In 2002, I was a lawyer in the first circumcision (male genital cutting, or MGC) legal case brought as a federal civil rights case. Visiting Judge Bernard Friedman used his full power to orchestrate a favorable result in this case for the defendants, making it impossible for us to get a fair hearing for our federal claims. Last November, a federal judge ruled that a 1996 federal law prohibiting female genital cutting (FGC) was unconstitutional, The judge’s name seemed familiar to me; I realized with a start that the same Bernard Friedman prevented a federal court from protecting males from cutting and then 16 years later blocked them from protecting girls! The cases do differ: males get no protection, while Judge Friedman held that ]”we don’t need a special anti-FGC law to prosecute cutters or their accomplices, though 27 States do have such laws.” Advocates of children's rights need to band together and make clear that the central ethical issue here is the violation of a young person’s bodily integrity without consent, and the exposure of that person's healthy "private parts" to surgical risk without an urgent medical need. Four European cases have held some forms of MGC to be worse than some forms of FGC and found liability. Why were these cases decided in Europe and not the US?