"Female genital mutilation" and carefully note the qualifier of "female" is nothing whatsoever like losing a limb. It is, rather, more akin to the "male genital mutilation" (aka circumcision) which has been inflicted on the majority of American males for decades. Maybe those males on the Board of Immigration Appeals were simply wondering what sort of preferential treatment they were due for having been subjected to penis mutilation as infants.

Oh, good heavens, is 'Anonymous' being so subtly ironic that it is undetectable? Comparing FGM with circumcision is absurd on its face. And I say this as someone who is strongly against circumcision.

But 'Anonymous' isn't actually too far off from what I suspected was going on here as I read the piece--that FGM is very common. If FGM is grounds for asylum, majorities of women in many countries would suddenly be eligible. More than the board wants to deal with.

As tantalizingly patriarchy-blaming as the reproduction = useful to society angle is, I'm going to go with Occam's razor on this one. I think it's purely a nativist don't-want-too-many numbers game.

When were the members of the board assigned to it and who gave them their posts? I didn't see it in the article but I'd wager that asylum for sterilization was put into place before the current board was sitting. It's unfathomable to me that she'll be pressed into an incestuous marriage with a husband who I assume knows how much she has tried to avoid him and not face "persecution" from either her husband, family, or tribe.

Along with In Sand Diego's numbers theory, I thought of that too, and I'm curious as to how many people are granted asylum for forced sterilization too. (Another number being that they can't have more children here. Perhaps I'm too cynical.

From what you have written I see stupid bureaucrats all over this. I see nothing about blinkered men.

It's lazy to hit the Patriarchy as your first reflex.

...but we want to give asylum to illegals from Mexico? this woman should just fly down to Mexico and illegally cross the border then all of the lefty liberals will be clamoring for her to stay.

Don't get me started on the stupidity of comparing circumcision to getting one's clit cut off.

As the board said, it is horrible, but it already happened. Clearly it's inconsistent with rulings on forced sterilization, but it seems like the way to remedy that is not to let past FGM victims eligible for asylum but to make forced sterilization victims ineligible. It may sound brutal, but the point of asylum is to keep things from continuing to happen, and neither of those things can continue to happen. To me, there is a much greater problem with the impending forced marriage. Why this is not grounds for asylum for a person who has been living in the U.S. (not for masses of forced-marriage refugees, since the numbers would get very huge very quickly) I cannot understand. I can only be grateful that I was born here.

And to the idiot who thinks removing a foreskin is akin to removing someone's entire labia and clitoris - it's like comparing removal of part of someone's eyelid to removal of their entire eyeball. I am against BOTH. But they are not the same.

Is a horrible crime perpetrated by women on women. It's part of a sick culture, but I don't think asylum for a handful of victims is a good way to deal with it.

What's needed is a way to stop this pattern from repeating itself. Maybe one thing which might work, would be to offer parents a dowry for the girls if they agree not to mutilate them. This dowry should ensure that the girls would still be considered acceptable, even favoured brides in their culture. Maybe the dowry could even consist of schooling or scholarships rather than money, which could contribute to raise women's status as well.

The BIA made an asinine ruling that because she can no longer "fear" being mutilated again, a victim of female genital mutilation is ineligible for asylum. In addition to contradicting both Circuit court rulings and prior BIA decisions granting asylum to victims of forced sterilization, it also turns years of asylum policy on its head. It is routine for asylum applicants to claim that family members will be subject to the same persecution or harm that the applicant experienced. I don't understand why the BIA didn't take into account the applicant's fear for what female genital mutilation (yes, I'm spelling it out on purpose) would mean to her children, or that she could experience ostracism or punishment if she tried to prevent harm from coming to her children.

I don't think that the BIA is a group of patriarchs, but that they are a group of bureaucrats who have to process thousands of appeals every year. The high volume of cases often leads to poorly drafted decisions, and sometimes scathing reversals at the appellate level. I expect that this individual will get her asylum grant, or at least be granted humanitarian parole - exporting her to a compulsory marriage to her first cousin is not an end result that the administration wants to have on its record.

The headline isn't very good because it's expecting the reader to go "No, FGM isn't anything like losing a limb, it's far far worse." But, before I clicked on the article, it instead got me into a mental debate over which would be worse, and I arrived at the conclusion that they're comparably bad (for different reasons, obviously).

And then the Immigration Board's logic that FGM is like having a limb chopped off doesn't support your thesis either, because once FGM has been done you can't really do anything more to mutilate the genitals, but once a limb has been chopped off you can always chop off the other limbs. (I wonder if it counts if they chopped of your right leg and then specifically threatened to chop off your left leg?)

The fruitful line of inquiry here is the fact that forced sterilization is considered grounds for refugee status while FGM is not. That's what the headline should refer to.