Bay Area Intactivists

On Friday, March 8, eleven-day-old Brayden Tyler Frazier died in Sacramento at UC Davis Children's Hospital after a grueling battle to stay alive. It is unclear why, despite having been in poor health, Brayden was subjected to circumcision in Lodi, California two days prior to his death. News of Brayden's failing health traveled quickly after his family members used Facebook to post pleas for prayers and updates about his struggle.

Human rights activists with signs and faux blood-stained clothes flanked the entrance of the Concordia-Argonaut Club on the eve of the San Francisco Medical Society's 2013 annual dinner to protest the physicians' opposition to the San Francisco Male Genital Mutilation Bill. The ballot initiative, which garnered the support of over 12,000 San Francisco voters, sought to restrict non-therapeutic circumcision to consenting adults.

The American Civil Liberties Union has once again come under fire for its defense of forced circumcision and ritual genital cutting of children. In 2011, the ACLU of Northern California argued that the San Francisco Male Genital Mutilation Bill ballot initiative violated a parent's right to subject healthy children to non-therapeutic genital cutting practices such as male circumcision in order to satisfy the religious beliefs of the child's parents.

In honor of Día de los Muertos, members of Bay Area Intactivists set up an altar in San Francisco's Garfield Square to memorialize the numerous lives lost to genital mutilation. The altar displayed the following text that was borrowed from www.sexuallymutilatedchild.org:

In Memory of the Sexually Mutilated Child

Attendees of the recent Association of American Medical Colleges conference in San Francisco were met by Bay Area Intactivists member Brother K during a demonstration condemning routine infant circumcision. Outfitted in white clothes with a red-stained crotch meant to symbolize a genital mutilation wound, Brother K carried a sign demanding equal rights for boys (to be protected from non-therapeutic, genital cutting) on one side and urging the public to view the video "Child Circumcision: An Elephant in the Hospital" on the other.

During the American Public Health Association annual conference last November in San Francisco, members of Bay Area Intactivists demonstrated outside the conference venue with signs decrying routine infant circumcision and citing it as medical fraud. The human rights advocates were not there to criticize the APHA but merely used the conference as an opportunity to educate those attending it. Although widely practiced in the United States, infant circumcision is typically performed without any diagnosis and—perhaps most importantly—without the consent of the owner of the penis.

Intactivists from around the country traveled to New Orleans last October during the American Academy of Pediatrics annual conference to protest the organization's promotion of routine infant circumcision and other forms of non-therapeutic, non-consensual, genital cutting. Bay Area Intactivists member Jonathon Conte was one of those attending and he also participated in a press conference organized by Intact America. The protest lasted several days and included a round-trip march from the convention center to the financial district.

Members of the group Bay Area Intactivists staffed a booth at Sunday Streets Berkeley to raise awareness of the human right of all individuals to be protected from non-consensual, non-therapeutic, genital cutting such as routine infant circumcision. A variety of literature available at the booth covered topics such as damage caused by male circumcision, peaceful alternatives (such as Brit Shalom) to the ritual genital cutting of children, and issues of forced genital cutting faced by intersex individuals.