Following the Aug. 10, 2010, publication of an Associated Press article, "Female circumcision victims seek out Colo. doctor," by Catherine Tsai, Clitoraid and Dr. Marci Bowers MD wish to clarify where donations should be sent and explain Clitoraid's role in the surgical process.

Nowhere in her article did Tsai mention Clitoraid, the parent, non-profit organization Dr. Bowers has been generously volunteering for since 2007. Therefore, the article failed to give a complete picture of the program's international implications. To be clear, Clitoraid (clitoraid.org) offers a humanitarian program to restore damage done by Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in North America, Asia and especially in Africa. Clitoraid is in the final stages of building a hospital in Burkina Faso (West Africa) to treat all FGM victims free of charge. Dr. Bowers will inaugurate the hospital once it is ready.

Donations will go toward the Burkina Faso hospital. It is in that vicinity that the largest number of FGM victims reside and where such surgery represents a two-year salary if the average patient were to pay for it. Clitoraid has been a 501 (c) 3 non profit organization since 2006.
Therefore, circumcised women seeking repair and those making donations should contact Clitoraid at , not Dr. Bowers.

"Clitoraid should be given first consideration when considering a donation of any kind, especially out of respect for our busy staff," Dr. Bowers said, adding that she wants to thank those who have written to her office to make donations following publication of Tsai's article.

It's also important to note that Clitoraid handles all post-surgical sexual therapy care under the guidance of sex therapist Dr. Betty Dodson.

Both Clitoraid and Dr. Bowers' office request that the Associated Press publish this joint statement to properly inform the public about Clitoraid and Dr. Bowers' involvement in this far-reaching, humanitarian endeavor.

Sincerely,

Dr. Brigitte Boisselier, PhD, President of Clitoraid
Dr. Marci Bowers, MD, head Clitoraid Surgeon

CATHERINE TSAI, Associated Press Writer

TRINIDAD, Colo. (AP) — This picturesque southern Colorado town known for decades as the sex-change capital of the world — thousands of gender-reassignment operations have been performed here — is becoming a beacon for victims of female genital mutilation.

Dr. Marci Bowers has performed about two dozen reconstructive surgeries on mostly African born women victimized as children by the culturally driven practice of female circumcision. Bowers is believed to be one of the few U.S. doctors performing the operation.

Bowers, who underwent a gender reassignment operation in the 1990s at age 40, said she relates to what her mutilation patients describe as a loss of identity, of not feeling whole.

"It took me so long to get there in my own life. I know what the feeling is like, seeking my own identity," she said.

Massah, a patient who grew up in a village in Sierra Leone and now lives in Australia, said the surgery "is like giving us a second life. Actually it's starting to live."

Wearing a blue-and-white striped shirt, dark blue pants and sneakers to her pre-surgery exam, Massah asked that her full name not be used because she hasn't told most friends and even family that she was having the surgery, or that she was circumcised as a girl in Africa.

She paid a $1,700 hospital fee, plus lodging and travel expenses for the surgery last month.

"I will spend my whole life savings," she said, "even if it's for one minute of feeling complete."

The World Health Organization estimates 100 million to 140 million girls and women worldwide have been circumcised.

Cultural, religious and social factors have helped keep the practice alive among those who believe it will reduce promiscuity and take away sexual pleasure or desire. The World Health Assembly passed a resolution in 2008 urging an end to the custom.

The restorative surgery practice in this town of 9,500 people near the New Mexico border began in early 2009.

Last month, at a guest house a short drive from Bowers' office, Massah and six other patients talked late into the night, sharing stories that they'd found difficult to voice even with best friends. All requested not to be identified.

One 37-year-old woman from Richmond, Va., was circumcised as an infant in Nigeria and realized in college during a biology class that she didn't look like her textbook diagrams. She said she would still like to ask her mother why.

"Why did you allow it to happen? What were you trying to prevent?"

Massah said she was circumcised at age 11 by a village woman. She was with about a half dozen of her sisters and cousins.

She was placed before the woman and was held down before being cut with what she thinks was a razor. She still remembers her screams.

"Nightmarish," she said.

She has felt ashamed, incomplete and apprehensive toward sex, she said.

"It's embarrassing going for Pap smears," Massah said haltingly, trying not to cry. "Just the look on people's faces."

She said she was hoping for "wholeness" from the surgery. A week into her recovery, she said she felt "ecstatic."

"Some people get another chance in life through organ transplant, but for me, this is it," she said.

Bowers learned her techniques for operating on FGM victims with Dr. Pierre Foldes, who performs the procedure in France.

Typically, patients have not had the entire clitoris removed, Bowers said, and the surgery exposes what remains, uses remaining tissue to reconstruct labia that may have been cut away, and clears scar tissue.

She said the surgery typically results in improvement in sensation as well as cosmetic benefits.

Bowers hopes to form a teaching program so other doctors can serve FGM victims.

"Somewhere, at some point, women have got to hold hands and say, 'No, no more. We're not going to do this anymore,'" she said.

Bowers' patients pay their own hospital fees and travel and lodging expenses, unless an insurer agrees to cover the hospital fee. Bowers donates her services.

Just how long that will continue here is uncertain. Bowers has announced plans to move to California this fall, and Mt. San Rafael Hospital where she operates says it has no immediate plans to add a new gender reassignment surgeon. That would be a big change for Trinidad, where Bowers' mentor, the late Dr. Stanley Biber, performed more than 5,000 sex change surgeries over more than 30 years.

Attitudes toward female circumcision are changing, the women patients said.

But, said Massah, "It's changing, but too slow. It's going to take a lot of generations."

Iman, a mother from the Twin Cities area in Minnesota who was circumcised, is grateful for Bowers and the chance to talk with other patients who underwent FGM.

"I left all that baggage at the guest house, all the things that tormented me," she said. "Imagine dealing with your worst demons and then meeting six other people who are dealing with the exact same issues you are. Then you get to leave all your baggage there, with no judgment."

Unlike other women who were blindfolded and cut in village ceremonies, with drumming and singing in the background, Iman was excised at age 12 in Kenya, in a doctor's office.

She had localized anesthesia. "I remember everything," she said. "My mom was there. I don't blame her because she did what was done for her. It was a rite of passage."

Later, she was taken to her grandmother, who checked whether the doctor had done a good job, she said.

After her grandmother died, her mother didn't take her three younger sisters to be circumcised. "I give her credit for that," she said. "It stopped with me."

___

Online: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jSMnS303G8Z5t4-z8cXMviLcyO6QD9HGI8S80


Associated Press

Sydney June 2nd, 2010

"While the International Raelian Movement is based on the protection of cultural rights of any groups, the line is clearly drawn at any form of violence, disrespect or in this case, outright sexual mutilation!" explains Jarel, leader of the Raelian Movement in Australia. "There can be no justification for such a proposal, what is needed is education and support for women that belong to these cultural groups to help them break free and reclaim what they were rightly born with; a beautiful sex and a functioning clitoris. After all, every human being has been designed to experience pleasure."

“The purpose of genital mutilation is one of cultural sacrifice not religious, and its only purpose is to remove any sexual pleasure the woman might experience,” states Zabou, the coordinator for Clitoraid in Australia. "Australia should aim to be the leaders in the reconstruction of the women who have been rendered a life of pain and suffering due to this barbaric practice, and not be part of its survival"

Clitoraid is a non-profit organization that is currently setting up a hospital in Burkina Fasa, run by volunteer doctors dedicated to the reconstruction of the damage millions of women who struggle to live with the painful consequences of female genital mutilation. Clitoraid’s goal is to inform the population, and also to collect funds to finance the construction of this hospital, where the patients will be operated on for free!!

Zabou: “If some group were to remove the hands of children for cultural reason, would the government offers to do it in hospital under the premise that is safer? of course not. the problem lies in the fact that a clitoris is still considered as dirty and useless. This prejudice has led 170 million women in the world to feel incomplete, ignoring the pleasure of orgasm that is now known as contributing to a healthy life . We cannot let our government be an accomplice to such barbaric practice."
Clitoraid has received several requests from Australian women willing to be repaired. One of them will be operated on by our leader surgeon in Colorado this coming Summer. (dear Nadine, please give Eden the status on that ok?)

For further information contact Eden Bates on +61 425 235 556.

LAS VEGAS, April 21 – The San Francisco Chronicle, through Caille Millner’s April 14 column “Wrong Approach to ending Genital Mutilation, successfully bullied the San Francisco-based store Good Vibrations to stop all fund raising activities for Clitoraid, a nonprofit organization that offers clitoral repair surgery for victims of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) both here in the United States and worldwide.

Millner and other critics following her lead have questioned the safety and validity of Clitoraid’s reconstructive surgery and expressed concerns about where the donated funds are going. And they say Clitoraid didn’t do an impact study to see how repairing the women’s genitals would affect their local communities.

In response, here is a written statement received at Clitoraid today from a woman born in West Africa. (She now lives in what she described as “a Western country.”)

“The world is now open, and it’s a very small place, with migration at its highest. People are no longer restricted to their villages, towns or countries until death. People are now exposed to other cultures. A lot of women who were circumcised [genitally mutilated] in other parts of the world now live in the West, and we now know that we’ve been violated unnecessarily. There is an awakening, a realization that sex isn’t meant to be a pleasure for the man alone and pain for the woman.

Then there’s the feeling of shame that you are somewhat deformed.

We withdraw from falling in love with [someone of] another nationality because we know the man will be looking and feeling for our clitoris during sex, and there’s embarrassment when we’re asked about our clitoris. Now even our own men prefer women with a clitoris and female orgasm since they see that as validation of their manhood and good performance.

Then we come to the medical aspect of it: childbirth, pap smears and general health checks that involve the vagina. A lot of us refuse to go for these because of the humiliation and embarrassment we face each time from the medical staff through no fault of theirs.

For me, and I guess I'll be speaking for a lot of victims, I feel like an impotent man in a heterosexual relationship.”

“It’s very clear to us at Clitoraid that the criticism we receive is mainly from individuals who don’t consider sexual activity important,” declared Dr. Brigitte Boisselier, head of Clitoraid. “That is definitely the reason why Clitoraid was started by Rael and had such a success among Raelians, since the Raelian philosophy states that having a harmonious sexual life is one of the keys to living a balanced life. A traditional religion offering charitable clitoral repair may be more palatable for Ms. Millner and many members of our society. Unfortunately, no traditional religion will ever create a charity to repair FGM victims. They stop with organizing groups that help with preventive campaigns. None will actually restore the sexual pleasure of those maimed because they all demonize women’s sexuality, sometimes to the point of grossly disfiguring women’s genitalia.”

Boisselier added, “The Raelian Movement, thanks to its pleasure-embracing philosophy, is the only religion working to restore sexual pleasure, and we will continue to do so no matter what opposition stands in our way. We owe it to the 135 million FGM victims who have no other recourse.”

Regarding the lack of scientific data often mentioned by critics, Boisselier said the surgical technique was developed more than 20 years ago by Dr. Pierre Foldes in France and published in a peer review journal, and that it is now practiced by many other surgeons trained by Foldes. Numerous testimonies from women praise his practice.

Nadine Gary, Clitoraid’s international head of operations, said the French health care system has been covering this common surgical procedure in France for years, and that Clitoraid’s head volunteer surgeon, Dr. Marci Bowers, MD, “a brilliant gender reassignment surgeon, will gladly and reliably clarify the steps and results of this surgery for anyone concerned about the validity and safety of this medical procedure.”

Gary said anyone concerned about how Clitoraid’s funds are used should visit , where the organization’s tax return statements are posted.

“I’m sure they’ll be surprised to see that no one in our organization is paid,” Gary said. “The money is so precious that all Clitoraid staffers are volunteers. Every penny goes to the women who call for help. Our reward is to hear about the beautiful, healing results.”

Here is what one of Clitoraid’s patients said after her surgery, according to Gary:

“I feel like every woman feels: I’m going to have the best life, the best marriage.” (Kady, 42, originally from the Ivory Coast)

“Today, two of the women operated on in March called to report that they’ve started having pleasant feelings where only painful scars were before,” Gary said. “And on Clitoraid.org, you can read a Clitoraid patient’s account of the path to her first orgasm after she recovered from FGM reversal surgery. The vibrator that helped her enjoy the first orgasm of her life was donated by Good Vibrations, and she says she can never thank them enough.”