“This Penis Business: A Memoir” Chronicles the Life Events That Compelled Georganne Chapin to Make Ending Circumcision Her Life’s Work

Chapin, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Intact America, Exposes the Big Business of Medical Circumcision and the Cruel Absurdity of Circumcising Baby Boys for No Medical Reason

(Tarrytown, New York—February 16, 2024)…Georganne Chapin, 72, has called out injustice throughout her life, as a child of civil rights activists, a budding anthropologist in Latin America, a CEO of a health plan for low-income individuals, and a founder of a health care quality and equity nonprofit. But it wasn’t until she went to law school mid-career and studied bioethics that Chapin turned to intactivism, the human rights movement dedicated to ending routine circumcision of baby boys in the United States.

Now, in a new memoir, “This Penis Business,” written by Chapin with Echo Montgomery Garrett and published by Lucid House Publishing, Chapin explains how her unusual upbringing, travels, and life experiences honed her as a leader, a critical thinker, and an outspoken advocate of children’s rights.

By following the author throughout her extraordinary life, readers can understand how and why Chapin co-founded and was picked to head Intact America, the leading intactivist organization in the United States. She has served as the organization’s executive director since it was launched in 2008.

“I wanted to write a book exposing the multi-billion-dollar medical circumcision business in the United States. But instead of saying ‘I oppose circumcision and you should, too,’ I chose to write a memoir about why I believe cutting the genitals of children who cannot consent is a massive human rights abuse,” says Chapin. “My hope is that readers will relate to how my thinking evolved and come to their own conclusion that cutting boys’ genitals violates common sense and flies in the face of basic bioethical principles that have evolved over the past eight decades.”

In addition, readers will find that “This Penis Business” is a master class in male anatomy, the role of foreskin in sex, and why circumcision cuts through us all—the men who are cut, the parents who regret allowing their sons’ penises to be cut, and lovers who will never experience sex the way nature intended.

Chapin’s Revelation About Circumcision

When she was 10 years old, Chapin saw her baby brother rushed to the doctor’s office to reopen his meatus, or urinary opening, which had closed up after circumcision. As a young adult when female genital mutilation emerged as a human rights issue, Chapin asked, “But isn’t that what we do to baby boys?” As a mother of a teenage, intact son, who thanked her for keeping him whole, she realized that by protecting babies from circumcision, she was protecting the bodies of the men they will become. “The day he thanked me is the day I became an intactivist,” she says.

Chapin’s Arguments Against Circumcision

The United States stands alone as the only Western developed country that routinely cuts the genitals of its baby boys. Chapin traces the beginning of America’s obsession with foreskin amputation to Victorian times, when circumcision was used in an attempt to stem masturbation and sexual pleasure of both men and women. Although circumcision is medically unnecessary—no medical society in the world, including the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), recommends routine circumcision of baby boys—each day, 3,500 American baby boys endure the pain and trauma of a procedure that permanently reduces the size and alters the function of their penises.

“The perpetuation of circumcision in American culture depends on fear and ignorance,” Chapin says. “As long as this wall of shame and silence pervades our society, another generation of boys is destined to grow up bearing the physical and psychological scars resulting from decisions made for them…Those decisions—based on false narratives, pseudoscience, and societal pressure—carry life-long consequences for the men they will become and everyone in those boys’ and men’s personal orbits.”

“This Penis Business” is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop, as well as local bookstores near you.

This Penis Business: A Memoir
Paperback ISBN 978-1950495450
$21.99

Published by Lucid House Publishing, Atlanta, GA

Genre/category: Activist Memoir/Bioethics/Medical Ethics

About Intact America

Intact America is the largest national advocacy group working to end involuntary child genital cutting in America and to ensure healthy sexual futures for all people. It does this by challenging social and sexual norms and empowering supporters and volunteers through advocacy and education. To learn more about the issues involved in the current conversation about newborn male circumcision, visit IntactAmerica.org and CircumcisionDebate.org, and follow Intact America on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Intact America operates as a not-for-profit organization based in Tarrytown, NY that is tax-exempt under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. EIN: 81-2887457.