Have You Been Cut?

Vulvas and vaginas have stories. Stories of our growth, impact, endurance, and unwavering resilience.

Since childhood, I’ve only regarded my genitalia as an instrument for peeing, menstruation, and birthing children. But a few weeks ago, a curious aunty sat across me over breakfast and struck up a conversation that spun my view of my genital anatomy.

“Whose child are you?” she started, just like every other aunty would when she goes to someone’s house and finds a strange child.

I don’t fault her for her curiosity. I was at a friend’s and everyone was family except me. Besides, I kind of stuck out like a sore thumb.

I was nervous, but having mastered the art of sounding confident even when I am all creamy inside, I explained whose child I was and how I found myself in the same house as her. I was happy to over-explain and tame all her questions at the root so that I could cruise through the breakfast in triumphant introversion. Unfortunately, my explanation piqued her curiosity and she paused her nibbling and directed all her attention towards me.

When she started her next question with, “No offense, but…” anxiety swept over me. I love grilling people, but being on the spot is a nightmare. Everyone in the room tuned into the conversation, and she went on to ask me if my community still practices tradition.

I was quite surprised because my community is among the few groups of people known to cherish its traditions. This wasn’t enough reason for me to say yes, though. As times have changed, other traditions have yielded to the inevitability of change. So, I clutched on a safer response and told her that it highly depends on what traditions she was referring to.

She leaned closer and asked me, “umekatwa?” in reference to female circumcision – a rite of passage that existed in many Kenyan communities and is no longer permitted because of its detrimental impacts on the health and well-being of women and outright violation of their fundamental rights and freedoms.

I was appalled and held back a scoff. As a Gen Z, I couldn’t believe that someone could ask me, a mere child, whether I had undergone a rite whose practice I’ve only heard of in my grandparents’ oral traditions and gender and equality discussions.

I took offense because that pointed out her ignorance of the traditions of a people she shares a border with and reflected her view on my community – as a people who hold on to destructive, archaic narratives.

Of course I couldn’t voice all this out because tribal animosities still reign in my country to date. Instead, I switched my phone on to look up the current state of female circumcision and mutilation.

I was shocked to find a UNICEF report highlighting that 68 million girls and women are at risk of undergoing the cut by 2030. When Kenya assented to the Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) Act that outlawed the practice in 2011, the vice nursed its battered head on a new platform called medicalisation, where health professionals are involved in the cut. Medicalised FGM rates stood at 15% in Kenya at the time the report was released in 2022 and it was projected to rise with time.

I couldn’t quite understand. Like, why are all these women and girls losing bits and pieces of their bodies? For people who have disregarded the valuable elements of our tradition like moral values, language, and the spirit of Ubuntu, I found using cultural advancement as a reason for the cut to be very hypocritical and destructive a narrative.

The audacity of some respondents to say that FGM is practised to curb harlotry shook me. What’s harlotry to begin with? As an uncut woman, I have never subscribed to whoredom or been driven to the brink of that bridge even when amok with ovulation rage. Sexual desire has and will always remain an instinct. Whether cut or uncut, women still feel the urge for sex. 

And so I wonder, do FGM perpetrators expect victims to lead happy sexual lives once they are of age? Because FGM tampers with almost the entire erogenous zone of the female reproductive system. How are they expected to partake in coitus if some of them have flesh removed from their vulvas and others sewn closed?

And even if not for sex, who gave them authority over the other person’s body? It’s inappropriate for almost half the world’s women population to be denied bodily autonomy as a 2023 United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) reports. Women’s bodies belong solely to themselves. Nobody has a right to touch or make decisions about a woman’s body except themselves.

Just like any other members of the human race, women’s bodies are made of flesh and bone. Women and their bodies are not objects for consumption, ornaments, or supporting casts in their lifetimes that need to be tweaked and polished to fit the roles available.

‘Society’ needs to relinquish the contemptuous grip and entitlement it has on women’s existence and let women enjoy their right to life, liberty, and security of person. ‘

I want to sit across from fellow women and only discuss the nuances of this complex arrangement called living. I don’t want to be scrutinised by older women from other communities on the suspicion that I might have altered genitalia.

And if we must talk about vulvas and vaginas, I want to recount tales of how unapologetically sensational these organs are and their noble role in ensuring the continuity of the human race through childbirth. I want to take pride in how glorious it feels to live in a body whose parts I can fully touch and account for.

Each individual woman’s body demands to be accepted on its own terms.
— Gloria Steinem