Oranges vs Apples

Many times while talking to people about my activism I am often told I am comparing apples to oranges. This is often used to state there is no comparison between two points, that to do so is not going to yield any positive result in making a point and end the conversation. The idea being that there are too many differences that comparison is moot. The phrase itself is problematic in that case because there are many similarities in those two objects. Both are fruit, come from trees, can be made into juice, are nutritious, have vitamins and many other factors. Only looking at the differences and being blind to the similarities will often lead to misinformation about the subject.

As stated above I get told this often when I am advocating my points in my activism. What kind of activism do I do, intactivism. I believe all children should be equally protected under the law when it comes to bodily autonomy and genital cutting. Society is vehemently against any genital cutting of girls because it can have severe negative impacts on the health and sexual pleasure of women. Rightly so there is outrage about this being done, so much so that society will even fight religion and other cultures in order to protect girls. This outrage ends though when it comes to boys and intersex children being cut. Then somehow it becomes justified and treated as religion having the right to cut. People will point out that its done to girls as a way to control their sexuality, without looking back in history to see why its done to boys. A justification for boys is that it help keep it cleaner because of the smegma that can be trapped in the foreskin, while ignoring the fact that girls also produce smegma along with menstruation and having a normal discharge which causes more bacteria to be created and the fact women have more folds of skin in their genitals. These are two examples of how people are willing to try and point out what they believe to be differences but really are similarities if research is performed. There are many more examples of how the orange is more like the apple than society is willing to acknowledge. Hopefully one day society will realize this and treat all fruits as equally important.