Is trans surgery just state-sanctioned mutilation?
by Brendan O’Neill, spiked:
Severe body modification is never good, whether it’s done for Islamic reasons or trans reasons.
There is a question about body modification among the young that nobody wants to ask, let alone try to answer. But it’s time we put it out there. Why is it ‘mutilation’ when a young woman’s vagina is cut for religious reasons, but ‘affirmation’ when it is done for trans reasons? Why do we balk in horror at the ritualistic removal of parts of the outer vagina in young women in certain countries in Africa, but we cheer ‘bottom surgery’ as a form of ‘trans healthcare’ in the West? We need a reckoning with this moral disparity in how we view the ideological alteration of women’s bodies. We live in a world in which you can be arrested for subjecting your daughter to body modification for Islamic reasons but you will become a star on TikTok for allowing your daughter to have her breasts removed for gender-affirmation reasons. And we need to talk about that.
The issue of ‘mutilation’ – a word nobody wants to use, I know – was recently forced into the light by Katherine Deves. She was a candidate for the Liberal Party in the federal elections in Australia last month. She didn’t win her seat. In the run-up to the election she caused a storm by using the m-word in relation to trans surgery. People uncovered old social-media posts from Ms Deves in which she said trans kids are ‘surgically mutilated and sterilised’. She posted photos of young girls who have undergone double mastectomies in the belief that they are boys, describing it as a ‘complete failure of safeguarding’ that healthy young women are having their breasts removed. Strikingly, Ms Deves did not back down. She admitted her language had ‘on occasion been unacceptable’, but she said she will continue raising questions about the fad for severe body modification in the name of transgenderism. As for her use of the m-word, which so rattled Australia’s chattering class, Deves said ‘it’s very emotive, it’s very confronting and it’s very ugly’, but it’s ‘the correct medico-legal term’ for some things that happen under the trans banner.
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