It is sad to see someone as able, and as obviously caring, as Giles Fraser making such absurd statements about circumcision (Comment, 18 July). He talks about circumcision as a "statement of identity" and about it "marking me out as belonging". Not long ago girls in China were "marked out as belonging" by having their feet bound, while in other parts of the world girls are "marked out as belonging" by having their genitalia mutilated in various ways. Are these practices to be considered OK because they have been going on a long time and are supported in their communities?

It may be politically impossible to enact or enforce laws banning circumcision on religious grounds but let us not pretend that barbaric practices like this are acceptable just because they are well-established.

It is also deeply troubling to see Fraser defending the indefensible because it is done by a group with which he feels moved to identify. A great deal of the evil in the world escapes condemnation for exactly this reason: too many Jews feel unable to condemn violence committed by the Israeli state and too many Muslims fail to condemn al-Qaida because of a wilful moral blindness.

Roger A Fisken

Bedale, North Yorkshire

• Your editorial (Circumscribing the law, 18 July) omits one significant consideration: infant boys subjected to the ritual of circumcision are unable to object to something that in later life they might not accept. If they ultimately reject Islam or Judaism, either as faiths or identities, they are left with an irrational physical mark that cannot be reversed.

I write as an agnostic secularist, so suspect my views will carry little weight with devout Jews or Muslims, but in a wider sense they, like some of the Christian denominations, predominantly the Roman Catholic church, should not try to pre-empt the future convictions of their children before they are sufficiently mature to reach their own conclusions.

Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion considers the imposition of religious belief on children one of the main objections to theism. The solution for Jews and Muslims therefore seems obvious: wait until your child is able to make his own decision about circumcision and abide by it.

Arthur Massey

Bristol

• Giles Fraser is unconvincing. Like many, he finds it difficult to envision a new post-Holocaust view of Jewish identity. The legal argument in favour of a ban is robust. The removal of a foreskin is clearly an assault and it is an accepted tenet of law throughout the world that the newborn and young are incapable of informed consent. Jewish argument in favour of circumcision is wreathed in sentiment and outdated notions of identity. If my novel Grosse Fugue is about anything, it's about the redefinition of identity in the light of what befell my people. No amount of religious indifference or even conversion provided immunity from murder. Increased observance since the Holocaust is merely a strand of denial, pretending that it never happened so that all that went before can continue unchallenged. The defence of circumcision has to be seen in that light.

Will the ban be overturned? Angela Merkel has promised legislation, based no doubt on her spurious notion that performance of the rite is a right. But that doesn't alter the fact the judgment was humane and legally correct. And it doesn't destroy the argument that no amount of hanging on to arcane superstitions can obviate debate about what the Holocaust actually means today.

Hopefully, a new sense of identity will soon begin to take shape, one that acknowledges the universality of the slaughter and the moral obligations that flow from that. When that happens, we Jews can perhaps focus on our shared heritage of justice, freedom of thought, the search for knowledge and the quest for personal liberty.

Ian Phillips

London

• So now male infant circumcision is deemed an infringement of human rights by a court in Cologne because of the "bodily harm" inflicted. By the same token, the MMR vaccination routinely given to all babies in the UK counts as a similar infringement, as the babies in question have not given consent to being inflicted with the pain of an injection. If the state wishes to supersede the rights of parents in deciding what's best for their children, we may as well put all our babies into care at birth. Surely children's rights are entrusted to parents until they are mature enough to think for themselves. Religious practices can bind individuals to society and state. The state would be foolish to try to alienate such a dynamic force for social cohesion.

Nabeela Shah

Ahmaddiya Muslim Women's Association

• Your editorial is plainly wrong. Despite your claim that female "circumcision" is in a place apart, nothing you put forward justifies that claim. Circumcision for both sexes is "cultural" and signifies belonging: except mutilation of boys is a monotheistic tradition and mutilation of girls isn't. No amount of moral relativism or ethical squirming will get you out of that dilemma.

Richard Gilyead

Saffron Walden, Essex

• So circumcision identifies Giles Fraser? How odd. With turbans, veils, kippahs and crosses, you can understand it – they make a visible identity statement. But circumcision? What does Rev Fraser do? Take it out every now and then to show whom he belongs with?

Lynne Reid Banks

Shepperton

• I am a victim of circumcision as discussed by Giles Fraser and have resented this mutilation all my life. If I shared his primitive superstition, I would marvel at his arrogant rejection of his god's anatomical design work.

Roger Nall

Worcester

• Your position on forced male circumcision is deeply disingenuous – and not just in your failure to acknowledge that male and female circumcision practices can be entirely comparable (as the World Health Organisation has confirmed, and as we saw in the recent FGM scandal in Birmingham).

There have been five or six infant deaths from haemorrhage and infection linked to male circumcision since September 2006, three of which went to inquest and were named by other newspapers, and one of which contributed to the suspension of a doctor. None of these deaths has been covered by the Guardian. If we're going to question issues of prejudice around the area of male circumcision, I think your newspaper has a case to answer. In covering the Birmingham dentist's offer to remove a small area of nerve-rich female skin (albeit without reporting his words, "something very, very superficial because I'm not going to cut the clitoris") in April, you didn't miss the chance to point out that female circumcision is "potentially fatal' ". But actual fatalities following excision of a larger area of nerve-rich male skin don't matter? How about we stop talking about antisemitism and Islamophobia, and begin a discussion about misandry?

Laura MacDonald

London

• Giles Fraser's arguments for circumcising infants for religious or identity reasons are very weak. Firstly, he says that circumcision is part of one's identity. This is fine when applied to an adult choosing to be circumcised, but we should not impose identity upon a child who cannot choose. He criticises the whole idea of prioritising choice by saying the idea "concede(s) to the moral language of capitalism". This argument is absurd, and could be used to try to defend anything that someone wrongly believed should be done to children.

He goes on to say that to abandon circumcision would be to give Hitler a posthumous victory, again because he sees circumcision as part of (Jewish) identity. This really is nonsense: the Nazis committed genocide, they did not stop people imposing an unnecessary medical procedure on children. And if one's identity really is dependent on circumcision, then one can undergo the procedure as an adult.

Circumcision is an irreversible mutilation. It should not be imposed on those who cannot consent to it, unless there is a medical need.

Richard Mountford

Hildenborough, Kent

• "This German circumcision ban is an affront to Jewish and Muslim identity." No it is not. No child should ever be subjected to physical abuse for any reason. That statement goes without saying in civilised communities. Circumcision (male or female) is child abuse; unless the procedure is medically indicated and carried out by a competent (qualified) medical practitioner. The practice of male or female circumcision for traditional or religious reasons has no legitimacy and is ethically and morally wrong.

Female circumcision, in theory, is the removal of the clitoral hood (foreskin) without damage to the clitoris. In reality the clitoris is damaged or destroyed and in many instances is deliberately destroyed in some cultures. Historically, these procedures were carried out in primitive settings, by tribal elders using a sharp stone. Mutilation of the clitoris was common. It is carried out to this day in numerous Muslim countries (mainly in Africa) even in hospital settings for religious reasons. The same happens to male victims in Africa when the sharp stone used to perform this ritual in tribal areas, or the scalpel of a surgeon in a modern hospital, slips and cuts off the tip or the whole glans of the penis.

In some Jewish communities (including in the US) the person trained in the practice of circumcision (a mohel) sucks the male baby's penis after the foreskin has been cut and removed. To me this is not only a deliberate wounding of a child but also sexual abuse.

There is no justification for allowing these practices to continue on religious or cultural grounds in any country. No one has the right to damage a child.

Doug Scorgie

London

• Giles Fraser omits a key point by ignoring the rights of the child, despite his wife's defence of his own son's rights.

Humans crave rituals of identity, whether religious or cultural and they should be respected, however irrational they seem to many of us. But we should not impose ritual mutilation on those too young to give consent. Article 19 of the convention on the rights of the child commits states to protect children from physical and mental violence and injury. Let those, like Giles, who want to be circumcised (for whatever reason) consent to it. Postpone the ritual to adulthood or at least an age when the individual understands what is happening and why. When I worked In Mozambique, 30 years ago, the government had an intelligent policy regarding circumcision (traditionally done at about 16 years of age). Health workers would provide hygienic, safer circumcision in hospital for free and the circumcised would donate blood to the hospital.

Gabrielle Palmer

Cambridge

• It is hard to agree with your editorial on the German case. Germany has the rule of law, a robust judiciary and a strong constitution with a commitment to human rights. Given the tenor of your comments one would be forgiven for thinking that no country would be suitable for this discussion.

The examples you give are disingenuous: the Swiss and French authorities arguably have a broader political aim than assimilation and there is a clear risk that the fear or distrust of otherness is influencing those policies. However, neither of your examples (minarets and veils) is in the same category as mutilating a child for historic or religious reasons. Liberal civil society, if founded on the rule of law and universal human rights from birth, must be careful not to indulge too readily cultural relativism when faced with particular customs. One cannot believe you would adopt this stance if, for example, the Scientologists or other more recent religious or quasi-religious orders, introduced the practice.

You rightly put quotation marks around the female equivalent but that is because the two acts are so very different in detail and extent. What, however, they have in common is mutilation. You may say that that word is loaded but so is "circumcision" outwith the context of a medical procedure.

Giles Fraser condemns elsewhere in your paper the Cologne court's attitude, and liberal secular sensibilities generally, as placing undue emphasis on personal autonomy. Perversely he does so in a piece where he regrets not circumcising his son. I repeat the point above: at what point does history alone justify the legality of these acts as one person's self-expression on another?

David Stockley

London