I’m a doctor and am circumcised myself. But I see the REAL devastating sexual consequences of this mutilating procedure every day. Here’s what no one tells you…

One evening while I was in medical school, a close friend pulled me aside and told me something I have never forgotten. She couldn’t feel anything during sex.

Here was an outspoken young man in his 20s, on the verge of tears, telling me that something most men wouldn’t think twice about had been taken from him before he could even speak. Because he was circumcised as a baby.

At the time he confided in me, he had just gotten his first girlfriend and suddenly found himself faced with this problem, with no idea what to do about it. He didn’t expect me to fix this. I guess he just needed one more person to know and he trusted me.

I thought about it a lot after reading a report in Good Health last week about men living with exactly this kind of damage. Judging by the reactions from readers, circumcision is an issue that many of you have strong views on.

An estimated 15 per cent of British men have had the surgery, most as children, and some of the stories are horrific: painful erections, loss of sensation, scars, infections. And relationships that fall apart because of a problem that the men involved can barely articulate and never acknowledge in the first place.

After years of helping men with some of these results, let me tell you what no one really wants: routine, non-medical circumcision is male circumcision. There. I said.

I myself am circumcised. It was done for medical reasons when I was five because I suffered from phimosis, where the foreskin does not retract properly, leaving me with recurring infections and pain.

A doctor recommended it, my family agreed, and I was operated on by a pediatric urologist.

Since then, he hasn’t given me a single moment of trouble, either physically or emotionally. So this is not a wounded man settling old scores.

This is the opinion of a doctor who has seen time and time again what non-medical circumcision can do.

Over the years, I have had patients say that circumcision caused sexual problems. In one case, such anatomical damage had occurred that entry was completely impossible.

The decision to circumcise a baby is not a well-intentioned act, as the particularly horrific story of Mohammed Abdisamad highlights. He was circumcised at the age of six months by someone without medical qualifications.

Within a few days he was feeling unwell and had to be rushed to hospital; He had a heart attack here; an autopsy determined the cause was a Streptococcus infection contracted during the procedure.

Last December, the deputy coroner in West London felt compelled to publish his Preventing Future Deaths report, warning that unless a change in the law was made, more babies would die in the same way.

This was not the first tragedy of this kind.

In 2012, a nurse named Grace Ebun Adeleye was convicted of manslaughter for circumcising a four-week-old boy at home with scissors and olive oil without anesthesia. He died from blood loss.

There were 14 deaths recorded in England between 2001 and 2024 where circumcision was listed on the death certificate. Half of them were children. The Office for National Statistics admits the real total is almost certainly higher as the procedure is not always reflected in the paperwork.

The shocking fact that most people don’t know is that anyone can circumcise a child in this country. You don’t need any medical training. No one licenses you, no one audits you, and you don’t need to keep records or bother with infection control. We police tattoo parlors more tightly than we police the cutting of healthy tissue from a child’s penis.

We have experienced something like this before with female circumcision. For years this situation continued quietly in some communities, with almost no one speaking out.

Then the campaigners did something very clever: they changed the words. Female genital mutilation became female genital mutilation (FGM), and almost overnight people saw it for what it always was: a barbaric practice hiding behind a neat, medical-sounding name.

We banned this. And rightly so.

So why can’t we say the same for men?

This procedure removes healthy, functioning, nerve-rich tissue from a child, possibly without consent. The gender of that child has nothing to do with morality.

When you object to one, you must also object to the other. But there is still a grotesque, unfair double standard here.

Just look at what happened this year. In January, the Crown Prosecution Service drafted new guidance, naming non-therapeutic circumcision for the first time as something that could ‘constitute a form of child abuse or offense against the person’ if carried out in unsafe or inappropriate conditions.

But after objections from religious groups, the CPS backtracked within weeks, dropping the phrase ‘child abuse’ and removing circumcision entirely from the section on harmful practices.

Dr., a mental health expert at King’s College London. Niall McCrae has argued for years that male circumcision is on par with female circumcision in terms of harm, and that we are too afraid to say so for fear of stepping in religious footsteps. He’s right.

You may say that a child cannot consent to any surgery, so why leave it out? But this misunderstands what consent represents. We always operate on children who cannot accept this, who have a burst appendix, a hole in the heart, a cleft palate, because something is wrong and the surgery fixes it.

My situation was exactly like this: I had a disease that was causing me pain and infection, and it was fixed with surgery.

Non-medical circumcision is the exact opposite. The child has no problems. We take a knife to the working tissue not to treat something, but to fulfill a tradition.

One is medicine. The other is that culture borrows the tools of medicine. I can already hear the pushback.

For many men, circumcision is really no problem. Like me, they have a happy, healthy sex life and never give it a second thought. Many men say they can get by just fine without a foreskin.

But this argument leaves me cold. Imagine a society that whips every newborn baby’s little finger not for any medical reason, but simply as a matter of routine or tradition.

There’s also the hygiene argument: The idea is that the penis is somehow dirty by design, something that can be fixed with a scalpel. Suggest the same thing for female anatomy, suggest buying knives for little girls so they can stay cleaner and the country will be on its feet, very true.

It’s true that urine and other substances can become trapped under the foreskin and, in a small number of men, cause chronic inflammation and sometimes a condition called lichen sclerosus, which has been linked to penile cancer in a few cases.

However, penile cancer is rare; It affects approximately 800 men a year in this country. And the answer to inflammation is extremely boring: retract the foreskin, wash underneath, dry properly, done. This is basic hygiene. You can’t cut open a baby’s healthy tissue to prevent a rare disease that can be easily prevented with soap and water. After all, a woman’s genitals also have folds that need to be washed. However, no one would dream of taking a knife to a girl to save her from this trouble.

We teach hygiene, screen, and treat problems when they actually arise.

The only proven medical benefit of circumcision is a small reduction in HIV transmission. But the answer is to teach our sons about safe sex, not to take a bite out of them just in case.

So what about the men already living with the fallout?

The psychological cost is heavier than most people realize. Many of these men clearly bear the hallmarks of trauma: intrusive thoughts and a deep sense of violation. Many people remain silent out of fear that they will be told to “man up” or that bringing it up would betray their family or faith.

One man I saw – who was suffering from a physical deformity and diminished sensation that was affecting his sexual life – was glowing with anger at what his parents had allowed to be done to him without his consent on religious grounds. He eventually sought help from psychotherapy as he fell into a deep depression.

In 2012, a nurse named Grace Ebun Adeleye was convicted of manslaughter for circumcising a four-week-old boy with scissors and olive oil and without anesthesia. died from blood loss

Dr. “After years of helping men who suffer the consequences, let me tell you something that no one really wants: routine, non-medical circumcision is male circumcision,” writes Dr Max Pemberton

Psychosexual therapy can also help a man (and his partner, if he has one) rebuild intimacy and remove the pressure and shame of sex through structured exercises and honest conversation.

The College of Sexual and Relationship Therapists maintains a register of accredited practitioners.

From a physical perspective (dryness or friction during sex), a good lubricant is the simplest solution that is often overlooked. Some men find that nonsurgical foreskin restoration (gradual stretching of the remaining skin) restores some sensitivity over time.

Revision surgery, which means skin grafting from the thigh or abdomen, is available privately but is costly.

Don’t neglect the emotional side either. Grief, anger, feeling violated are all perfectly reasonable reactions to something that was done to you without your permission. Speech therapy can help here (ask your GP for advice).

But the answer, of course, is to stop doing this to children.

We need to express it this way. It’s not circumcision. It’s not tradition. It’s not a section. Male circumcision.