This week I submitted a guest report for the Strange Quarks podcast (you can also listen on the Guardian website, ooh!); you can follow them on Twitter.

Here’s what I said in text format with some links and a bit of stuff that had to be left on the cutting room floor; also see my earlier posts here and here for expansion. I hope to find time to do a proper post on the HIV/circ issue some time but my free time is practically non-existent right now!

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I’m going to talk about my number 1 overlooked issue in skepticism, which is: circumcision. I think people should be talking about it more.

We’re quite rightly disgusted by and vehemently opposed to female genital mutilation or FGM.

All its various forms are reviled and usually illegal, from those as minimal as a pinprick to the most severe and life-threatening.

However, the developed world, including the UK, used to widely practice FGM alongside male circumcision or MGM both for similar reasons, including beliefs of hygiene benefits, curing disease or unwanted behaviour and aiming to reduce or remove sexual desire.

But girls now have their healthy, functional tissue – their bodily and genital integrity – protected by law; makes sense.

I’d argue all children should be protected from unnecessary, damaging, permanent genital surgery; routine infant circumcision is cosmetic surgery, encouraged by parents, religious traditions, or physicians who sometimes make a profit from it, in the case of the US. No baby can consent to having a healthy part of his body removed or altered and this is surely a violation of his basic right to protection from abuse and, indeed, of a doctor’s oath to Do No Harm. Edit: it pays to think before it starts to matter more, because then it can be too late. Watch this medical student, and read his comment underneath his video. There are a lot of lame excuses around.

People wrongly believe that “It’s harmless!” The deaths of over a hundred babies per year in the US alone suggests otherwise, not to mention non-fatal complications such as scarring, meatal stenosis, skin bridges, fistulas, cysts, impotence and the one-in-a-million chance of the loss of the penis altogether.

Edward Wallerstein said, “Circumcision is a solution in search of a problem.”

It’s been cited as a cure for all sorts of ridiculous things down the decades, from epilepsy and masturbation to bed-wetting and blindness. It offers no more hygiene benefit than 10 seconds in the shower with a bar of soap. I file it with alternative medicine-style quackery and the reasons for its persistence are strangely complex.

One problem now being recognised with the latest in a long line of dubious justifications is that suggesting “circumcision could prevent the spread of HIV!” to already poorly-educated populations causes a sort of invincibility complex to form, where people believe they are resistant and therefore end up spreading the virus even more.

Improving sanitation, education, barrier contraception availability, and reproductive autonomy for women are things we should be striving for anyway, not trying to shoe-horn in outdated surgical procedures.

Then there’s the “He won’t remember if we do it when he’s a baby!” line. People don’t really remember anything from their infant days but that doesn’t mean you can abuse them in any way you like.

“Oh, the foreskin is useless!” people proclaim light-heartedly. A false perception likely the product of depressingly insufficient sex education, including within medicine. It’s actually the most nerve-dense, sensitive part of the penis. Any volunteer test subjects for this assertion? I thought not.

Studies assessing whether circumcision affects sexual function and pleasure often make two critical mistakes in the groups they compare to intact men; 1. those circumcised at a young age (who therefore have no ‘natural’ sexual experiences to relate to) or 2. recently-cut adult men reporting increased pleasure, when it takes a few years for permanent glans exposure to have its desensitising effects. Men attempting foreskin restoration in later life should surely also be consulted – yes, there is such a thing, do check it out.

Some will make exceptions for “it’s a religious/family tradition” – or even “we want him to look like his dad!” The children of amputees surely feel relieved. These also reasons given for FGM that we reject.

It’s quite sickening to read women’s comments about their sexual preferences used as reasons to force it upon their children– “it looks better!” and “intact is ugly” are too frequently heard. If a man confessed to saving up for his daughter’s breast enlargement or labioplasty we’d be appalled, right? We don’t do this with any other body part.

There is also increasing evidence that permanent psychological damage can result from such a huge physical trauma in early life, including Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. These effects are not only limited to recipients of the surgery; read experiences of women who deeply regret allowing it here (NB/ is quite upsetting). One man seeking compensation writes:

I was circumcised as an infant and my mother was not informed of the great injustice being performed on her only son. Not only has it caused great physical trauma but psychological and emotional as well. Damages are immeasurable. I want justice for what was done to me, and I never want another child to be sexually assaulted and butchered in their first moments of life. It has long lasting horrid affects. How can you ever trust when the first thing you know is pain and the most pleasurable part of your body is taken away?

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There are other quote-unquote ‘reasons’ for the practice, which I’ve gone into more detail on in my blog and maybe could expand upon at a later date. No medical organisation recommends routine infant circumcision, yet thousands of boys are subjected to it every day.

Why?

Have you thought about it?