Female Genital Mutilation Is Illegal In The United States. Trans Surgeries For Kids Should Be, Too.

Shortly before leaving office in January 2021, President Donald Trump signed bipartisan legislation called the “Strengthening the Opposition to Female Genital Mutilation Act of 2020.” It was a proud day for those of us at Independent Women who had worked for years to put an end to this barbaric practice.

Female genital mutilation is the partial or total removal of female external genitalia for non-medical reasons. Held by certain cultures as a way to ensure young girls remain “pure” before they marry, the traumatic process causes extreme emotional and physical consequences and has no health benefits.

During my service as the director of the International Women’s Issues Office at the State Department, the suffering of young women and girls caused by female genital mutilation haunted me.

The STOP FGM Act increased penalties for committing this heinous practice, expanded the scope of punishable offenses, and required government agencies to submit an annual report to Congress that includes the estimated number of American women and girls who have undergone or are at risk of genital mutilation.

It is estimated that there are over 513,000 women and girls who have experienced or are at risk of genital mutilation in the United States. The STOP FGM Act did more than offer protection to these vulnerable young girls and women. It showed the world that in the United States, there will be no tolerance for this sort of human rights abuse.

Yet while westerners recoil at the idea that girls would be subjected to genital mutilation — irreversible harm under the guise of social or moral good — we enable a different form of abuse on our own girls.

When Prisha Mosley was a teenager, she believed that changing her body would bring her peace. She was struggling with trauma, mental illness, and a desperate desire to escape herself. Instead of addressing the root of her pain, adults in positions of authority affirmed her self-diagnosis and sent her down a path of hormones and surgeries that would leave Prisha permanently scarred.

What medical professionals did to Prisha and too many other young adolescent men and women — permanently disfiguring their healthy bodies in the name of health care — is no different than what we rightly condemn as female genital mutilation.

In Western hospitals, under bright lights and with institutional backing, minors are being prescribed puberty blockers, injected with testosterone, and undergoing irreversible surgeries to remove healthy breasts or even alter their genitalia — all in the name of “gender affirmation.”

One of the most common prescriptions in gender medicine — testosterone, which Prisha was prescribed at 17 — literally leads to female genital mutilation by causing vaginal atrophy and painful clitoral growth and chafing.

This is without even mentioning phalloplasty, which is a surgery to create an appendage that looks like a penis for trans-identifying females. Surgeons hack off a portion of the woman’s arm for skin to use to create the pseudo-penis, leaving her with an irreversible and highly visible scar, and, once it is created and attached, it is rife with complications, including urinary problems, fistulas, strictures, wounds, and infections.

If a girl in another country were subjected to genital mutilation surgery because her community believed it would make her more acceptable or “pure,” we’d be outraged. We’d call it a violation of her bodily autonomy. But when it’s done in the name of identity, we call it “care.”

This double standard is dangerous.

Female genital mutilation and gender-transition surgeries on minors share critical features: they’re performed on healthy bodies, often before the individual is mature enough to understand the full consequences, and they result in lifelong physical and emotional harm. In both cases, young people are manipulated by adults into believing that their value or wholeness depends on altering their bodies irreversibly.

We have laws protecting girls from female genital mutilation, as we should. So why is it controversial to suggest we also need laws to protect vulnerable children from irreversible gender procedures?

At the end of the day, this issue goes beyond politics: it isn’t partisan to want to safeguard children from adult agendas and ideologies that demand lifelong fealty and commitment from confused, traumatized youth. There’s nothing compassionate about a scalpel, nothing healing about cross-sex hormone injections that lead to a lifetime of complications and pain.

Americans like Prisha live every day with the consequences of decisions they’ve made when they were too young and too broken to understand them. If we truly care about protecting children’s rights and bodies, we must be willing to speak uncomfortable truths. And one of those truths is this: female genital mutilation and gender transition surgeries on minors are more alike than we dare admit. Both should be outlawed.

Andrea G. Bottner is the vice president for external relations at Independent Women, former director of the International Women’s Issues Office at the U.S. Department of State, and former acting director of the Office on Violence Against Women at the U.S. Department of Justice.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.