A very Merry Christmas and a retrospective Happy Hanukkah to all! The 2020 International Conference on Men’s Issues had no fewer than four speakers on various aspects of genital autonomy. The conference was held online instead of the original plan to hold it in Australia.

The conference organizers posted more than 100 presentations between November 14 and November 19. For information on the conference, please visit http://icmi2020.icmi.info/.

See below for videos of the four genital autonomy talks. All four were released on November 16, 2020.

J. Steven Svoboda, “Genital Autonomy, Equal Protection, and the Law: Two Judicial Decisions 17 Years Apart”

Steven overviews our progress toward genuine gender equity in our treatment of genital cutting practices, as well as signs of optimism and potential barriers to our making further progress.

He also discusses in detail two very different court decisions relating to the laws against female genital cutting in the US and in the UK. He discovered that the same judge was involved in 1) a federal class action circumcision case in which Steven was a lawyer in New York and then, seventeen years later, in 2) the case ruling that the federal law against female genital cutting (FGC) had to be invalidated because it was a matter reserved to the states by the federal Constitution. Steven also mentions two recent Swiss cases which as far as he knows are unknown to the general public and which his organization recently had translated to English.

James Loewen, “Male Genital Mutilation (MGM): Reflections of an Intactivist (1993-)”

Brother K, “Infant Circumcision: The Cruelty In the Cradle”

Gary Costanza, “Mommy, What’s Circumcision?”