Posted on by Matt Thomas

The Splinter Fraction: Male Circumcision Should Be Outlawed — 1 Million Percent

Note: This piece argues that male circumcision should be strictly outlawed for non-consenting minors. It approaches the topic from a strict bodily autonomy framework regarding non-consensual, non-therapeutic interventions on minors, and treats irreversible bodily alteration without consent as the central ethical issue. It is not addressing medically necessary or emergency procedures, nor situations where an intervention is required to prevent serious immediate harm, which are outside its scope. The argument also focuses on principle rather than comparative cultural practice, and is intended as a normative claim about legal consistency in liberal systems rather than a commentary on individual intent, belief, or identity.

Epigraph:

Jesus don’t touch my baby.

Ryan Adams

Male Circumcision Should Be Outlawed — 1 Million Percent

Male circumcision of non-consenting minors should be outlawed globally, with legal penalties applied to those who perform or facilitate it, and civil penalties imposed on parents who authorise it. I was circumcised in infancy in a Catholic family in 1974. The issue is not medical ambiguity or cultural discomfort but a basic question of bodily autonomy: whether irreversible, non-therapeutic alteration of a child’s body can ever be justified without consent. In a liberal legal system that claims to prioritise individual rights, the answer should be consistent and categorical. Anything less relies on inherited exemptions—religious, medical, or cultural—that do not withstand ethical scrutiny once the principle is stated plainly.

The core objection is simple: irreversible bodily modification without consent is impermissible when it is not medically necessary. A child cannot consent, and parental authority is not unlimited; it is a delegated responsibility bounded by the child’s future autonomy. Circumcision is not an emergency intervention. It is not a life-saving procedure in the vast majority of cases. It is the removal of healthy tissue from an individual who will live the entirety of their life with that alteration imposed before they had any capacity to participate in the decision.

This is where liberal societies already reveal a partial but incomplete consistency. We accept that consent is not static across childhood. We do not allow children to make binding decisions about sexual activity, because we recognise developmental thresholds of agency and understanding. That is why age of consent laws exist at all, and why they sit at or near adulthood in most jurisdictions. But the same logic applies more fundamentally to irreversible bodily alteration. If we accept that certain domains require maturity before consent is meaningful, then permanent physical modification must fall under the same principle. The difference is not moral category; it is legal lag.

The counter-case is not weak in structure, even if it fails ethically. It rests on four main claims: parental rights, medical justification, religious freedom, and social normalisation. Parents are routinely empowered to make medical decisions on behalf of children under a “best interests” standard. Circumcision is often placed within this framework as a preventive health measure. Some studies are cited to suggest reduced risks of urinary tract infections or sexually transmitted infections later in life, and complication rates in clinical settings are presented as low. On this basis, it is framed not as cosmetic alteration but as permissible preventive medicine.

Religion provides a second pillar. In Judaism, circumcision is a covenantal rite central to religious identity. In Islam, it is widely practiced as a tradition of purification and belonging. Liberal states are deeply reluctant to interfere with such practices, treating them as protected expressions of religious freedom. On this view, banning circumcision would represent not neutrality but intrusion into foundational religious life.

The third pillar is cultural and social integration. In societies where circumcision is widespread, particularly where it is near-universal within certain populations, deviation can create stigma or perceived abnormality. The argument follows that enforcing prohibition could impose social harm on children by marking them as different within their communities. Finally, legal systems distinguish male circumcision from female genital cutting on the basis of severity, medical context, and institutionalisation within healthcare systems, arguing that harm is not equivalent and therefore regulation need not be symmetrical.

Taken together, these arguments form a sort of a defense of permissibility under existing liberal frameworks: parental discretion within medical norms, protected religious practice, and harm-based legal classification.

But each of these pillars collapses under a stricter application of bodily autonomy.

Parental authority is real, but it is not sovereign. It exists only insofar as it serves the future autonomy and welfare of the child. It does not extend to irreversible, non-therapeutic bodily alteration where no immediate necessity exists. The “best interests of the child” standard is not a blank cheque; it is a constraint. We already recognise this in other domains where the state intervenes against parental choice when irreversible harm or violation of fundamental rights is at stake. The question is whether we apply that constraint consistently.

Medical justification also fails the threshold test when examined carefully. Even if certain population-level benefits exist, they are statistical, not essential. They can be achieved through far less invasive means—hygiene, education, barrier protection—without permanently altering the body of an individual who has not consented. Preventive possibility is not sufficient justification for irreversible intervention. Medicine does not normally operate on the principle that minor statistical risk reduction permits non-consensual surgery on healthy individuals.

Religious justification is where liberal systems most visibly reveal their tension. Freedom of religion is a foundational principle, but it is not absolute. It has never been interpreted as permitting unlimited parental action upon a child’s body. The critical distinction is between belief and irreversible physical imposition. Religious freedom protects the right to believe, to practice, and to transmit culture—but it cannot logically extend to authorising permanent bodily modification of an individual who has not consented to participate in that covenant. A child is born into a tradition, not owned by it.

The social integration argument similarly confuses descriptive normativity with ethical justification. That a practice is common within a group does not mean deviation is harmful in a way that justifies irreversible intervention. Social discomfort is not equivalent to bodily violation. Otherwise, any culturally dominant practice could immunise itself from ethical scrutiny simply by achieving prevalence.

The legal distinction between male circumcision and female genital cutting is often defended on the basis of harm severity and medical framing. But this distinction, while operationally convenient, becomes unstable when the underlying principle is examined. If the governing value is bodily integrity and consent, then sex-based differences do not determine permissibility. The relevant question is not comparative severity alone, but whether irreversible non-consensual alteration is being authorised at all. Harm thresholds may differ in degree, but the structural violation—altering a child’s body without consent—remains.

Once these counter-arguments are reduced to their core, what remains is not a justification but a set of accommodations: to tradition, to institutional history, to religious continuity, and to cultural inertia. None of these constitute a moral defence of the act itself; they constitute reasons why it persists.

This is why enforcement matters. A principle without enforcement is not a principle in practice. If bodily autonomy is to mean anything in a liberal legal system, it must be protected even when the practice is culturally embedded or religiously significant. That requires prohibition of the act itself, accountability for those who perform it in violation of the rule, and civil liability for those who authorise it on behalf of non-consenting minors. The aim is not punishment for its own sake, but alignment of law with the ethical principle it already claims to uphold in other domains of bodily autonomy.

What makes this issue more than historical critique is that it persists into the present as a live inconsistency. It is 2026. Liberal legal systems already recognise that bodily autonomy is foundational in adulthood. They already recognise that consent has developmental thresholds. They already prohibit non-consensual genital alteration in other contexts. The remaining question is whether they are prepared to apply the same principle consistently when tradition, religion, and medical normalisation converge.

A system that protects bodily autonomy only after adulthood has not resolved the ethical question; it has merely deferred it. The principle either applies universally to the body of the individual, or it does not. If it does, then non-therapeutic circumcision of minors cannot stand as an exception. 1 million percent.

Note: This piece is part of the Splinter Fraction series of political positions that the two-person Trans-Pacific political party has taken. You can find some of the others below.

On the Federal Age of Consent: A Reply to Alan Dershowitz
The Splinter Fraction: On Trans Issues, A Working Position
The Splinter Fraction: On Protected Medical Access for Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF)
Posted on by

The Splinter Fraction: On Why Clove Cigarettes Should Be Legal in the US

Note: This is the fourth position of the Trans-Pacific Political Partnership known as The Splinter Fraction. Our first position is about the Age of Consent in the U.S. Our second position is about privileged access for Medecins Sans Frontieres to all war zones and protection from the powers that be for their operations. Our third position is to spread karaoke as widely as possible.

Full disclosure: I love clove cigarettes. I’m not here to pretend tobacco is harmless, but I do smoke and I love cloves specifically — their sweetness, their bite, the way they announce themselves rather than slip by unnoticed. They’re not a casual habit. They’re not cheap. They’re not especially forgiving. They are, unmistakably, a specialty product for adults who already know what they’re doing. Which is precisely why their disappearance from the United States strikes me as so strange. If public policy is supposed to focus on scale, harm, and likelihood, cloves barely register. And yet they were eliminated cleanly and completely.

This isn’t a brief for Juul, bubblegum vapes, or any product designed to recruit new smokers as efficiently as possible. Those deserve scrutiny, regulation, and in some cases outright prohibition. Clove cigarettes are something else entirely. They were never poised to take over American high schools. They were never discreet, never mass-market, never engineered for easy uptake. They appealed to a narrow, adult audience — travelers, artists, longtime smokers with particular tastes. Their banning didn’t meaningfully change youth smoking behavior; it simply removed a minor, culturally specific option from the legal market. Which raises a quiet but important question: why was such a small thing targeted so decisively, while other flavored cigarettes were not?

The answer, of course, is the carve-out. In 2009, when the United States banned flavored cigarettes, it did so selectively. Clove cigarettes were prohibited outright. Menthol cigarettes were not. This distinction was never really about flavor chemistry or relative harm; it was about politics, constituencies, and consequence. Menthol had a large, organized user base and a long, fraught history tied to race, policing, and targeted marketing. Regulators understood that banning menthol would provoke backlash, raise enforcement concerns, and create secondary harms. So menthol survived. Cloves, by contrast, had no organized defenders, no obvious political cost, and no plausible narrative of collateral damage. They were small enough to remove without resistance.

We don’t object to the menthol carve-out. In fact, I understand it. Public policy often has to weigh downstream effects as much as stated intentions, and there were legitimate fears about what a menthol ban might unleash. But that logic cuts both ways. If menthol was spared because its removal would have caused disproportionate disruption, cloves deserved consideration for the opposite reason. Their user base was tiny. Their market footprint was negligible. Their elimination solved no urgent public-health problem and prevented no foreseeable epidemic. It simply demonstrated how regulation tends to work in practice: not by calibrating rules to scale and risk, but by acting most decisively where the fewest people are able—or willing—to object.

What the clove ban reveals, more than anything, is how regulation actually moves through the world. It does not flow evenly from evidence to outcome. It flows through constituencies. Products with organized users, sympathetic narratives, and visible secondary effects are handled with caution. Products without those protections are handled cleanly. Clove smokers were never numerous enough, loud enough, or legible enough to matter. There was no lobby. No advocacy group. No credible fear of backlash. As a result, cloves became an easy victory: a flavored cigarette could be banned, a public-health win could be declared, and no meaningful political cost would be incurred.

This is not corruption so much as gravity. Policymaking, especially in public health, often advances where resistance is lowest. That doesn’t make it malicious, but it does make it uneven. And unevenness matters. When regulation targets the smallest, quietest practices first—those least likely to produce harm at scale—it risks confusing symbolic action with effective policy. The clove ban didn’t fail because it was harsh; it failed because it was misaligned. It addressed a marginal behavior while leaving far larger, more consequential ones to be negotiated indefinitely.

One of the unspoken assumptions behind the flavored-cigarette ban was that flavor itself was the problem. But not all flavors function the same way. Some are engineered for mass adoption: sweet, smooth, cheap, discreet, and easy to inhale even for first-time users. Those products lower the barrier to entry and deserve aggressive scrutiny. Clove cigarettes operate at the opposite end of the spectrum. They are pungent, smoky, and unmistakable. They announce themselves immediately. They are harder on the throat, more expensive, and far less forgiving to the uninitiated. In other words, they are an acquired taste by design.


This distinction matters because public health should be attentive not just to ingredients, but to uptake dynamics. Products that spread rapidly among new users pose a different kind of risk than products that remain confined to a narrow, self-selecting adult audience. Cloves never behaved like a recruitment tool. They didn’t mask tobacco; they added complexity to it. They weren’t optimized for stealth or scale. Treating them as equivalent to mass-market flavored cigarettes collapses important differences and replaces targeted regulation with blunt prohibition. If the goal is to prevent widespread initiation, then precision matters—and cloves were never the right target.

There is also the question of adult autonomy, which is often treated gingerly in tobacco policy but can’t be avoided entirely. Smoking remains legal. That fact alone establishes a baseline assumption: adults are permitted to make choices that carry known risks. Within that framework, the question is not whether tobacco should be virtuous, but whether adults are trusted to exercise discernment among legal options. Choosing a clove cigarette is not an attempt to evade regulation or denial of harm; it is an aesthetic preference exercised within an already constrained and taxed marketplace.

This is where the phrase “following the muse” matters. It sounds indulgent until you realize how narrow the claim is. It is not a demand for limitless choice or novelty flavors designed to entice new users. It is a request for consistency. If adults are allowed to smoke, they should be allowed to choose among products that differ meaningfully in character, tradition, and appeal—especially when those products are demonstrably niche and non-expansionary. Removing cloves didn’t protect children. It simply narrowed adult choice in a way that feels arbitrary rather than principled.

It’s reasonable to ask why any of this matters. Clove cigarettes are not a public-health crisis. Their absence does not rank among the great injustices of modern regulation. But small decisions often reveal larger habits of mind. When policy treats scale, intent, and impact as interchangeable, it stops distinguishing between meaningful intervention and symbolic tidying. The clove ban solved a rhetorical problem more than a real one. It demonstrated action without demanding precision.

What’s left behind is an inconsistency that never quite resolves. A flavored cigarette with massive market share remains legal because its removal would be disruptive. A flavored cigarette with negligible market share was eliminated because its removal was easy. That asymmetry doesn’t undermine public health as a goal, but it does weaken confidence in how that goal is pursued. If regulation is to be trusted, it should align most tightly with where harm is greatest—not where resistance is lowest.

This is not a call to roll back tobacco regulation or to relitigate every compromise embedded in public-health law. It’s a narrower observation. When a system is willing to make exceptions for powerful constituencies while eliminating marginal practices without consideration, it reveals something about how decisions are actually made. Clove cigarettes weren’t banned because they were uniquely dangerous. They were banned because no one important would miss them.


Even so, positions don’t need mass movements to exist. Sometimes they begin as a splinter fraction: a small, clear objection to an unnecessary loss. If smoking is legal, and if nuance still matters, then there is room—at least in principle—for a carve-out that acknowledges scale, intent, and adult choice. Even if only two people think so, even if it’s just me and Annie, that’s enough to say it out loud.