A violation is still a violation.

Let’s be clear from the start: **this is not a legal argument.** I do not care how statutes are written, how policies are framed, or which box an institution checks to make itself feel justified. This is a moral argument. And morality doesn’t bend just because a system is uncomfortable with the implications.

In plain human language, *assault* means a violation of someone’s body. It does not require a courtroom. It does not require erotic intent. It does not require penetration. It requires only one thing: **someone’s bodily integrity being intentionally violated without true consent or necessity.**

When the body parts being targeted are sexual or reproductive organs, that violation is sexual in nature. Period. Not because it involved desire—but because of *what was violated*.

Genitals are not morally neutral. Reproductive organs are not just “tissue.” They are tied to future intimacy, fertility, identity, and autonomy. To damage, remove, or permanently interfere with them is not a small thing. It is not a cosmetic choice. It is not “just healthcare.” It is a profound act with lifelong consequences.

And when that act is done to a child?

That’s where society loses its moral footing entirely.

Children cannot give adult-level informed consent. They cannot understand long-term consequences like sterility, sexual dysfunction, altered development, or irreversible loss. They cannot imagine their 25-year-old self, their 40-year-old self, their future relationships, or future grief over choices they never got to make.

That is *why* adults are supposed to protect children.

*Not project onto them.

*Not experiment on them.

*Not use them as proof-of-concept for adult theories, fears, or ideologies.

So I’m going to say what too many people are afraid to say out loud:

**Any non-necessary, non-emergency interference with a child’s sexual or reproductive organs—especially when it is permanent—is assault.**

When it targets sexual organs, it is sexual assault in the plain meaning of the words. Calling it something else does not cleanse it. It only anesthetizes our conscience.

We hide behind legal categories because they give us distance. “This isn’t rape.” “This isn’t abuse.” “This is allowed.” “This is regulated.” But morality doesn’t care what label makes adults feel safer. Harm does not evaporate because paperwork exists.

If the same act would be considered a violation if done to an adult without consent, the fact that it is done to a child—someone more vulnerable, more dependent, more trusting—does not make it better. It makes it worse.

Intent doesn’t save you here. History is full of people who harmed children “for their own good.” Science has been wrong before. Medicine has been wrong before. Social consensus has been catastrophically wrong before. “We meant well” is the most common excuse used after irreversible damage is already done.

And underneath all of this is a question no one wants to answer honestly:

**What happened to letting children be children?**

What happened to tomboys—the girls who hated dresses, climbed trees, roughhoused, and grew up just fine? What happened to gentle boys, sensitive boys, artistic boys, boys who weren’t interested in violence or dominance but still became men?

When did personality stop being allowed and start being pathologized?

When did discomfort turn into diagnosis, and diagnosis into justification for permanent bodily intervention?

There was a time when adults understood restraint as love. When protection meant *waiting*. When guidance meant creating space, not rushing to conclusions. When the future adult—the person the child would one day become—was treated as someone worth defending.

Now we act as if adults have the right to rewrite a child’s body to resolve adult anxiety. As if uncertainty is more dangerous than permanence. As if a child’s natural development is a problem to be managed rather than a process to be safeguarded.

This isn’t progress. It’s hubris.

The law may continue to draw narrow boxes. Institutions may continue to sanitize language. But morality doesn’t disappear just because it’s inconvenient.

A violation is still a violation.

A child is still a child.

And adults are still responsible for protecting futures that do not yet have a voice.

If that makes people uncomfortable, maybe that discomfort is the point.

Because the moment we stop flinching at irreversible harm done to children’s bodies is the moment we should be deeply afraid of who we’ve become.