“In cultures around the world, people have, for millennia, engaged in a wide range of practices to modify human genitalia: through pricking or piercing; adornment with jewellery; stretching, cutting or excising tissues; or more recently, through surgical reshaping in a medicalised context. These practices may affect people of a wide range of ethnic identities and backgrounds; religious and secular people; people in the Global North and South; and people of a wide range of ages, from infancy to adulthood. They may be medicalised or unmedicalised; voluntary or non-voluntary; and associated with different types or degrees of risk, as well as different potential benefits. These benefits—including perceived social benefits, such as a feeling of heightened connection to one’s group—are commonly reported. They need to be understood and acknowledged if one is to account for some groups’ or individuals’ commitment to take on or reproduce these genital practices.

Each of these various genital practices may elicit starkly different attitudes—from enthusiastic endorsement to harsh condemnation depending on one’s values and point of view. For example, some people strongly support transgender surgeries, including for legal minors (in select cases)*, but passionately object to physically similar surgeries in children born with intersex traits. Some people express outrage at ritual practices involving a ‘prick’ to the vulva of prepubescent girls, but show little concern for the ritual penile circumcision of newborn boys. Some people see cosmetic labiaplasty as an appropriate option for older adolescents, as long as they have parental permission, whereas others see the same practice as harmful and oppressive, even for consenting adults.

Different moral reasons—for and against these different practices—are also offered to justify certain positions. Some of these reasons focus on contested claims of harm or benefit; others focus on children’s rights, consent and bodily autonomy; still others are grounded in notions of parental decision-making authority and the value of family privacy.

Such debates and disagreements apply even to the present authors. Some of us, for example, are morally opposed to all genital ‘cutting’ practices that are neither strictly voluntary nor medically necessary, irrespective of the person’s sex or gender. Others believe that religious or customary practices for boys, but not girls, should be allowed. Still others maintain it is up to parents to decide what is best for their children, and that the state should refrain from interfering with any culturally significant practices unless they can be shown to involve serious harm.

Despite our diverse disciplinary expertise in anthropology, sociology, psychology, criminology, law, gender studies, medicine and bioethics, we are united by one shared concern. This common ground has inspired us to collaborate across disciplines and perspectives to write this paper. Our primary concern here is to draw attention to the harms that may be caused by the lack of accuracy, objectivity, fairness and balance in public representations of these diverse practices.

Among other things, we are concerned that, out of all the genital practices alluded to above—carried out across cultures, age ranges, sexes and genders—there has been a systematic tendency to cordon off and single out, for purposes of condemnation and critique, only those practices affecting non-intersex females, and among these, only those that are customary in the Global South, especially in Africa (or in diaspora communities), while ignoring similar practices that have long been customary in powerful countries of the Global North.”