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A Physician’s False Equivalence: Why Circumcision Is Not Sex-Change Surgery

by Cecil Maner
08/25/26
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A Physician’s False Equivalence: Why Circumcision Is Not Sex-Change Surgery on Minors

On August 24, 2026, Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, a physician and former public health official, appeared on Jesse Watters Primetime. When pressed on whether government should prohibit sex-change surgeries for minors, El-Sayed refused a direct answer. Instead he asked Watters, “Are you circumcised?” and insisted that circumcision is also “surgery on a kid’s ding-a-ling.” He framed opposition to pediatric gender procedures as selective interference in decisions properly left to parents, doctors, and patients. The comparison is not merely strained. It is medically inaccurate, historically ignorant, and theologically inverted. That it came from a trained physician makes the failure more serious.

A physician is expected to distinguish procedures by anatomy, purpose, permanence, and risk. Circumcision removes the foreskin. It leaves the penis, testes, and reproductive capacity intact. Sex-change interventions on minors—cross-sex hormones, mastectomy, orchiectomy, and construction of neo-genitalia—remove or destroy healthy sex organs and reproductive systems. One is limited tissue modification with a long historical record and generally low complication rates when performed competently. The other is elective sterilization and reconstruction performed on children whose gender dysphoria often resolves with time. Watters correctly replied that circumcision differs from castration. El-Sayed’s retort collapsed that distinction into a crude slogan about “surgery on a kid’s ding-a-ling.” A doctor who cannot or will not articulate the difference between foreskin removal and the destruction of primary sexual and reproductive organs has abandoned basic clinical reasoning.

The historical record further exposes the falsehood. Circumcision did not begin in modern hospitals under insurance coverage. According to the King James Version of Genesis 17, the LORD appeared to Abram when he was “ninety years old and nine” and established an everlasting covenant. God declared: “This is my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee; Every man child among you shall be circumcised. And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me and you.” The command extended to every male, including those born in the house or bought with money. That same day Abraham, at ninety-nine, and Ishmael, at thirteen, were circumcised, along with every male in the household. No pediatric gender clinic, no cross-sex hormones, no irreversible loss of fertility. The act marked inclusion in a covenant with God, not rejection of the body God formed.

That covenantal meaning is decisive. Genesis 17 presents circumcision as a positive sign of belonging: God promises to be a God to Abraham and his seed, to multiply them exceedingly, to give them the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession, and to establish the covenant through Isaac while still blessing Ishmael with fruitfulness and a great nation. The cutting of the foreskin is the “token” of an everlasting relationship grounded in the created order. It affirms the male body as the site of divine promise. Sex-change surgery on minors operates from the opposite premise. It treats the chromosomal and anatomical sex—XX or XY, the developmental pathway that produces male or female reproductive systems—as a defect relative to an internal sense of identity. Where the Abrahamic rite seals covenant with the given body, medical transition seeks to revise that body. One is covenantal affirmation; the other is an attempt to override DNA-determined sex. To equate them is to erase both the religious significance of the first and the biological reality of the second.

El-Sayed’s argument therefore fails on every relevant level. Medically, a physician should know that removing the foreskin is not equivalent to castration or the construction of artificial genitalia. Historically, the practice long predates modern medicine and was performed on Abraham and Ishmael without hospitals or insurance. Theologically, the King James text of Genesis 17 presents circumcision as the token of an everlasting covenant with God, not as rebellion against the sexed body. A candidate who is also a physician has a heightened duty to speak with precision about the human body. When that candidate instead offers a false equivalence that blurs irreversible sterilizing procedures with an ancient covenantal sign, the public is entitled to reject the claim as both unserious and dangerous.