Get Involved!
The Winter 2025 edition of O&G Magazine centres on the vulva—anatomically vital, often misunderstood, and still burdened by stigma. This issue explores the diagnosis and management of vulval conditions across the lifespan, including lichen sclerosus, benign lesions, paediatric presentations and postmenopausal changes. It also considers the social and psychological dimensions of vulval health, with contributions from psychosexologist Chantelle Otten, artist Jamie McCartney, and advocate Kath Mazzella OAM, whose personal story as a vulval cancer survivor underscores the importance of open dialogue to support earlier diagnosis. Together, these voices highlight the need for clearer language, greater cultural sensitivity, and more inclusive, confident care in a frequently overlooked area of women’s health.
As a woman — and as someone who has dedicated my life to both medicine and psychology — I feel compelled to speak to this issue, not only from a clinical standpoint but from the deeply personal position of someone who fiercely supports women’s rights, bodily autonomy, and trauma-informed care.
This is just my opinion, but I believe we are long overdue for a serious, open, and unapologetic conversation around the hidden cost women pay when our most intimate anatomy is treated as dispensable in the name of clinical necessity — especially when we aren’t even tracking the numbers.
Clitoridectomy — even when performed for medically indicated reasons such as vulva cancer — is not just a “surgical outcome.” It is a profound loss that can alter a woman’s sense of self, her sexual identity, her relationships, her embodiment, her pleasure, and her psychology.
The fact that we don’t have clear national statistics on how many Australian women are undergoing clitoridectomies each year is, frankly, unacceptable. When women’s health data isn’t being tracked, it’s not just an oversight — it’s a reflection of the systemic invisibility of female pain and experience.
I want to be clear: I absolutely support life-saving treatments, and when a cancer threatens life or spreads aggressively, we do what is necessary. But let’s also be honest: a clitoridectomy is not the same as a skin biopsy.
It’s not the same as removing a mole or even a breast. The clitoris is a complex organ with 8,000 nerve endings, central to female pleasure and identity — yet it's often treated as if it's medically irrelevant, even disposable. Where is the aftercare? Where is the long-term psychosexual counselling?
Where is the public acknowledgment that women who undergo this kind of surgery are enduring a form of trauma that goes beyond the physical?
And why is it that we, as a society, are still so reluctant to talk about it — unless we’re discussing it in the context of FGM in other cultures? Is it easier to be outraged about what happens to women “over there” than to examine what’s happening quietly, clinically, here at home?
In my opinion, we need more transparency, more research, more empathy, and a lot more rage when it comes to how women's health — and particularly women's sexual health — is handled. We need to start from a place of respect for the wholeness of a woman, not just her survival. So yes — dare we question? Absolutely. We must question. We must challenge. We must speak. Because silence is complicity, and I for one will not be silent when it comes to the protection and dignity of women
