Egypt clinic helps women reclaim bodies scarred by genital mutilation ---Agence France-Presse

CAIRO: Intissar was only 10 years old when she was forced to undergo genital mutilation, but 30 years later, one clinic is offering help for some of the millions of Egyptian women affected by the still-rampant practice. Intissar, a journalist who like other women cited here spoke under a pseudonym to protect her identity, recalls having spent 30 years "completely deprived of pleasure, without any connection to my body." Her story closely resembles that of millions of Egyptian women and girls who have gone through female genital mutilation (FGM) at a young age, despite state-sponsored efforts seeking to curtail the practice. But for three years, one clinic has sought to change the reality of many of these women. In 2020, surgeons Reham Awwad and Amr Seifeldin became the first to offer clitoral reconstruction surgery in Egypt through their clinic, Restore FGM. Surgery is "the last resort," Awwad told Agence France-Presse in her Cairo clinic. A common first step in the clinic's treatment is psychosexual counselling coupled with plasma injections, which Awwad said "can reduce the need for surgery by 50 percent." The plasma injections allow for the regeneration of damaged tissue without subjecting women to new, invasive procedures. Nourhan, also using a pseudonym, described chronic pain and a severed sense of pleasure in the two decades since she underwent genital mutilation at 11.

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