A UK Department for International Development campaign to eliminate FGM via Wikimedia

The NHS is setting up support centres across England for victims of female genital mutilation – eight walk-in centres where women aged over 18 "will be offered expert care." (‘New clinics to help victims of female genital mutilation’, Telegraph, September 14, 2019).

Understandably, these victims of the practice have told the BBC that they welcome these new facilities, which they see as “a way forward” that ‘would allow women to “speak out” about their ordeals. but it seems they will be acting well after the event, which usually takes place during childhood, rather than trying to prevent it.

And it is beyond ironic that the BBC, which has been busy making films telling schoolchildren that there might be more than 100 genders, cannot see that they are helping to further the practice of genital mutilation of perfectly health reproductive organs in one social context – "trans" - while condemning it in another. In one case a barbaric practice is part of an extreme version of Islam, while in the other it is an intrinsic, almost sacred, part of an unproven ideology promoted with a religious zeal that seeks to censor dissenters. 

Neither do they seem to question why a form of genital mutilation – admittedly, of males as well as females -- should be approved by the Government and paid for by the taxpayer, even when it renders psychologically confused and distressed individuals permanently sterile. Will we also in time see taxpayer-funded walk-in centres for the victims of the trans ideology, offering cold comfort years after the irreversible, life-changing event? 

Ann Farmer lives in the UK. She is the author of By Their Fruits: Eugenics, Population Control, and the Abortion Campaign (CUAP, 2008); The Language of Life: Christians Facing the Abortion Challenge (St Pauls, 1995), and Prophets & Priests: the Hidden Face of the Birth Control Movement (St Austin Press, 2002).