Tara Muir slams the law seeking to protect minor girls from female genital mutilation as having the potential to place “draconian limits on transgender people.”

US — Wyoming. Transgender activists are protesting a bill that would criminalize the performance of female genital mutilation on a minor in Wyoming as an act of aggravated assault and battery. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), as many as 200 million girls and women worldwide are living with the harmful effects of female genital mutilation (FGM), which include chronic pain, recurring infections, incontinence, sexual problems, and complications of pregnancy and labor that increase risk of death to the infant. However, Tara Muir, Policy Director of the Wyoming Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault (WCADVSA), has slammed the legislation as having the potential to place “draconian limits on transgender people.”

While recent demand for FGM in the US is often driven by Muslim refugees and immigrants from Africa and the Middle East, Equality Now concludes that the procedure “is performed across religious, cultural and socioeconomic groups around the world.” It has come to public light within the last three years that FGM secretly occurs in certain reclusive Christian sects when Renee Bergstrom, now 76, and Jennifer, now in her 40s, wrote in detail about the lifelong health impacts they have experienced after being forced as children to undergo FGM in their strict white Christian communities in North Dakota and Oklahoma, respectively. FGM has also been reported in pockets of Latin America and Eastern Europe.

WHO found that FGM is nearly always carried out on minors, and estimates that over 3 million girls are at risk of being subjected to genital mutilation every year. The practice has no health benefits.

The two major US political parties have come together to protect girls under age 18 from FGM. 32 states have already passed laws banning the practice on minors. Representative Dan Laursen (R-Powell) proposed House Bill 127 – Prohibition of female genital mutilation, which is intended to outlaw FGM across the state of Wyoming. Conservative Republicans and Democrats alike have signed onto the bill.

HBO 127 defines FGM; classifies FGM as aggravated assault and battery; requires convictions of FGM be included on the child abuse registry; prohibits licensure of health care professionals who perform the procedure; mandates FGM be reported as child abuse; provides an avenue for victims of the procedure to recover damages; and calls for establishment of a community education program.

The legislation defines FGM thusly:

“Female genital mutilation” includes the partial or total removal of the clitoris, prepuce, labia minora, with or without excision of the labia majora, the narrowing of the vaginal opening such as through the creation of a covering seal formed by cutting and repositioning the inner or outer labia, with or without removal of the clitoris, any harmful procedure to the genitalia, including pricking, piercing, incising, scraping or cauterizing or any other actions intended to alter the structure or function of the female genitalia for nonmedical reasons.

HB0127 – Prohibition of female genital mutilation

HBO 127 specifies that “sex reassignment surgery” is not prohibited “if the person on whom it is performed is over eighteen (18) years of age and requests and consents to the procedure.” Although both Democrats and Republicans acknowledged that it is already “rare” for a doctor to allow a person under 18 to undergo gender-affirming surgeries, transgender activists are crying foul.

Representative Sara Burlingame (D-Cheyenne) protested the language of the sex-reassignment clause as “bog[ging] this bill down with something that’s going to stop it in its tracks,” while Tara Muir of WCADVSA complained, “Wyoming cannot be the first state with such draconian limits on transgender people.”

Studies have found such immediate complications of FGM as severe pain, bleeding, shock, infection, septicemia, urine retention, and injury to adjacent tissues. FGM can also lead to a host of delayed and late complications, including: psychological trauma; fistula; chronic pain; formation of keloids that may lead to severe pain during intercourse and problems delivery a child; growth of cysts larger than an orange; menstrual problems; incontinence; difficulty urinating; urinary tract infections; infertility; labial fusion (sealing up of the vagina); high risk of infections during pregnancy; narrowing or lost flexibility of the vagina leading to difficulty delivering an infant vaginally; preterm labor and 15-55% increased risk of stillbirth or early neonatal death due to increased levels of the hormones estrogens and progestogens in the blood; dangerously heavy bleeding after childbirth; and higher risk of HIV.

Men who identify as transgender have routinely expressed hostility toward anti-FGM activists who have themselves been victimized by the practice. Tweeters said Ms Bergstrom’s use of the phrase “female genital mutilation” is transgender-exclusionary language, as not all people with vaginas are women, and not all women have vaginas. Jana Cornel, a black woman, was similarly told by Canadian politician Morgane Oger that the practice of FGM does not target females, as “nobody knows your sex except how you express it as gender.”

Morgane Oger reprimanding and transplaining to a black woman who has suffered FGM that it was all because of her "gender"… Outrageous!

If you support these gross, racist, sexist men you are neither feminist nor progressive.#SexNotGender #PeakTrans #Mansplaining @RadfemJana pic.twitter.com/etAI9eJLI6 — Radical Snippets (@RadSnips) May 28, 2019

Women in Africa and the Middle East are disproportionately the victims of sex based oppression, for example FGM. Suggesting sex is a social construct ignores the real sex based oppression in the world. — Mark Schirmer (@MarkSchirmer4) December 24, 2019

Read more on this story Transgender worries threaten female genital mutilation ban

WyoFile

Concerns in the Wyoming Senate over gender reassignment surgeries threaten an effort to criminalize female genital mutilation that soared through the House. New study shows female genital mutilation exposes women and babies to significant risk at childbirth

World Health Organization

2 JUNE 2006 | GENEVA – A new study published by the World Health Organization (WHO) has shown that women who have had Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) are significantly more likely to experience difficulties during childbirth and that their babies are more likely to die as a result of the practice. Female genital mutilation and pregnancy: associated risks.

US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health

Female genital mutilation (FGM) is a traditional practice that has no medical benefit and severe health consequences for girls and women. This article discusses the risks to patients who are pregnant and have had FGM. Female genital mutilation (FGM) management during pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum period

International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics

Female genital mutilation (FGM) is a traditional practice with serious health consequences to women that is still practiced in 28 countries with approximately 2 million girls exposed to the practice annually.