That is not what a doctor is supposed to do.  You broke the oaths you took as a doctor.  Not many of us have the strength or support to speak out against your kinds crimes, but there are thousands of men around the US that feel the same.  You’ve made people think they can do anything they want to their children.  You have completely forgotten that children are people too, who will one day form their own opinion.  And there is no way of telling what that decision will be.  So how can you go around robbing people of their right to choose what they want for their own body?  You are given a lot of power over infants and children, and you need to be held responsible when you abuse that power.  Those children who are so helpless don’t stay that way forever.  And those of us who feel you abused your power and damaged our bodies and broke our rights aren’t just going to take it lightly and let it go.  Especially when you continue to abuse your power mutilating infants.  We are going to speak out against people like you, until the knives and clamps and straps are put away for good.

Circumcision has turned into the perfect crime.  You mutilate the bodies of children and get paid to do so.  US citizens have so much trust in you that they rarely question what you tell them.  It’s been done for so long that few question it and many just assume it’s beneficial and necessary.  You’ve made it so prevalent that women have developed a hatred for intact penises simply because they have no exposure to them.  Society has stopped seeing the foreskin as an actual normal, natural and healthy organ.  And the worst part is that the way it’s done even the victims are unlikely to speak against it.  Mutilating infants means that the men they grow into have no idea what they are missing.  Society puts so much strain on men to be masculine and sexually endowed and confident, that what man would ever admit that he was damaged?  Men speak positively about circumcision because they don’t want to accept that they have been mutilated, damaged, and are missing functional and beneficial parts of their genitalia.  If they accept that circumcision isn’t this absolutely great thing then they have to face the fact that they were hurt.  They have to face the fact that the Doctors they trust are the ones who lied and hurt them, and that their parents who were supposed to protect them offered them up on a silver platter.  So most choose the psychologically easier path to deny the harm at all costs.  Then when they have sons of their own they mutilate them as well to uphold their denial.  After that they defend circumcision because accepting that it’s harmful would mean having to accept that they hurt and mutilated their own child, on top of having to come to terms with their own mutilation.  All of this comes together in the horrid system where men are damaged and must accept that damage as a positive, and damage their own sons or face the psychological pain from realizing just what exactly was done to him.  And women have become so biased and ignorant towards circumcision that they usually are just as outwardly approving of it. 

When anyone tries to speak about circumcision in any negative way you get to see the real effects on society.  It’s considered taboo to say anything bad about it.  Those who are in denial will go to frightening lengths to silence those who try and speak out against circumcision.  Deep down people are afraid to know the truth.  Whenever people start to come to their senses the medical system makes a new statement regarding the numerous health benefits of cutting off healthy, natural body parts.  American medicine has completely lost all sense of right and wrong and even the most basic sense of ethics.  Cutting body parts off of children is not alright!  And the systems lies have convinced people that the foreskin isn’t a part of human anatomy.  People talk about it as if it’s a disease or birth defect.  Meanwhile 80% of men in the world have foreskins and are happy just the way they are.  

You probably think what you did was beneficial in some way but I’ve done my research and what you did was damaging.  Doctors like you make ridiculous claims of benefits from circumcision but when you don’t just take the American Medical communities word for it and actually question the “benefits” it’s shocking how quickly and easily the argument for cutting children falls apart.  Doctors in medical school just assume that everything they learn is correct and well.  They don’t consider that the people teaching them could be wrong and biased.  Doctors in training should question everything!  All humans can be corrupted, power corrupts, and who has more power than Medical groups that can say literally anything, teach anything, and be believed almost unquestioningly.  Doctors usually know little about the foreskin besides how to cut it off.  Even doctors that have some sense of morality are often prevented from saving children from barbaric mutilation, because the hospitals they work for refuse to allow them to.  The highest authorities in the American medical realm no longer care about what’s good or right, or ethical.  They only care about money and doing whatever they have to, to prevent their mistakes and lies from coming to light.  As of right now there are five “benefits” that Doctors preach about when trying to sell circumcision.  Those are that circumcision is cleaner, decreases the rate of Urinary Tract Infections, protects against STD’s like HIV/AIDS, that over 10% of boys will need to be circumcised in the future anyways for problems with their foreskin, and that it decreases the risk of penile cancer. 

First of all saying that being circumcised is cleaner is a pretty ridiculous argument for cutting a body part off.  There is this huge myth that you need to clean extremely thoroughly and often under the foreskin and that it’s some kind of rocket science to do so.  If people in America actually had any understanding or exposure to foreskins then they would know how simple cleaning is.  You clean it just like any other part of your body, it doesn’t require any more care than any other body part.  America has some of the most obsessive bathing habits, so in our society a foreskin would have no effect on personal hygiene.  In fact cleaning under the foreskin too often can have negative effects.  So not only does basic bathing resolve this issue, even if it didn’t it is far too extreme to cut body parts off against someone’s will to make bathing easier.

The argument that circumcision decreases the risk of UTIs is probably the most commonly stated “benefit” in favor of it.  Any truth in such a statement is lost when you factor in basic hygiene practices.  On top of that, since when is an open wound proper treatment for an infection?  Amputation is supposed to be a last resort in medicine, but somehow doctors here in America think it should be the go to treatment.  Antibiotics are the proper way to fight an infection.  To put how ridiculous this is into perspective consider females UTI rates and risks.  Females on average have a much higher risk for UTIs than both intact and circumcised men.  So why do women get antibiotics and men get the knife?  Actually, men do get the antibiotics because that’s what actually helps them, but they still get the knife anyways.  Men still get UTIs when circumcised and are given antibiotics that usually resolve the problem easily.  Logically circumcision has no place in the equation for treating UTIs, yet American doctors act like it’s the one and only option.  It doesn’t prevent UTIs, it doesn’t help in curing UTIs.  Yet our Idiotic system will not let any intact person who gets a UTI go without insistently pushing that they get circumcised.  Sometimes going so far as to make parents circumcise their children.

Third is the belief that circumcision protects against STD’s like HIV/AIDS.  Doctors constantly bring up a study conducted in Africa that supposedly showed that circumcised men are 60% less likely to contract HIV.  How anyone even acknowledges the existence of this study is beyond me.  As far as the scientific method goes this study is complete crap, and that’s without focusing on how unethical it is.  The short version is that they got a group of intact African men who tested negatively for HIV/AIDS.  Then a couple weeks later they tested to see how many of them had contracted HIV/AIDS.  Then they did the same thing, but this time they circumcised the men.  When they tested this group of men, fewer of them tested positive for HIV/AIDS than the intact group.  In case you don’t see it let me explain what’s wrong with this study.  This study doesn’t properly account for the frequency of sexual intercourse or the percentage of partners that had HIV/AIDS.  On top of that HIV/AIDS takes a while to show up on tests after an individual has been infected.  So members of the groups could have already been infected before the study began and anyone who may have been infected during the study would most likely not even show up as positive when they were tested at the end of the study.  Then take into account that the circumcised group was probably not feeling all to up for sexual intercourse right after having part of their penises cut off.  All together this study is flawed beyond belief, Doctors should be trying to hide its very existence out of embarrassment.  Instead they use it as “concrete proof” that circumcision provides extensive protection against STD’s.  America’s doctors have convinced hundreds of thousands of African men to undergo circumcision solely on this study. But it still isn’t as bad as here in America because those men are actually men who are matured and can make the decision for themselves.  It’s not forced onto them when they are most vulnerable like her in America.  On top of all that there isn’t a huge risk of contracting HIV/AIDS in America, so even if it was true it wouldn’t matter much here.  How many infants are planning on going and having sexual relations so early in life anyways?  This offers no good reason to circumcise men at all, let alone force it as soon as you can get a knife between their legs.  When you look at other first world countries that don’t practice circumcision on any regular basis you don’t see much difference in STD prevalence.  In fact most first world countries with the vast majority of men being intact have lower rates for STD’s.  Informing people about safe sex is how to properly prevent STD’s, not cutting off part of people’s genitalia.  Doctors should be promoting condoms not cutting.  And if and when a male gets a UTI they should be treated with antibiotics just like women, instead of pain and mutilation.

Fourth is that many Doctors like to bring up the belief that over 10% of boys will need to get circumcised out of medical necessity.  I believe you like to refer to it as “emergency circumcision”.  Danish research shows that only 5% of boys experience any problems with their foreskin.  Of that 5% only 1.7% required surgery, and only 0.4% of them required actual removal of the foreskin (circumcision).  The reason it’s believed to be higher here in America is the same reason circumcision is still practiced at all, lack of accurate information.  Doctors are so eager to circumcise infants that they will take any problem at all and declare that circumcision is absolutely necessary, when in fact it isn’t.  The reason that there are so many more occurring foreskin problems in American boys for Doctors to say require circumcision, is because of lack of knowledge about intact penis care.  Many doctors and parents don’t know that when boys are young the foreskin is attached to the glands similarly to how our fingernails are attached to our fingers.  Of course I’m sure you know this since you had to tear my foreskin from my glands before cutting it off.  Many parents and doctors make the mistake of forcefully retracting a child’s foreskin.  This mistake is usually made due to the lie that the area under the foreskin requires constant and thorough cleaning at all ages.  Forcefully retracting a foreskin can be extremely damaging and obviously painful.  Doing so can lead to problems that doctors in America claim can only be fixed through circumcision.  The foreskin is not supposed to retract until later in life, so there is usually no need for any special penile cleaning during infancy or early childhood.  It’s different for everyone but it’s not uncommon for a boy’s foreskin to not be retractable until puberty.  Doctors and parents also mistake normal processes where the foreskin begins to detach from the glands and become retractable as medical emergencies.  Ballooning is fairly common in intact boys as their foreskins begin to become retractable, people from European countries know this well.  But people and doctors in America are so ignorant about the intact penis that they rush their sons to a hospital where of course the doctors claim circumcision is the only option.  So in terms of actual necessity, when a doctor actually respects a boy’s body and actually has proper medical knowledge on basic anatomy there is less than half a percent chance that a boy will require circumcision.

The final “benefit” Doctors talk about is that circumcision decreases the risk of penile cancer.  First off there is no real evidence of this.  Even the American Cancer Institute denies the correlation.  Plus penile cancer is among the more rare forms of cancer, so cutting pieces of a person’s anatomy off to decrease the already small risk is absolutely ridiculous.  If this was actually a concern then why don’t doctors cut the breasts off of infant girls?  Breast cancer is far more prevalent and can even be assessed for how likely a girl is to get it.  Yet you respect girl’s bodies and allow them to decide later in life for themselves, if they want to have their breasts removed when they have a high risk for breast cancer.  Why do boys deserve any less?

So what you did to me certainly isn’t beneficial.  But it’s worse than that, because the foreskin isn’t just a useless piece of extra skin.  It’s a part of sexual anatomy that has several functions.  The foreskin is meant to protect the glands of the penis.  It is there to keep the glands sensitive and moist/lubricated.  The foreskin even plays a role in keeping the natural penis clean!  The foreskin contains tens of thousands of nerve endings to increase sexual pleasure.  The foreskin creates a gliding motion during intercourse and masturbation that is more pleasurable for both men and women.  A foreskin is not a birth defect.  It is a natural and healthy part of the human body.  Foreskins, along with the boys they are attached to deserve to be respected and cared for.  Not brutally ripped and cut from the rest of the body.

Along with losing the functions of the foreskin there are numerous things that can go wrong during and as a result of circumcision.  You can cut too much skin off, paving the way for several problems down the road.  Painful erections, chafing, dry/roughness, loss of sensitivity, bending/curving/deformation of the penis, scrotal skin being forced up the shaft, tearing of scar tissue, stretching and tightening of the skin.  You can slip up and damage other parts of the penis like the glands.  Many boys are forced to endure future circumcisions to deal with mistakes or complications during healing.  There are even a number of boys who die each year due to complications from their circumcisions, over 100 a year in case you care, all completely avoidable.  Most infants go into shock from the extreme pain, and most parents misinterpret this believing their children did/do not feel any pain because they may not be crying.  Many parents even believe that children sleep soundly and peacefully through the procedure.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Infants are too young to receive anesthesia so they usually only receive local numbing agents and sometimes sugar!  Next time you don’t need a surgery, how about you ditch the anesthesia and try a sugar cube and tell me how well you sleep through it.  These are just some of the problems that we know about.  There is even reason to believe that children most likely suffer mental trauma as well.  Infant’s brains are developing extremely quickly and they are exposed to extreme pain and suffering during procedures such as circumcision. You could easily expect that kind of trauma to effect an adult, so a young, impressionable, developing mind is more than likely affected in some way.  The AAP claims that “the benefits of circumcision out way the risks” yet at the same time they admit that “the risks of circumcision are not known”.  How can you know that the benefits out way the risks when I just explained how ridiculous the benefits are, and you admit you don’t know the risks?  It’s just like how doctors used to say cigarettes were “healthy”, or how lead based items used to be “safe”, or even how slavery used to be “beneficial and healthy for blacks”.  There are plenty of terrible things that the people making profit off of or had self interest in, lied about to keep it going and hide the wrongs that were done and continue to be done.  There has not been much research invested into the negative effects of circumcision here in America, since American doctors don’t want anything interfering with their profits and mutilation culture.  But medical organizations around the world find circumcision just as bad as it seems over and over.  Problems such as meatal stenosis are up to three times more common in circumcised boys, even when the procedure was done “flawlessly”.  Are you beginning to understand why I’m so angry, why so many men are angry, and why we have every right to be?

Even if circumcision was a beneficial thing, even if it had zero risk and no negative affects you would still be in the wrong.  Does every person not deserve the right to bodily autonomy and integrity, to not be forced into medically unnecessary procedures without their own consent?  Circumcision is a permanent procedure, once it’s done there is no going back.  Doctors and parents have no right deciding what normal, healthy, parts of the body their children get to keep and not keep.  Neither doctors nor parents have to endure the pain and trauma.  Neither doctors nor parents have to live with the choice, complications and all the ramifications.  Neither doctors nor parents have to wake up every morning and go to sleep every evening knowing they are missing a part of themselves that they were powerless to protect.  Neither doctors nor parents sexual lives are forever impacted by the decision.  Neither doctors nor parents have any way to tell what an infant boy will want in the future.  In terms of the most basic of human rights, is the right to your natural body, undamaged by intentional acts, no longer important? Circumcision can be done at any time in a male’s life but doctors choose infancy to push the hardest.  They claim the wounds heal faster in infancy and that infants won’t remember the pain and trauma.  We remember and are affected by those memories, even if it’s not always consciously.  And if an individual wants to be circumcised so badly when they are old enough to decide for themselves, then pain and healing time shouldn’t stop them if they are truly serious about it.  Forcing something onto someone simply because it’s easier to do at a certain time does not make it ok.  And this time is conveniently when the individual cannot fight back or speak for themselves.  If doctors were forced to wait until an individual could make an informed decision themselves I think the circumcision business would quickly go under. 

You, the people you work with, and the people you work for in this country are monsters, criminals, and mutilators.  The rest of the world looks at you in disgust.  If having a foreskin is such an unhealthy thing and being circumcised is such a beneficial thing, then why doesn’t it show in other countries?  Other first world countries respect and enjoy the natural body and foreskin.  They have no worse problems than we do, and in many areas they have fewer problems than we do.  Intact men almost never choose to part with their foreskins.  They know firsthand how precious, useful, pleasurable, and overall wonderful the complete undamaged male genitalia is.  You have robbed me and I imagine plenty others of that right.  Your hands are forever stained with my blood.  Circumcision can be done at any time in a person’s life, but you still decided to force the procedure on my body.  Is it so hard to simply respect the body, rights and future decisions of children and leave them alone?  If a person decides for themselves, after proper research, when they are an adult that they want to be circumcised then they can then.  Circumcision is permanent, so why would you make a permanent decision that doesn’t need to be made, for someone?  When you circumcise someone who decides in the future they don’t want to be circumcised, you are dooming them to feel violated, mutilated, and damaged forever.  If you simply wait and it’s something they absolutely want they can do it in the future and can be how they want.  Forcing your choice onto people leaves those who are unhappy to be so forever, while if you wait then everyone can end up how they want to.  It’s really not that hard a concept to grasp, if you actually have a conscious.

You allow and directly fuel the largest and longest lasting violation of human rights in America.  You profit off of it, you make yourself feel powerful and untouchable practicing it.  You convince most people, including yourselves that you’re helping infants, improving their lives.  When in reality it’s all a scam kept up with money, lies, unquestioning trust, and denial.  Cutting natural, healthy, functional body parts off of non-consenting, helpless infants is not parenting and it’s not medicine.  It’s mutilation plain and simple.  You hear people say that boys never complain about circumcision.  Consider this a formal complaint.  I did not consent, I am extremely angry and upset about what you did to my body.  You are a monster, a mutilator, a child predator, an abuser, the most horrid kind of criminal loose in society.  Society gives you nearly limitless trust and respect and you have abused that power and hurt the very people you swore oaths to protect and help.  You harm the most innocent people in society, you have no right to call yourself a doctor or even a human being at this point.  Maybe this letter will wake you up and open your eyes for once.  There’s not much I can do about my situation but making my feelings known and working to end this barbaric practice is at least something.  I pray every day that I will wake up and have back what you took from me, even though I know I never will.  For the love of everything and everyone forced circumcisions must end. 

I would like a return phone call to discuss this further and would like to be reassured that no more babies will become victims at your hands.

Sincerely,

A Victim of Male Genital Mutilation