"Well it's a drastic procedure by your standards and mine, but for the people who are living in desperation perhaps the best way to understand it is that it seems no more drastic to them than circumcision"
About this Quote
Money’s line doesn’t just defend a controversial intervention; it rehearses a whole rhetorical playbook for turning moral alarm into clinical neutrality. He opens with a disarming concession - “by your standards and mine” - a nod to shared squeamishness that pretends to put speaker and listener on the same ethical footing. Then he swaps the frame: people “living in desperation” become the decisive moral authority, not because we’ve heard their voices, but because desperation is invoked as a solvent that dissolves ordinary standards.
The circumcision comparison is the clever pivot. Circumcision is culturally normalized, often performed on infants, and routinely justified as tradition, hygiene, or identity. By tethering a “drastic procedure” to something many audiences already tolerate, Money isn’t offering an analogy so much as a laundering mechanism: if you accept A without flinching, you’re being inconsistent if you recoil at B. The subtext is an accusation of bourgeois prudishness masquerading as concern.
It also smuggles in a quiet claim about consent and harm. Circumcision’s ethical controversies are flattened into “no more drastic” - not “less harmful,” not “more justified,” just emotionally equivalent. That’s a strategic downgrade from moral reasoning to affect management: the question becomes how it “seems” to the desperate, not what it does to a body, a psyche, or a future self.
In context, Money’s broader project often aimed to naturalize contested sex and gender interventions by presenting them as pragmatic responses to suffering. This sentence crystallizes that ethos: normalize the exceptional, medicalize the political, and let cultural familiarity do the argumentative heavy lifting.
The circumcision comparison is the clever pivot. Circumcision is culturally normalized, often performed on infants, and routinely justified as tradition, hygiene, or identity. By tethering a “drastic procedure” to something many audiences already tolerate, Money isn’t offering an analogy so much as a laundering mechanism: if you accept A without flinching, you’re being inconsistent if you recoil at B. The subtext is an accusation of bourgeois prudishness masquerading as concern.
It also smuggles in a quiet claim about consent and harm. Circumcision’s ethical controversies are flattened into “no more drastic” - not “less harmful,” not “more justified,” just emotionally equivalent. That’s a strategic downgrade from moral reasoning to affect management: the question becomes how it “seems” to the desperate, not what it does to a body, a psyche, or a future self.
In context, Money’s broader project often aimed to naturalize contested sex and gender interventions by presenting them as pragmatic responses to suffering. This sentence crystallizes that ethos: normalize the exceptional, medicalize the political, and let cultural familiarity do the argumentative heavy lifting.
Quote Details
| Topic | Health |
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