Jay’s Story

How I Remembered My Neonatal Circumcision and Became Disillusioned with Intactivism

At the age of 1, I was injured and taken to the emergency room. The pain of that trauma was seared into my mind and I clearly remember the incident to this day. The doctor, the nurse. The smells, the decor. Even the route we took in the car on the way over.

Afterward, I began having recurring nightmares. For the longest time, I thought they were nightmares of that traumatic day, but the more often I had the nightmare, the more I noticed discrepancies. The doctor and nurse were not the same ones from the emergency room, nor was I in the same hospital. There was something disturbingly familiar about this nightmare, yet I couldn’t quite place it, and it unnerved me to the core. I was certain this was no ordinary nightmare, and the events were somehow real.

As the years passed and the recurring nightmares persisted, I became unsettled with how vividly consistent they were. The nightmares would overtake whatever dream I was having, and I’d find myself running or struggling to get away from the doctor and nurse who were haunting me. But no matter how hard I struggled or how far I ran, one way or another, I’d find myself in that same exam room, pinned down on my back and unable to move as the doctor and nurse discussed whatever evil they were preparing to do to me. I lay immobilized by my restraints and paralyzed by fear, mesmerized by my tormentors. Then the nurse would approach, and the pain would commence – a sickening feeling of death in the pit of my gut that was so intense, it stayed with me hours after I awoke screaming bloody murder. A sickening feeling I can still experience to this day if I think about it too much.

The recurring nightmares persisted for years, and my family grew increasingly annoyed with my inability to outgrow them. In the 1st grade, I drew a picture titled “A bad moment in our famaly,” intentionally misspelled here for accuracy. The drawing featured me in bed with a sad face as my mother, father and 3 siblings angrily hovered nearby. Any compassion they felt for my struggle had long since evaporated by this point in my young life. From time to time, I’d enjoy respites from that recurring nightmare, but it persisted well into my 20s before it finally subsided and was eventually forgotten. Or more accurately, the memory was repressed for my own sanity.

I was 20 when I had my first sexual encounter, and the moment didn’t go well. I struggled to perform and my boyfriend at the time suggested it was because I’d been circumcised. He was intact and claimed to have run into this problem before with “cut” guys. My mind unexpectedly reeled at the context and use of that word – I had been “cut.” It was the first time I came to understand what had been done to me – I had literally been cut in the most intimate of ways.

Naturally, I’d heard the word circumcision before and had seen the occasional intact penis, but I never understood the difference between intact and circumcised. I just thought some people had strange looking penises and I was too shy and embarrassed to ask. As far as I was concerned, I had a natural penis, and to suddenly learn otherwise blindsided me like a knockout punch by a prize fighter.

My boyfriend went on to explain the “banging around” my circumcised penis was subjected to inside my pants, and the more he spoke, the more that familiar sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach grew. That gnawing feeling of death from my recurring nightmares grabbed hold of me, yet I still didn’t make the connection that my nightmares were repressed memories of my circumcision. My mind was too busy reeling from what my boyfriend was saying, and from the embarrassment and shame I felt from being so clueless as to the state of my own body. In the blink of an eye, my first sexual encounter, an intimate moment most find pleasurable, had knocked the trajectory of my life in a completely different direction. From that moment on, I was obsessed with restoring my foreskin.

I felt violated, raped by doctors, religion and my abusive family. I felt duped, and like my body wasn’t my own. I was repulsed by the sight of my own penis and was deeply distraught. How could this have happened to me? I was poised to move out of my parent’s home and finally free myself from the prison of their purgatory, yet that gash between my legs, seared across my genitals, would last a lifetime. I couldn’t outrun it, I couldn’t outlive it, nor could I escape it. It seemed the only immediate solution to ease my suffering was to take my own life.

I struggled daily with intense thoughts of suicide for the next few years. I created a homemade foreskin restoration device while concurrently searching for a urologist to help me. I had no one to talk to and was fumbling through on my own.

I was a 20-year-old with erectile dysfunction seeking help from urologists who flatly refused to take me seriously. Little did I understand, walking into their office claiming circumcision was harmful, was akin to wandering into a lion’s den and trying to convince bloodthirsty meat eaters to suddenly become vegan. Urologist after urologist berated me, many of them spitting venom and bible verses about morality as they literally chased me out of their office in front of a reception room of patients. I was considered obscene and immoral for merely suggesting circumcision was harmful. I’ve since heard many doctors claim they’ve never heard a man complain about being circumcised. It’s easy to make that claim when you have no intention of listening in the first place, and eject the few who do complain from your office with self-righteous indignation.

I later came to understand the reason these urologists went off the deep end so quickly, is I’d caught them red handed in a lie. I had exposed their willful participation in malpractice by refusing to offer informed consent, and blatantly forcing their ideas about morality and religion onto others, whether they liked it or not. But beyond that, I had caused them to question the state of their own manhood, and no man takes it well when you suggest their penis is a mangled deformity that doesn’t function as it should.

Doctors are trained to work in high stress situations. They heal bullet wounds in an emergency room. They deliver bad news to cancer patients. But dare question the validity of circumcision, and they go from aloof professional, to foaming at the mouth crazy in the blink of an eye. I saw roughly a dozen urologists seeking treatment for erectile dysfunction, and not one of them offered me treatment of any kind. But all of them were sure to lecture me on the morality of circumcision and tried to berate me into accepting this was done to me for my own good.

Eventually, I found a cosmetic surgeon sympathetic to my plight and I endured two painful experimental surgeries to restore my foreskin. But the medical abuse didn’t magically stop there. In the hospital, I was literally abandoned by an entire ward of nurses who refused to care for me because of what I had done. If I were a leper, they would’ve cared for me. But because I had my foreskin restored, I was seen as scum unworthy of compassion or professionalism. I was confined to my bed with a catheter, and aside from bringing me meals, I was left to fend for myself in the middle of a hospital.

It’s important to note that the urologists who berated me quoted the bible, not the Talmud. And the hospital nurses who refused to care for me wore crucifixes, not the star of David. Make no mistake, Christian doctors are the ones who circumcised this nation. Jews are an easy scapegoat, and they certainly take no offense with circumcision becoming mainstream in America. But it was Christian doctors who grabbed the baton and ran with it – or rather – grabbed a scalpel and circumcised every man or boy they could get their hands on, literally for any reason whatsoever.

Tummy ache? Let me circumcise you. Mental illness? Let me circumcise you. Brain tumor? Let me circumcise you. They even claimed circumcision would cure black men of their predisposition to be rapists, and would serve as a humane alternative to forced castration.

It’s been said that doctors are eager to circumcise because they believe the more men they clip, the higher they ascend to god. So, are they proponents of circumcision for their patient’s benefit or their own? Any doctor “eager” to perform appendectomies on newborns for literally any reason whatsoever would probably have their license revoked, but when it comes to circumcision, sanity goes out the window.

Naturally, I didn’t know any of this growing up. Those revelations would come much later in life. But being gay and in my young 20s when I had foreskin restoration surgery, I had experienced enough bigotry and homophobia to know that religious people will say and do most anything to get their way. I didn’t need to do any research into the history of circumcision to know it belonged exclusively to the domain of religion. I saw evidence of that with my own eyes. I washed spit off my face flung by rabid doctors spewing bible verses. I saw the holy condemnation in the eyes of the nurses who refused to care for me. I saw the crucifix on my hospital room wall and the bible in my bedside table. I knew the alleged morality that guided these supposed medical professionals. The evidence of who and what was oppressing me was blatantly obvious.

Not long after surgery, I met my husband and moved to Los Angeles. It was a clear demarcation in my life that allowed me to start over as an “intact” man. Never again would I speak about circumcision. Never again would I allude to how much it bothered me. And never once did I mention to my husband that I’d had foreskin restoration surgery.

My husband was raised Jewish but doesn’t identify as a Jew. My husband was born gay and his bigoted parents never accepted him as such, so he describes himself as being raised Jewish, but not as being Jewish. My parents raised me Catholic, but I’m not Catholic – I’m a cult survivor who had Catholicism forced upon me with spit and violence until I was old enough to escape my oppressors and live my own life.

It’s worth noting that while my husband was raised Jewish, he was never circumcised. He was born with a condition known as aposthia which is a rare birth defect where someone is born with no foreskin. Since my husband had nothing to cut, he was never circumcised during his bris. Later in life, my husband’s short foreskin began to reveal itself, and he’s now one of the few men to have been raised Jewish, and to have had a bris, yet still has an intact foreskin.

My husband and I never once talked about circumcision. We had been together over 25 years when one of my in-laws rudely asked him if I was circumcised, and before I could protest, my husband responded that I was not. My jaw about hit the floor. I had always assumed my husband knew my surgically restored foreskin was not a standard model straight from the factory, but apparently, he believed I was naturally intact.

The conversation with my in-law spiraled into an argument about circumcision, and she behaved as if all men owed her their foreskins. She even went on to say that if my husband and I ever had a son, she’d force him to be circumcised and there was nothing we could do about it. I can only imagine how she intended to accomplish this. Needless to say, we no longer speak to this particular in-law, but the argument stirred up a lot of old emotions for me.

Around this same time, I was scheduled to have surgery on my nose to repair the damage my father had done during one of his drunken rages. Recovering from surgery, I felt a lot of pain in my upper lip and didn’t understand how that correlated with repairing my nose. I wanted to investigate but couldn’t lift my upper lip high enough to see what was going on. The pain caused me to have nightmares that I didn’t quite understand, but they included disturbing imagery of scalpels.

The next time I saw my doctor, I asked him about it and he said he took it upon himself to cut the webbing under my upper lip because it would improve my smile. I was upset he didn’t ask me for permission, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. What’s done is done. But his description of how he cut that webbing under my upper lip kept repeating on a loop in my mind. I kept imagining a scalpel slicing through my flesh and my sleep became even more disturbed for weeks afterward.

I didn’t understand why this had rattled me so deeply. The surgery on my nose didn’t bother me in the least, but something about slicing that webbing under my upper lip unnerved me to the core. Then, out of the blue, I remembered there was another web of flesh on my body that had been sliced – my frenulum when I was circumcised. And with that, thoughts of my circumcision began haunting me again.

It was like my 20s all over again and I couldn’t stop obsessing about my circumcision. I couldn’t believe something that I thought I’d gotten over had come back so swiftly and with such force. I didn’t understand why this was happening to me, but I knew for certain that I had to resume restoring my foreskin. While the results of my surgery some 25 years prior were good enough to fool my husband and most doctors, I was still dissatisfied with the results. Having been overtaken by circumcision despair before, I knew that I wouldn’t stop obsessing about my circumcision unless I did something about it.

So, there I was, decades after my foreskin restoration surgery, and I once again found myself wearing a restoration device to complete my transformation. During this time, the person I bought my restoration device from told me about a new documentary he thought I’d be interested in titled, American Circumcision. I was indeed interested but wasn’t eager to watch it for fear of what feelings it might conjure. It was bad enough that I felt compelled to restore my foreskin again, but I didn’t want to revisit any of the suicidal feelings I’d experienced in my 20s with my initial circumcision awakening.

Time went by, but the documentary remained on my mind. I knew I’d watch it sooner or later, but I was in no hurry. Then one day I decided it was finally time, and I sat down to watch it in secret without my husband. I had butterflies in my stomach as I nervously watched. I think I instinctively knew it was going to have a profound effect on me and I was ready for the worst. And I didn’t have to wait long.

There came a moment in the documentary when they were preparing a baby to be circumcised, and something in my mind snapped. It was like a dam had burst and my mind was flooded with visual imagery and emotion. In the blink of an eye, memories of my childhood recurring nightmare came rushing back to me. My body trembled, I began to cry, and the room felt like it was spinning. And worst of all, those 2 faces that haunted my recurring nightmares came back into focus. I could see them as clearly as if they’d never been forgotten. Worse still, I experienced that familiar sickening feeling of death in the pit of my gut, and it nauseated me to the core.

I hadn’t thought about those recurring nightmares in decades, and I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten about them for so long. I understood what repressed memories are in an intellectual sense, but I had never experienced the truth of what it’s really like until that moment. My recollection was so swift and so forceful that I felt like I was hit by a truck. Then the truck backed up and ran over me for good measure.

As these repressed memories took over my psyche, I began writing just to make sense of my thoughts, but I couldn’t write fast enough. It was as if the words wanted to force their way out of my head all at once. It was maddening. I kept writing and writing for days, then weeks, then months before I finally realized I probably had enough material to write a book if I could make sense of it all. That’s when the title of the book came to me, Circumcision Scar, because it was abundantly clear that my circumcision didn’t just hack my penis, but gashed my psyche.

The truth I’d uncovered shook me to my bones – I remember my neonatal circumcision. That’s what those recurring nightmares had been about all along. That’s what’s been haunting my dreams my entire life. And it took until I was in my 50s to finally understand the message my subconscious had been sending me. If circumcision is so harmless, why did it haunt me so deeply and for so long? It clearly caused me a great deal of harm.

I’m a writer, so my husband is accustomed to seeing me become obsessed with my work. But this was different, and it was as obvious to him as it was to me. I was diagnosed with PTSD while writing my book. I was sleeping roughly an hour a night and lamented to my husband that I thought writing the book would kill me. But the compulsion to keep writing was insurmountable. Much as I wanted to stop, I had to get those words out of my head. My husband had no idea what I was writing or why it had consumed me so deeply, but he encouraged me to stick with it and see it through.

I never thought I’d let my husband read my book, but once all was done, I decided to give it to him, and he was shocked to say the least. He couldn’t believe I’d hid something so intimate from him in plain sight for so long. He said he was proud of me for what I’d accomplished, and for being brave enough to speak my truth so unapologetically. He was also shocked to hear he had aposthia and went his entire life not knowing the true state of his own body.

How Christian Doctors Circumcised America and Forced Their Morality Onto a Nation

While researching my book, I learned a man named Dr. Remondino is credited with almost singlehandedly making circumcision mainstream in America, and he wrote a bestselling book near the end of the 19th century titled, The History of Circumcision, from the Earliest Times to the Present – Moral and Physical Reasons for Its Performance.

Remondino was an influential member of numerous medical associations, was featured in a weekly radio program, had a recurring column in a national newspaper, and gave numerous public demonstrations on firearms and his days as a Civil War medic. Dr. Remondino was famous, beloved and respected, and he made it his life’s mission to convince America on the benefits of circumcision at every opportunity. Dr. Remondino was so prolific at circumcision, that history’s oldest surgery was coined “Remondino’s Operation.”

Dr. Remondino believed circumcision rightly belonged to Christianity and took issue with St. Paul for not enforcing it more strictly. He saw it as his life’s work to reunite circumcision with Christianity, and largely succeeded at doing just that. He believed circumcision should be forced upon every man by civil ordinance if necessary, and even touted the benefits of female circumcision. He saw America as the starting point for mainstream circumcision and wanted to use it as a springboard to take universal circumcision global.

In his bestselling book, Remondino describes the naval practice of using prostitutes to coax servicemen into being inoculated for syphilis, and suggests the same method could be used with circumcision. And at the end of World War II, that’s exactly what happened. An entire generation of veterans were circumcised and went back home to do the same thing to their sons, “so he looks like me.”  And with that, the image of a clean-cut American was born; staunchly patriotic, with a cigarette dangling from his lips, a woman on his arm, a gun in his holster, and Dr. Remondino’s version of a “Hebraic circumcision” in his pants.

Christians today claim to circumcise their children for health reasons, but I firmly believe they do it for religious reasons but prefer to stay in the closet about it. Dr. Remondino used the American Standard Version of the bible to sell circumcision to America. The New Testament states circumcision isn’t required, however, try telling a Christian to throw the Old Testament in the trash or burn it in the fireplace, and watch how they react. They can’t, because they value both. One didn’t make the other obsolete.

Dr. Remondino claimed ownership of circumcision in the name of all Christians when he proudly agreed to let it be coined “Remondino’s Operation,” and Christians since have been happily circumcising their son’s in god’s name, even if they like to pretend it’s about a bunch of phony health benefits. Perhaps that’s why “the circumcision of Jesus” appears in Google search before you even finish typing the sentence. Circumcision has been about religion for millennia. The alleged “health benefits” have always been secondary to fulfilling cult doctrine – and doctors and doctrine have always gone hand in hand – hence why Dr. Remondino believed doctors should behave as both clergy and healer.  

To this day, Christian doctors like Remondino use the promise of alleged health benefits as an excuse to force their morality onto a nation – as Remondino said – by civil ordinance if necessary. But passing laws takes time, and Remondino and his colleagues didn’t want to be hampered by silly things like freedom of choice. So they circumvented the law with overzealous health benefits that can easily be debunked by anyone willing to do a little research. In doing so, Christian doctors have created a massive conflict of interest in a country that claims to have religious freedom. They’ve gone too far with the lie to willingly admit the truth now because of the legal ramifications it could trigger. The self-righteous rarely take responsibility for anything. In their mind, divine law supersedes corporeal law, and so long as they’re doing “god’s work” they never believe they’ve done anything wrong.

Doctors freely admit that circumcision is the oldest “surgery” in history, and in my view, surgically altering a child’s body at birth is nothing short of a heinous crime. I didn’t have recurring nightmares my entire life for nothing. I equate circumcision as being nothing less than surgical pedophilia – surgical rape – the rape of innocence, and the rape of religious liberty. A newborn boy’s penis is literally “manipulated” to induce an erection in order to facilitate circumcision – and giving a baby an erection in any other context would be a federal crime.

I’ve known my husband’s doctor for over 20 years, so he speaks to us in a very comfortable, down to earth sort of way. When my husband requires a procedure, he reminds us of his lawful duty to warn us of every million-to-one-shot side effect and possible risk, no matter how remote. Then he chuckles and says, “but you’re probably at greater risk of dying in a car accident on the way over to the hospital.” Yet, when it comes to circumcision, doctors willfully ignore their responsibility to offer informed consent. Instead, they make people feel like bad parents if they don’t circumcise their child. They never warn parents that circumcision can permanently change their son’s temperament. Or that it could result in amputation, disfigurement, or death. They never mention their newborn son will be given an erection, or that his amputated foreskin could be sold to a cosmetic company for $100,000. Instead, doctors regurgitate the false claim that circumcision can prevent HIV, despite the fact that America has one of the world’s highest HIV rates in spite of circumcision.

Currently, precedent sides with parents when defining religious freedom, however, I believe that mindset needs to evolve to side with children. It’s one thing to raise your child as you choose and instill them with your faith, but surgically modifying your child’s body to conform to your faith is dubious at best. Worse still, it’s the literal definition of a cult – to forcibly instill beliefs onto another against their will.  Just because babies can’t say “no” to circumcision, that doesn’t mean they are willing participants. And to force circumcision onto a child for religious reasons assumes they will grow up to accept your faith unequivocally, and that assumption isn’t necessarily the case.

There are no genetic markers for religion. No child is born Jewish, Muslim or Christian. However, there are indeed genetic markers for being LGBTQ, and all three major religions routinely persecute my community simply for being who they were born to be. So when a parent says they circumcised their child for his future wife’s benefit, I take exceptional offense to that. I don’t much care what women prefer in bed and I don’t want my penis to be amputated just to suit their preference. Love your sons as they were born to be, not for who you force them to be – but that simple approach is something religious people simply can’t do, and they always force their will like cultists.  

Religious freedom protects the individual, and that includes the right of a child to grow up and choose not to believe in religion. It’s a constitutionally protected right that’s violated on a daily basis by virtually everyone, so the fact that religious freedoms are being clipped from baby boy’s penises in pediatric wards throughout this nation isn’t anything anyone is worried about. Pediatricians are quite comfortable regurgitating every excuse in the book to justify their actions, then label those excuses “health benefits” so they can feel good about what they’ve done. How else could someone who gives baby boys erections for a living sleep peacefully at night?

Having said that, I firmly believe Jews and Muslims must be given religious exemptions when it comes to circumcision. The First Amendment is clear in these matters, and no one has the right to prevent someone from practicing their religion. Any and all legal attempts to force Jews and Muslims from practicing religious circumcision will fail. Offering them exemptions will still protect 95% of boys, and perhaps Jews can be convinced of the benefits of the Brit Shalom later.

By the same token, I don’t believe Christians deserve a religious exemption for circumcision, because they’ve been dishonest about their motives all along. The New Testament’s views on circumcision are clear, and you can’t pretend you’re clipping your sons for imaginary health benefits one day, then claim religious exemption the next – but personal experience has made it abundantly clear that evangelicals will say and do most anything to get their way.

If the prospects of anti-circumcision laws were to become a reality, I fully expect Christians would suddenly attempt to claim religious exemptions to continue doing it. Suddenly, they’d stop talking about all the “health benefits” and claim they’ve been doing it for religious reasons all along, same as Jews and Muslims. I’d bet my life on it. But given the current state of activism against circumcision, I suspect any legal protections against protecting boy’s genitalia to be several generations away.

Intactivist Bigots and QAnon Extremism in Intactivism

I first became acquainted with the intactivist movement when I finished my book and began to promote it. I had virtually no exposure to it prior and had high hopes – hopes that were swiftly quelled.

There are a lot of people in the intactivist movement doing good work and making a positive impact, but unfortunately, there seems to be just as many people who are bigoted, homophobic, and anti-Semitic and are dragging the entire movement into the trenches of extremism. I’ve spoken privately with a few intactivists who’ve said bigotry flows freely within the movement, but no one is willing to call people out on it – and it isn’t hard to see why. The intactivist community is rather small and one could easily find themselves ostracized for speaking out against the bigotry within its ranks.

Unfortunately, from what I’ve witnessed firsthand, the problems within intactivism aren’t the exclusive domain of a fringe element, rather, it’s a problem that extends from the top down – from those in the highest levels of influence and public view, to anonymous social media accounts rife with hate. It speaks volumes when a prominent nonprofit writes a 14 page document explaining why political correctness is tedious and time consuming and anti-Semitism is overstated, when all they had to do is write 14 words that said: Bigotry doesn’t represent the ideals of intactivism nor the human rights issues we represent.

When leadership makes excuses for bad behavior, it validates it for the entire movement. One only need look at former President Trump, his administration, and his millions of supporters for evidence of how divisive this approach can be. The man could kill someone on live TV and evangelicals would laud his actions. Trump tear gassed a crowd of legal protestors so he could stand in front of a church posing with a bible – the literal definition of Christian imperialism. That’s the problem with religious fanaticism – it’s the exact mindset Dr. Remondino used to convince America of the value of “Holy Circumcision” – the exact mindset that helped his colleagues to circumcise this nation – and using that mindset as a weapon and calling it intactivism won’t get us out of this mess.

When Trump incited a mob to storm the Capitol, an intactivist was photographed holding signs alongside white supremists and QAnon terrorists – and intactivists on social media were thrilled one of their own had posed for the photo op. I spoke up and said associating intactivism with white supremacists probably isn’t great publicity, and many intactivists didn’t get my point. Moments like this speak volumes as to the juvenile mindset many intactivists possess, and how clueless they are when it comes to nurturing a successful human rights movement.  

The FBI has flagged QAnon as domestic terrorists, yet I’ve seen many intactivists openly parrot QAnon ideals, including respected intactivists that are publicly known. Why do so few intactivists lack the common sense to know why that’s a problem? Why do so many lack the backbone to speak up against it? Is it because the majority of intactivists share these extremist views?

Intactivism is in its infancy, and it shows. The movement has a lot of growing up to do if they ever expect to take this issue mainstream. I’ve tried to speak about this openly, but it hasn’t gone well, reaffirming the warnings I received privately from intactivists who were afraid to speak up against their friends and colleagues. An intactivist on social media told me that ridding intactivism of bigotry and extremism would ruin the entire movement. Really? Well, any movement that would be “ruined” by becoming more tolerant and accepting of others isn’t something I need to be part of.

When I first started promoting my book on social media, I was invited by an intactivist to participate in a private forum he described as a “think tank” for intactivism. The forum had several discussion threads, and I was perusing one titled “grief” or something to that effect. An anonymous member posted that he wanted to kill himself because he was so distraught over his circumcision, and I was trying to share my own struggles over suicide with him. Then, out of the blue, two intactivists chose to attack me about the LGBTQ community, specifically the transgendered, and neither showed the slightest concern for the suicidal intactivist I was trying to speak with.

This forum had a code of conduct clearly posted which discouraged attacking people based on sexual orientation, but to my knowledge, the forum’s moderators never reprimanded the two guys who confronted me. Nor were they reprimanded for making erroneous posts in a forum topic about grief. And that’s exactly the kind of frat boy mentality that doesn’t belong in a human rights movement.  

There are a lot of intactivists I genuinely admire, and unfortunately, there are just as many who give me the creeps. As a gay man who’s spent the better part of his life being persecuted, I know what bigotry looks like. Moreover, I know what bigotry feels like, and I can’t be part of a movement that tolerates, and even encourages, bigotry within its ranks.

We’re all free to believe what we like, but believing something privately is different than publicly championing extremist views and linking them to intactivism. The gay rights movement is all about diversity, but with intactivists, diversity means standing shoulder to shoulder with some of the very people trying to strip my rights away as a gay man. Absent any moral leadership from those in positions of influence, I simply can’t feel good about that.

When I attempted to advertise my book, it was labeled as hate speech by 3 separate companies, and that assumption was based on intactivist’s reputation alone. Perhaps they saw that article claiming intactivism has been overtaken by the Alt Right movement. One of the companies was Amazon, but to their credit, they made some concessions.

How have intactivist’s earned this reputation? If intactivist’s are essentially “tree huggers,” as someone suggested to me, then why are they repeatedly associated with far right extremist groups? Why are “tree huggers” attending QAnon riots? Some of the perception about intactivists may indeed be misplaced, but some of it has certainly been earned. You can’t echo extremist ideals then claim foul play when that reputation comes back to bite you.

Aside from protecting children, there should be an expansion of existing laws to include protecting men with foreskins, be they restored or naturally intact. I recently had a urologist tell me if I needed a prostatectomy, he would have no problem circumcising me while I was sedated. The scary thing about that, is the doctor would be well within his legal rights to do so, because I would’ve signed a release giving him permission to do anything he deemed medically necessary for my health and well-being, and I’d be hard pressed to find a judge who didn’t agree that circumcision is indeed a health benefit. I’d also be hard pressed to find a journalist who didn’t write a jaded “weird and wacky” type story about the guy who restored his foreskin, only to have it clipped off again – you know, one of those knee slapping, feel good kind of stories that late night hosts would deliver monologues about.

Ultimately, my circumcision story will end how it began – in solitude – and I’m okay with that. This was, and always will be, my solitary journey to take. My husband and I speak more freely about circumcision now that he knows the truth, but in reality, it’s just not something that enters our day-to-day conversations.

My first memory is of being abused by religion and doctors acting in the name of morality. My final thoughts will be of escaping this earth on my own terms rather than continuing to live by someone else’s – and I’ll leave this earth the way I came into it – with a foreskin, no matter what that friggin cult says.

Religious people will never stop forcing their faith, and I’ll never be a willing recipient of their misplaced piety. For me, circumcision has been the literal apex of oppression, and I’ve spent my life climbing back to that zenith and reclaiming my freedom.

I wish you all the best in your own struggles against circumcision.

Jay J. Jackson
Author of Circumcision Scar