ABSTRACT
Introduction Perpetuation of the practice of FGM cannot be fully understood without exploring the issues of gender and women’s human rights. ‘Gender’ is a term given to the social construction of roles allocated to men and women,1 and shouldn’t be confused with ‘sex’, which we are born into; women menstruate, are able to become pregnant, give birth and breastfeed an infant, for example. Men can produce and impregnate women with sperm,2 but, at the risk of stating the obvious, what the two sexes cannot do is swap these functions.
