I quote the article's title verbatim because, frankly, I'm at a loss of words for this one.
Female Genital Mutilation at Cornell
Please tell me somebody around DKos can help stop this.
I don't know what to make of this or who to tell, so I came here. This is horrific! Surely there are ethics boards who can put an end to these procedures?
UPDATE: Okay, apparently diaries have a minimum length requirement. Whatever. Here is basically what's happening:
A pediatric urologist at Cornell—Dix Poppas—has been operating on little girls with what he judges to be oversized clitorises, cutting away important clitoral tissues, and then stitching the glans to what remains of the shaft. Poppas claims that, unlike past clitoral-reduction procedures, his procedure is "nerve sparing."
First big problem: "nerve-sparing" surgeries don't always work. And the chunks of these girls' clitorises that the doctor is cutting away—large pieces of their clitoral shafts—may be just as important as the clitoral glans.
But we are not writing today to again bring attention to the surgeries themselves. Rather, we are writing to express our shock and concern over the follow-up examination techniques described in the 2007 article by Yang, Felsen, and Poppas. Indeed, when a colleague first alerted us to these follow-up exams—which involve Poppas stimulating the girls’ clitorises with vibrators while the girls, aged six and older, are conscious—we were so stunned that we did not believe it until we looked up his publications ourselves.
In the course of our inquiries, made in preparation for this publication, nearly all clinicians to whom we described Poppas’s “clitoral sensory testing and vibratory sensory testing” practices thought them so outrageous that they told us we must have the facts wrong. When we showed them the 2007 article, their disbelief ceased, but they then seemed to become as agitated as we were. At an international conference two weeks ago, when Dreger told Ken Zucker, a psychologist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and member of the clinical establishment, about this, Zucker said that we could quote him as saying this: “Applying a vibrator to a six-year-old girl’s surgically feminized clitoris is developmentally inappropriate.” We couldn’t find a clinician who disagreed with Zucker.
And these are the people actually looking into this. I have no idea what can be done to help -- that's why I am asking all of you. The other people in this field don't feel that Doctor Dix Poppa (that's really his name?) is doing anything even vaguely appropriate, from the sound of it.
First is the appalling initial surgery and its extremely dubious claim of being "nerve sparing". What's worse is the follow up exam the doctor performs to verify that the nerves have been spared. Again in case you missed it, the follow up involves using a vibrator on a child and asking how it feels. When asked, other doctors didn't even believe anybody do such a thing. And then there's the part that really drives the knife in:
There's another disturbing reason this surgery is being performed: girls with large clitorises are more likely to identify as lesbians when they grow up. Needless to say (or maybe not-so-needless): carving up a girl's clitoris does nothing to change the underlying hormonal and genetic factors that contribute to lesbian orientation and identity. Big clits don't make lesbians—lesbians sometimes make big clits. These surgeries are partly motivated by out-and-out homophobia, by the belief that "fixing" a large clit somehow prevents lesbianism. (Larger penises correlate positively with gayness in males but no one is out there shortening boys' penises.)
The procedure is also apparently meant to prevent the appearance of "ambiguous" genitalia -- in short, it's designed to stop transgender situations from arising.
That's just a short summary. Go read the article, the blog post that the article is about, and the actual published reports of this guy's "work". There's also a Psychology Today follow-up.