Author’s note:
The article was originally published in the March 2011 issue of The Whole Woman magazine (http://www.whole-woman.com). This declaration of my feminist intactivism is personal, and discusses adult themes.  

The Making of an Activist
A Personal Manifest@ of a Feminist Intactivist By Travis Wisdom

Developing a Feminist Consciousness
In kindergarten, children used to approach me inquiring about my gender: “Are you a boy or a girl, because you look like a boy but act like a girl, so what are you?” Their curiosity later progressed into vindictive inquiries about my aberrations from the gender and sexual norms: “Do you have a dick or a pussy?” “You’re a queer/dildo/fairy.” I learned early in my development that I was very different from the other boys and girls, and that those differences ought to be concealed if I were to survive.

When I was eight, a neighbor began molesting me for roughly five years. Later, I endured the US “justice” system for three years. I was required to undergo a medical examination. Three physicians conducted the exam, which was recorded and played live in the examination room. The footage was disseminated to other doctors and later viewed in the courtroom. The jury rendered a verdict of “not guilty” (different from “not innocent”) on all fifteen counts brought forth. My intellect, pastime interests, and perceived sexuality were all used against me, indicating that I fabricated the story. After called into question the possible necessity of psychological counseling for my sexuality, it was implied that I used “manipulative seduction” to achieve my desire.

Indeed, the relentless ridicule in school and the trivialization and the mockery from the courts caused great challenges during my childhood. This resulted in a period of depression. Later, I began to ascribe to self-mutilation; “cutting” as known among teenagers, and it became a way to cope with these psychological and emotional pains. I realized that I needed something in my life that would help me survive these oppressions, but also something that would attempt to make sense of these experiences, and treat them seriously. I needed someone, a group, or an abstract concept that would be useful to articulate what went wrong, why all of this had happened, and what could be done to survive and then grow from these struggles.

I developed an interest in feminism very early in my life. Feminism spoke to me because it offered a sense of security and belonging that allowed me to ask questions about my experiences with hopes to actively change or improve the conditions of my life. Feminism, as I define it, acknowledges the existence of sexism, and attempts to offer methods to eradicate it, in order to secure equality between men and women. Feminism is not misandrist and it does not strive for feminine domination. The soul of the movement is concerned about women’s lives and how to better women’s lives so that they may be one day treated equally with men, not valued in relation to their social roles, but holistically, as beings that matter. Feminism embraces the intersections of our identities and our diversity; and challenges each of us to deconstruct what we have constructed in our lives, and to articulate what we leave unarticulated. By learning how to deconstruct the meanings of gender and sexuality, I have been able to embrace my own unique blending of the binaries, as a sense of gender and sexual queer. I was able to connect to feminism with my struggles as a gay male and as a victim of both sexual assaults and Western jurisprudence.

Developing an Intactivist Consciousness
While enrolled in an introductory English course, my professor related our discussions to male circumcision anytime a student addressed female circumcision. She defined mutilation of the body and that the procedures should be known as fe/male genital mutilation. During our class presentations, she allowed a student to run a medical video circumcision procedure. I made it about half way into the fifteen-minute video before I collapsed and vomited in the restroom. It took several moments to regain myself as I hobbled back to class feeling nauseous. I never finished the video and my life has never been the same.

Like many Westerners, I was opposed to female circumcision strictly out of ethnocentrism. I deplored genital cutting in women and girls simply because the practices exist outside my constructed socio-cultural frameworks, and not because I understood the ramifications surrounding the procedures. Similarly, I accepted male circumcision, and it remained unquestioned, because it exists within these frameworks. My professor challenged each of her students to assess the practice of forced genital amputations, in both females and males.

The social movement that promotes the protection of minors from unnecessary genital surgeries is known as intactivism. The intactivist movement strives for increased knowledge and awareness of the intact human body, the purposes and functions of the body’s genitalia, and better consciousness of the damages of genital modifications.  

My intactivist consciousness began after watching this video in class. I entered into a state of emotional chaos, and it was during emotional states that I conducted research on male circumcision. Because this consciousness was sparked toward the end of my undergraduate studies, I was able to apply feminist methodological approaches to research. After concluding an opposition to genital cutting in minors, I reflected on my research and I made the decision to identify as an intactivist. What I didn’t realize at the time was, as a feminist, I already had some of the underpinnings of an intactivist ideology: the belief in body ownership, autonomy, sex awareness and education, and equal protection under the law. My feminism made space in which the newly accepted intactivism could dovetail and collaborate with my beliefs in equality between males and females, better sex education and awareness of how vital and important the foreskin is to optimum sexual health, my interests in examining jurisprudential theory to sex equality, and articulating questions of the body, beauty, and dominance.

Coming Out as Political Declaration of Resistance           
I have, most significantly, come out in my life and to others three times: as a gay man, as a feminist, and as an intactivist (in this order). These have been life-changing experiences and, in many ways, they are not conclusive. Coming out has been a fluid process, which started as personal acknowledgements of identity, that later progressed to public statements of who I am. I have lost family and friends, and gained some. I feared the rejection and judgment, but I refused to live in the margins.

            Ironically, I chose to come out because I refused to live in the margins. Instead, I am still living and participating within the borderlands, but coming out has been a political declaration of resisting social hegemonic ideologies of sex and gender, the body, and sexuality. Grounded in feminism, I participate in the struggles for social justice, attempting to make space that will improve people’s living conditions.

            Coming out as a feminist man has also been a unique declaration of resistance. In the early stages of my feminism, I was not conscious of what it meant to be feminist and male. Later, through my Women’s Studies education, I soon learned that being a feminist man meant being a comrade in struggle to end sexism, and to deplore injustice. It also meant recognizing many of the privileges that go unrecognized, divesting them, and embracing feminist politics.   

Sexual Emancipation
I remember my molester telling me that one day I would be able to “experience our love with my wife” and that “you’ll become as big as me and she’ll love you for that.” Our “extra special relationship” was one that I was supposed to share only with him until I matured fully, and then I was to “spread the gift” to others. He taught me sex education and I learned about all of the things that excited him: his girlfriend, his grown children, his dog, and me. As an eight year old child, I felt that our relationship was wrong, but I wasn’t exactly sure why or what I could have done to avoid it. All I knew was that I was partly or entirely to blame and that I did not –ever –wish to be sexual again. I quickly associated sex and intimacy specifically with deviant, manipulative seduction.    

My sexual emancipation arose from feminism. I saw sex as a dirty act. I didn’t want to relive my childhood assaults and my molestation, and I paralleled sexual pleasure and intimacy with power imbalances. I hated my body, and myself, and I detested the feeling of blind obligation to comply with my molester’s pleasures. Sex, in any form, was lewd, and masturbation was a selfish, pathetic act that only the rejected performs. I used to feel guilty for finding young men tantalizing. I have been able to break from many of these shackles through my Women’s Studies education. By deconstructing gender and hegemonic beauty, sex and sexuality, I have learned to embrace the ways in which I blur the lines of distinction between male and female, queering my gender and my beauty. I choose to incorporate the ‘at symbol‘ in this declaration of views because it encapsulates this queerness: the combination of socially constructed and new ways of articulating masculine and feminine, male and female, and sexuality, is what becomes the basis for my manifest@. My inner soul is dominated by the feminist/feminine self  (‘a’) and the outer self is more masculine (‘o’). The ‘@’ represents a blending of these identities.       

Feminism has helped me embrace a fluid sexuality. Although I am sexual strictly with men, I have been able to love my love for men, my love for brown boys, boys of color, and white boys, resisting familial prohibition. These shifts in ideology have created a sex positive belief that has allowed me to enjoy sex and intimacy, enjoy masturbation, and to be comfortable with exploring the range of my sexuality, kinks, tastes, and interests, without guilt, and free from anxiety.

An important part of my sexual emancipation is foreskin restoration. Restoring my foreskin has allowed me to reclaim my body, and to embrace it. I accept the past, but I actively choose to protect and heal my body’s violation. By restoring my foreskin, I emancipate my sexuality, chipping away at the damages caused by circumcision of my sexuality and of my body. By restoring my foreskin, I declare that my body is beautiful, and that it is now a violence-free, rape-free zone.

From Theory to Praxis: On Feminism, the Active Intactivist, and Valuing a Feminist Education
I speak very openly about my feminism and my sexuality. I also speak openly about genital amputations because I want people to challenge their unquestioned attitudes toward circumcision on boys, and their often ignorant condemnation of female circumcision. Many people make excuses as to why the discussion is irrelevant to them: when speaking to an older Jewish woman about circumcision, she told me “I don’t care about the medical side, it’s all religious, but at this point, none of it matters because I’m old, my kids are grown, and I don’t even fuck anymore, so why should I care?”

On another incident, after publishing an article articulating male circumcision from a feminist perspective (in an online feminist magazine), several of the intactivist readers seemed uncomfortable with the writing because I used “the ‘f’ word.” After the article appeared on other sites on which comments could be posted, most felt that “its all about humanism and human rights, not feminism.” “Why should feminism care about what we do to our boys? Feminism is about women over men.”

Women’s Studies emerged as a legitimate academic discipline after the demand that academia be more inclusive of women’s issues and women’s experiences. Women’s Studies is unique and important as a discipline because it is interdisciplinary in scope, asks questions about power, privilege, and oppression, and attempts to describe, explain, and analyze the conditions of women’s lives by placing women at the center of inquiry. The methodological approach of asking questions and analyzing situations about women through women’s perspectives has been particularly useful and rewarding. It has been through this approach that I have realized how vital feminist theory is to understanding social stratification and what attempts can be made to combat and resist oppression.

Women’s Studies has taught me feminist theory and, later, how to contextualize activism within this framework. I have learned that feminism is relevant to my life because of shared struggles. Being a woman is not a prerequisite in order to be a feminist, and feminism should be valuable in everyone’s lives because it teaches how to improve our living conditions through positive social change.

By speaking to people about their views on circumcision, I am able to hear their perspectives about a traditional practice that is so deeply engrained in Western identity, that much of the justifications are inconclusive. In doing so, slowly, I can help people realize these disconnects and work through them. The process encourages an articulation of normalcy, what it is, and how to deconstruct it. As with any traditional practice, there are often long, convoluted histories, and through the process of the practice becoming a dominant expression of cultural identity, people begin to describe the practice as “just the way it is.” By deconstructing this normalcy, we can begin to assess the traditional practice from a new perspective, and offer ways to improve our society with more accurate and complete knowledge in order to better the future.