Hmm, I can see why that helpful female (mentioned earlier)
> preemptively informed me that such things like "pharaonic
> circumcision" aren't the only kind of female circumcision. (One of her
> examples was removal of "only" the clitoral hood, which too is genital
> mutilation.)
Female genital cutting includes a lot of things. For example, the American Academy of Pediatrics now suggests changing laws to allow a "ritual nick," which as it notes (perhaps understating matters), "is much less extensive than routine newborn male genital cutting."
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/125/5/1088.full
Curiously, it rationalizes in the same statement that this could "play a role in the eventual eradication of FGC," while expressing no similar concerns over the MGC it has just acknowledged, in the same paragraph, as more severe.
Like Canadian pediatricians' onset of panic over "feticide" for purposes of sex-selection (but not abortions for any other reason), the American lot seem to have a rather strange approach to deciding what is and is not a Big deal.
http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/1165378---feticide-debate-plunges-us-into-murky-ethical-waters http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1117816--orientalist-discourse-on-female-feticide-in-canada
-- "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað."