Hi, my name is Dmitry, and this is my circumcision story.

I was circumcised when I was old enough to walk, to talk, to know something terrible was happening. This was the early 1990s, and I had been living with my family in the Soviet Union. The government had just collapsed, my family was in chaos, and we moved to Jordan. Someone decided a 3-year-old boy needed to be circumcised. I don’t know why. Medical necessity? Cultural pressure? Punishment?

I remember everything, most of all the dull knife the doctor used. He thrust it into the frenulum, full of nerve endings, the most sensitive part of the human body. I screamed until screaming gave out. By the time he finished flattening what remained, I was watching from somewhere outside my body. I died on that table, and they brought me back. But what returned was not the same boy.

They cut me during active neural development, when my nervous system was building its permanent architecture. My brain reorganized around the trauma. Dissociation became my default state, the foundation of my consciousness. I didn’t learn to disconnect from my body. I was built disconnected.

For nearly 10 years, I refused to speak. When I finally did, at age 13, the first thing I said was, “Why did you circumcise me?” I don’t remember the answer. Maybe there wasn’t one. The silence that followed taught me that many questions humans cannot answer—except through introspection such as prayer, meditation, or the depths of contemplation.

The circumcision was the first in a series of traumatic events and ongoing realities in my young life. Repeatedly molested by my father, raped by boys at school, gripped by the throat by my brother. All of it landed on a boy who was already broken. I kept wondering, why prolong my suffering? I tried to kill myself, but each time, someone intervened.

The cutter who circumcised me took more than my ability to experience any pleasure. They took my ability to experience emotional embodiment. I could not develop a basic felt sense that 3-year-olds develop. I never knew layered emotions or joy. They took my “aliveness.”

I spend my time managing, maintaining, and surviving a form that doesn’t align with my feminine polarity. My architecture is mind over body. It’s like driving a car: The car does not drive you. That is the only mechanic by which I can function, albeit destructive. Somewhere in the wreckage, though, something unexpected grew. I couldn’t respond to touch or to visuals, or perform on command. But I could exclusively respond to love—emotional connection. When I was finally truly seen by someone who loved me, something in my body stirred. As our relationship of trust unfolded, my body responded, and slowly the architecture started to dismantle. For the first time in my life, I could feel pleasure without pain, guilt, or dissociation. My body and I were in the same room.

Without surgical intervention, the most sensation I can recover is 30% and intense painful erections. Doctors say de-keratinization is impossible, but I was able to reverse some of it via a tending protocol involving seminal growth factors. The glans softens, but the organ that remains is not where pleasure lives—no frenulum, not enough mucosa. What remains is a stump that receives little, thus I have chosen celibacy. I dread sleep as the night terrors have me relive the knife, which bolts me back in a cold sweat. I love life, but often the exhaustion of living makes it not worth it.

It’s important to me to be an active part of Intact America and the intactivist community, both in person and in online support groups. I also joined Intact Global and was able to meet my heroes in person, for they can speak for those like me whose grief goes inward into self-harm and ideation. I donate to various intactivist groups, and I print and spread anti-circumcision stickers in public bathrooms. At times I have worn a bracelet that says “Say NO to circumcision.” When customers have asked me about it, it has been painful to talk about—but even more painful when I’m dismissed. Writing here about my own story, as painful as it is, gives me another way to find and give support.

I have a body I now tend despite the memory and the scars. I have a protocol, a practice, a daily act of care. I have the sunrise to witness. And the command: LIVE.