Monday

August 31st, 2026

Insight

El-Sayed's Insane Circumcision Analogy

David Harsanyi

By David Harsanyi

Published August 31, 2026

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"Sex changes for minors. Do you support that?" Fox News host Jesse Watters recently asked Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed.

"So you think it's OK for a parent to slash his kid's ding-a-ling off?" Watters finally interjects.

"Are you circumcised?" El-Sayed asked.

"Circumcision's different than castration," Watters shot back.

"It's a problem that you think you get to decide what happens between a parent, a doctor, and a patient," El-Sayed argued. "I'm just saying that, yes, circumcision is surgery on a kid's ding-a-ling."

Circumcision is a minor, low-risk procedure that's been practiced by humans going back 5,000 years or more. Around 80% of American men are circumcised. Their lives are not irreparably altered. Their natural maturation is not impeded.

Most pediatricians believe the health benefits of circumcising boys outweigh the risks of the procedure. No one compels parents to circumcise their children. And if a 13-year-old boy suddenly demanded to be circumcised for cosmetic reasons, no responsible parent or doctor would needlessly subject them to a scalpel.

Castration has also been around for thousands of years, though chiefly as a tool of torture and subjugation. The children of impoverished parents, slaves or the abducted young might be turned into eunuchs. Today, affluent parents voluntarily hand their children over to quacks to be forever damaged.

The notion that El-Sayed, champion of a socialized healthcare system that would empower the federal government to dictate all our medical decisions, doesn't believe the state should have a say in your choices is risible.

"Gender-affirming care," however, isn't medical care; it is elective mutilation. So, of course, society has a responsibility to intervene in the relationship between parent, doctor and patient if that "patient" happens to be a healthy minor and the actions of the doctor and parent constitute child abuse.

That's the debate.

And that's the conversation El-Sayed and other progressives would like to avoid. Because the unvarnished truth would disgust any well-adjusted adult. Even the anesthetized description of the process, "gender-affirming care," is an insidious euphemism that inverts reality to conceal a truth about a process that uses puberty blockers, hormones and surgery to "affirm" a child's fleeting self-conception, not their gender.

Many people have been coaxed into believing that supporting gender-change cruelty is an act of love, compassion and acceptance. One of the duties — the most vital duty — of any parent is protecting their children from harm, including self-harm. Indeed, one of the most vital duties of all civilized people is protecting children from violence.

We do not give in to the fantastical, fleeting whims of children. Because, despite some modern conceptions of parenthood, children do not possess any deep existential knowledge about gender or anything else. Your job is to protect them from their worst inclinations and social contagions, not follow them into madness.

If a parent rejects biological truths, that's their business. If a child wants to dress up as the opposite sex, that's their business, as well. But the state has a duty to step in and protect a child who isn't old enough to vote, rent a hotel room, order a drink, open a bank account, buy spray paint or play lotto, from destroying their anatomy.

Compassion means giving children with gender dysphoria the psychiatric or spiritual help they need, and perhaps an education. Your "authentic" gender is the one you're born with, as any normie understands, which is no more "assigned" to you than your height or skin color.

Yet, a smarmy Democrat running for major political office goes on the country's top cable news network and glibly compares circumcision to procedures that cause irreparable damage to healthy reproductive systems, not to mention infertility, impaired sexual function, chronic pain, blood clots and forever seeping wounds, as not to offend his activist base.

Now, El-Sayed might be an extremist, but he earned a medical degree on top of a doctorate, so he is uniquely positioned to have an educated discussion on this issue. At the very least, it's mystifying that any progressive candidate running for a seat that may well decide Senate control doesn't have a prefabricated answer ready to go when he's asked why it's OK to alter permanently the lives of children as young as 5.

Then again, maybe El-Sayed doesn't have a good answer because there is no good answer.

(COMMENT, BELOW)


Previously:
08/24/26 Second Amendment backward; NYT attempts to horrify on supposed 'Right to Kill'
08/10/26 Abdul el Sayed is an American tragedy
08/10/26 Fauci's legacy: Shattered public trust
07/31/26 Fauci's Cowardly Fifth Amendment Evasion
07/27/26 Neither Party Is Talking About What Voters Actually Care About
07/20/26 Luddites Are Winning the Data Center Debate
07/13/26 AOC Should Thank Baby Boomers for the World They Left Her
07/03/26 The United States Has Always Been at War
07/01/26 The Socialist Revolution Will Eat the Dem Party
06/19/26 Why Is the Trump Administration Taking Orders from the Iranians?
06/12/26 Even Without His Controversies, Graham Platner Is Just a Lightweight Extremist
06/08/26 Southern Poverty Law Center's REAL scam
06/01/26 Dems Are in No Position to Lecture Anyone About Candidates
05/25/26 Jeff Bezos Is Right About Capitalism, Wrong About Taxes
05/11/26 Why Stay in NATO if Europe Isn't Willing to Help Us?
05/01/26 Nazi Tattoo? Hamas Defender? No Problem, Says Chuck Schumer, a self-styled defender of Jewish interests
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04/13/26Everyone Knows What the Dems' AIPAC Obsession Is Really About
03/27/26 Trump's Iran Deal Must Be Nothing Like Obama's
03/24/26 Class-War Economics Is Counterproductive and Un-American
03/20/26 Paul Ehrlich is dead. Regrettably, his legacy isn't
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03/06/26 Trump eradicates 47 years of feckless foreign policy
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