Babyhack!
Don’t you dare tell your little girl there’s no monster lurking in the closet. Because I just read the abstract of his paper on Nerve-Sparing Ventral Clitoroplasty. And actually, I think he’s not so much in a closet as practicing pediatric urology in New York. Either way, he’s out there and he’s the stuff of nightmares.
I don’t know how parents determine their daughter’s clitoris is “too big”. I don’t even know what that means. I was under the impression that big clitorises were sexy anyway, but no one should be evaluating a child’s genitals in such a way unless they’re presenting an actual medical problem. “Being bigger than average” isn’t a medical problem. But somehow, a bunch of parents decided their daughters’ clitorises were too big, and turned to Dr. Dix P. Poppas for help (you probably think I made that name up, but I didn’t even!).
Dr. Dix P. Poppas is nothing if not helpful. According to this and this and this he’ll helpfully hack into your child’s healthy clitoris (as young as 4 months) and pare it down to some arbitrary acceptable size. Then he’ll stimulate her clitoris with a vibrating device and ask her how it feels… not just once, no! Every year. He’ll keep a chart. A chart of your daughter’s mutilated clitoris’s sexual response. Across years.
There’s no way to convey this in normal-sized font, so…
Creepy. Evil. Creepy.
Why this guy is allowed perform experimental surgery on children and then systematically molest them is anyone’s guess.
I posted about this on twitter the other night, and comparisons were naturally made to male circumcision, which I’m also entirely against (concerning male circ, Holly Pervocracy wrote about it recently, and made some excellent points, as she tends to do). I’m not sure if we’re talking equal atrocities considering the potentially-scarring, prolonged aftercare involved, but to me these seem like obvious civil rights issues. We’re talking about the physical integrity of a person. You don’t fuck with that, even if you’re that person’s legal guardian. What am I missing here?
Maybe it’s down to the fact that I don’t want kids and can’t realistically put myself in the position of a parent, so maybe there are complexities to this I can’t grasp, but when we’re talking circumcision I’m appalled when otherwise-intelligent people whose opinions I respect trot out tired, unsound reasons for cutting off pieces of their hypothetical babies’ genitals. I’m not going to fight all the stupid pro-circ. myths right now because Intact America does a thorough job here. But really, the bottom line is that I just feel that cutting a child’s genitals for arbitrary reasons is never justified. Trust me, when they’re adults they’ll have plenty of time to decide if they want to mutilate their own genitals.
Why would anyone force a child to submit to any surgery that’s medically unnecessary? Or does that just go back to the “Why is there evil in the world?” question.
I get the impression (maybe it’s just my last thread of wishful thinking) that by “too large” he doesn’t just mean some cosmetic judgement but really to the point of ambiguous genitalia–i.e., a clitoris that’s kind of like a small penis. Which is arguably even MORE important not to fuck with because you don’t necessarily know what the kid’s gender identity is going to end up being. But it sort of explains why parents would go along with the surgery.
The only explanation I can come up with for why parents would go along with the vibrator thing comes from the Milgram experiment. The authority figure said it was okay, and he does have a white coat and all…
I have been disgusted by this story all week. To add to all the great points you already made, I’m sure this does nothing to help these poor girls self esteem. Jesus, what really gets me is the follow-ups. Since when is molestation medically sanctioned?!
As a cut man I cannot support freedom-of-choice enough. When my parents decided to circumcise me I was 6, their rationale being that the minimal/zero anaesthesia that newborns get was cruel and unnatural, better to do the whole thing ‘humanely’.
A good 20 years on I still feel a great deal of resentment about that decision as the whole process ruined masturbation for me until I was 17 when much of the subsumed sentiment toward my mangled member had faded (‘Don’t touch it or it will fall off’).
I cannot fathom why anyone in this modern age would be so ignorant as to proscribe female circumcision in the West. An article in a prominent Australia newspaper recently discussed a paper in a (the?) prominent Australian Medical Community journal which suggested legalizing doctors/surgeons to perform female circumcisions – to prevent backyard operations (which are apparently enough of a problem here to warrant considering making female circumcision to be legalized in Australia!?)
@Holly Pervocracy I was wondering about that. In the abstract it’s referred to as clitorimegaly, which can mean 10mm in width and up, I guess. That’s all the information I can find on it, and so far I’m not sure why that should be a problem unless it’s presenting an obstruction or discomfort. If Dr. Dix P. Poppas would like to enlighten me, I’m perfectly willing to hear him out before I beat a bitch down. And I agree completely that messing with intersex or ambiguous genitalia is irresponsible. Not to be a hippie about all this, but I’d be pretty pleased if we could get over our fixation with binary sex/gender.
You’d think at some point a parental instinct of “You’re gonna stimulate her what?” would kick in, but no. We have to go on with the experiment. Ugh.
@evey Seriously. How do her parents explain to her why she’s being brought to her scary urologist’s office to get her clitoris stimulated with a vibrator year after year? “Honey, your clitoris was freakishly large! Just take your punishment like a good girl.”
This quote from the abstract may be the most chilling of all. Okay, probably not, but still: “Study received medical institution review board approval.”
@IDiom Last time I checked, children were people. Messing with a person’s genitals without his or her consent is the kind of thing no doctor should consent to. Healthy kids don’t need cosmetic surgery.
I’m partly paraphrasing @VioletScreaming from twitter here, and I agree with her: Letting doctors take over the mutilation is flawed logic. The temptation will be there to liken it to the logic of decriminalizing abortion to stop back alley procedures, but pregnancy is actually a medical condition and the mother is perfectly able to give consent (if she’s forced into an abortion, that’s abominable and rightly a crime). Children cannot and would not (unless under duress) consent to genital mutilation. We can’t outsource atrocities to doctors. Education and criminalization of FGM should be implemented and enforced extensively before that extremity is even considered.
And just because male genital mutilation has been the norm for hundreds of years doesn’t make it okay either. Anything that becomes widespread in order to prevent masturbation by lessening sexual sensitivity is something we should all take a good, long look at and then promptly denounce.
My fiance is uncut, thank the gods. The foreskin is not some random useless flap of skin. Genital mutilation is wrong, no matter the sex of the victim, no matter the excuse.
@Elodie Seriously, and if all those excuses are sound they’re simply reasons an adult might eventually decide to get elective surgery later in life. They never justify taking the decision away from someone.
Just to edit my comment; prescribe, not proscribe. Erg. Too early in the morning.
One word: criminal
…ok another word: horrible
Working in the medical field this disturbs me greatly. Looking at it from a science point of view the clitoris would have to be causing problems for the child and the yearly stimulation would be to make sure the nerves didn’t get damaged during the surgery. But that falls into a whole nother category. If the clitoris is so large it should make one stop and wonder if the child also has a penis and if that is the case many test should happen before there is a surgery. It is a double edged sword, do you wait until your child is old enough to choose if they want to be male or female? Or do you make the choice for them and hope you made the right one?
As for the males, there are reasons to have a child circumsized. Like for instance with my nephew, my sister opted not to have the proceedure done. But a short six months later it HAD to happen. The fore skin would not stretch over the head of his penis and this caused many problems. And it was not for the lack of my sister trying to give her son the option when he got older either. He would scream every time you went to change his diaper.
There are conditions to have each done and once again it falls into the grey area, do you as parents decide or let your child get older and make the decision? If you wait until they are older how much stress are they going to be under because of their issue? If you choose for your child, did you make the right choice?
I can say that if I had a daughter that had an enlarged clitoris there would be many lab test and so forth that happened before I took a glance at surgery. I also wouldn’t take my daughter back yearly for the stimulation. That could wait until she was older and COMPLETELY understood what was happening and could make that decision for herself.
There would be many hours spent on prayers asking the good Lord to guide me in the right direction. And though I can see the science behind it, I don’t agree with it!
Dear God, this is like some kind of evil Nazi experimentation! I can’t even bring myself to click on the link for fear of nightmares. WTF is wrong with these parents?! I have three daughters and I can’t imagine a circumstance where this kind of surgery would seem like a good idea. Jesus. I’m feeling ill now.
O.M.F.G.