Keeping our focus exclusively on a Western context for
the purposes of this article, we argue as follows: Under
most conditions, cutting any person’s genitals without
their informed consent is a serious violation of their right
to bodily integrity. As such, it is morally impermissible
unless the person is nonautonomous (incapable of con-
sent) and the cutting is medically necessary

The “crash,” we suggest, may have just happened in
the federal case. Rather than ruling on the merits, Judge
Bernard A. Friedman struck down the 1996 American
law as unconstitutional, citing jurisdictional constraints.
Congress, he argued, did not have the authority to pass
a nationwide ban on FGM because it is “local criminal
activity,” which is the province of the states. He thus
avoided confronting the equal protection issue at the
federal level, whilst appearing to be aware of its exist-
ence: “As laudable as the prohibition of a particular type
of abuse of girls may be,” he wrote, “it does not logically
further the goal of protecting children on a nondiscrimi-
natory basis.”4

Another recent legal development concerns a bill in
California, introduced but later tabled, that sought to
outlaw medically unnecessary “intersex” surgeries,
including so-called “feminizing” clitoroplasty, before an
age of consent (Gutierrez 2019). The purported goal of
most such surgeries is to make the child’s genitals
appear more stereotypically masculine or feminine,
which some have presumed, albeit without strong
evidence, to be important for their psychosocial develop-
ment. However, a growing number of individuals sub-
jected as children to such genital cutting claim to have
been seriously harmed by what was done to them when
they were incapable of understanding the risks and con-
sequences. Moreover, some express great resentment
about what they consider a violation of their human
rights