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Hi.
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Today I'm going to share
my personal journey
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with female genital mutilation, FGM.
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Feel free to cry, laugh, cross your legs,
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or do anything your body feels like doing.
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I'm not going to name
the things your body does.
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I was born in Sierra Leone.
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Did anybody watch "Blood Diamond"?
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If you have any thoughts --
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I don't have any diamonds
on me, by the way.
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If you have heard of Ebola,
well, that's in Sierra Leone as well.
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I don't have Ebola. You're all safe.
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Don't rush to the door.
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Be seated. You're fine.
I was checked before I got here.
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My grandfather had three wives.
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Don't ask me why a man
needs more than one wife.
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Men, do you need more than one wife?
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I don't think so. There you go.
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He was looking for a heart attack,
that's what I say.
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Oh yeah, he was.
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When I was three, war broke out
in Sierra Leone in 1991.
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I remember literally going to bed
one night, everything was good.
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The next day, I woke up,
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bombs were dropping everywhere,
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and people were trying
to kill me and my family.
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We escaped the war and ended up
in Gambia, in West Africa.
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Ebola is there as well. Stay away from it.
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While we were there as refugees,
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we didn't know what
was going to become of us.
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My mom applied for refugee status.
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She's a wonderful, smart woman, that one,
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and we were lucky.
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Australia said, we will take you in.
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Good job, Aussies.
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Before we were meant to travel,
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my mom came home one day, and said,
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"We're going on
a little holiday, a little trip."
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She put us in a car,
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and we drove for hours
and ended up in a bush
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in a remote area in Gambia.
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In this bush, we found two huts.
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An old lady came towards us.
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She was ethnic-looking, very old.
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She had a chat with my mom, and went back.
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Then she came back and walked
away from us into a second hut.
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I'm standing there thinking,
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"This is very confusing.
I don't know what's going on."
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The next thing I knew,
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my mom took me into this hut.
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She took my clothes off,
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and then she pinned me down on the floor.
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I struggled and tried
to get her off me, but I couldn't.
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Then the old lady came towards me
with a rusty-looking knife,
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one of the sharp knives,
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orange-looking, has never seen
water or sunlight before.
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I thought she was going to slaughter me,
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but she didn't.
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She slowly slid down my body
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and ended up where my vagina is.
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She took hold of what I now know
to be my clitoris,
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she took that rusty knife,
and started cutting away, inch by inch.
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I screamed, I cried,
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and asked my mom to get off me
so this pain will stop,
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but all she did was say, "Be quiet."
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This old lady sawed away at my flesh
for what felt like forever,
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and then when she was done,
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she threw that piece of flesh
across the floor
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as if it was the most disgusting thing
she's ever touched.
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They both got off me,
and left me there bleeding,
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crying, and confused
as to what just happened.
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We never talked about this again.
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Very soon, we found
that we were coming to Australia,
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and this is when you had
the Sydney Olympics at the time,
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and people said we were going
to the end of the world,
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there was nowhere else
to go after Australia.
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Yeah, that comforted us a bit.
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It took us three days to get here.
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We went to Senegal, then France,
and then Singapore.
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We went to the bathroom to wash our hands.
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We spent 15 minutes
opening the tap like this.
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Then somebody came in,
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slid their hand under and water came out,
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and we thought, is this what we're in for?
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Like, seriously.
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We got to Adelaide, small place,
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where literally they dumped us
in Adelaide, that's what I would say.
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They dumped us there.
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We were very grateful.
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We settled and we liked it.
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We were like, "We're home, we're here."
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Then somebody took us to Rundle Mall.
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Adelaide has only one mall.
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It's this small place.
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And we saw a lot of Asian people.
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My mom said all of a sudden, panicking,
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"You brought us to the wrong place.
You must take us back to Australia."
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Yeah. It had to be explained to her that
there were a lot of Asians in Australia
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and we were in the right place.
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So fine, it's all good.
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My mom then had this brilliant idea
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that I should go to a girls school
because they were less racist.
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I don't know where she read
that publication. (Laughter)
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Never found evidence of it to this day.
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Six hundred white kids,
and I was the only black child there.
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No, I was the only person
with a bit of a color on me.
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Let me say that. Chocolate color.
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There were no Asians, no indigenous.
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All we had was some tan girls,
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girls who felt the need
to be under the sun.
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It wasn't the same as my chocolate,
though. Not the same.
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Settling in Australia was quite hard,
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but it became harder when I started
volunteering for an organization
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called Women's Health Statewide,
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and I joined their
female genital mutilation program
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without any awareness of what
this program was actually about,
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or that it related to me in any way.
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I spent months educating
nurses and doctors
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about what female genital mutilation was
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and where it was practiced:
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Africa, the Middle East, Asia,
and now, Australia and London and America,
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because, as we all know,
we live in a multicultural society,
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and people who come from those backgrounds
come with their culture,
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and sometimes they have cultural practices
that we may not agree with,
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but they continue to practice them.
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One day, I was looking at the chart
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of the different types
of female genital mutilation,
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FGM, I will just say FGM for short.
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Type I is when they cut off the hood.
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Type II is when
they cut off the whole clitoris
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and some of your labia majora,
or your outer lips,
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and Type III is when they
cut off the whole clitoris
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and then they sew you up
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so you only have a little hole
to pee and have your period.
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My eyes went onto Type II.
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Before all of this,
I pretty much had amnesia.
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I was in so much shock
and traumatized by what had happened,
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I didn't remember any of it.
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Yes, I was aware something bad
happened to me,
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but I had no recollection
of what had happened.
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I knew I had a scar down there,
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but I thought everybody
had a scar down there.
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This had happened to everybody else.
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But when I looked at Type II,
it all came back to me.
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I remembered what was done to me.
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I remembered being in that hut
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with that old lady and my mom
holding me down.
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Words cannot express the pain I felt,
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the confusion that I felt,
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because now I realized that
what was done to me was a terrible thing
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that in this society was called barbaric,
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it was called mutilation.
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My mother had said
it was called circumcision,
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but here it was mutilation.
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I was thinking, I'm mutilated?
I'm a mutilated person.
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Oh my God.
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And then the anger came.
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I was a black angry woman.
(Laughter)
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Oh yeah.
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A little one, but angry nevertheless.
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I went home and said to my mom,
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"You did something."
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This is not the African thing to do,
pointing at your mother,
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but hey, I was ready for any consequences.
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"You did something to me."
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She's like, "What are you
talking about, Khadija?"
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She's used to me mouthing off.
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I'm like, "Those years ago,
You circumcised me.
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You cut away something
that belonged to me."
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She said, "Yes, I did.
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I did it for your own good.
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It was in your best interest.
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Your grandmother did it to me,
and I did it to you.
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It's made you a woman."
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I'm like, "How?"
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She said, "You're empowered, Khadija.
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Do you get itchy down there?"
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I'm like, "No, why would I
get itchy down there?"
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She said, "Well,
if you were not circumcised,
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you would get itchy down there.
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Women who are not circumcised
get itchy all the time.
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Then they sleep around with everybody.
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You are not going
to sleep around with anybody."
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And I thought,
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her definition of empowerment
was very strange. (Laughter)
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That was the end
of our first conversation.
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I went back to school.
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These were the days when we had
Dolly and Girlfriend magazines.
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There was always the sealed section.
Anybody remember those sealed sections?
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The naughty bits, you know?
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Oh yeah, I love those.
(Laughter)
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Anyway, there was always
an article about pleasure
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and relationships and, of course, sex.
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But it always assumed
that you had a clitoris, though,
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and I thought, this doesn't fit me.
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This doesn't talk about people like me.
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I don't have a clitoris.
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I watched TV and those women
would moan like, "Oh! Oh!"
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I was like, these people
and their damned clitoris.
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(Laughter)
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What is a woman without a clitoris
supposed to do with her life?
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That's what I want to know.
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I want to do that too --
"Oh! Oh!" and all of that.
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Didn't happen.
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So I came home once again
and said to my mom,
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"Dolly and Girlfriend said
I deserve pleasure,
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that I should be having orgasms,
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and that, you know,
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white men should figure out
how to find the clitoris."
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Apparently, white men
have a problem finding the clitoris.
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Just saying, it wasn't me.
It was Dolly that said that.
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And I thought to myself,
I had an inner joke in my head
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that said, "I will marry a white man.
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He won't have that problem with me."
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So I said to my mom,
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"Dolly and Girlfriend said
I deserve pleasure, and do you know
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what you have taken away from me,
what you have denied me?
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You have invaded me
in the most sacred way.
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I want pleasure.
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I want to get horny, dammit, as well."
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And she said to me,
"Who is Dolly and Girlfriend?
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Are they your new friends, Khadija?"
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I was like, "No, they're not.
That's a magazine, mom, a magazine."
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She didn't get it.
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We came from two different worlds.
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When she was growing up,
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not having a clitoris was the norm.
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It was celebrated.
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I was an African Australian girl.
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I lived in a society
that was very clitoris-centric.
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It was all about the damn clitoris!
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And I didn't have one!
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That pissed me off.
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So once I went through
this strange phase of anger
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and pain and confusion,
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I remember booking
an appointment with my therapist.
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Yes, I'm an African who has a therapist.
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There you go.
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And I said to her,
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I was 13, I was a child,
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I was settling in a new country,
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I was dealing with racism
and discrimination,
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English is my third language,
and then there it was.
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I said to her, "I feel like
I'm not a woman
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because of what was done to me.
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I feel incomplete.
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Am I going to be asexual?"
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Because what I knew about FGM,
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the whole aim of it was to control
the sexuality of women.
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It's so that we don't have
any sexual desire.
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And I said, "Am I asexual now?
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Will I just live the rest of my life
not feeling like having sex,
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not enjoying sex?"
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She couldn't answer my questions,
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so they went unanswered.
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When I started having my period
around the age of 14,
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I realized I didn't have normal periods
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because of FGM.
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My periods were heavy, they were long,
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and they were very painful.
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Then they told me I had fibroids.
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They're like these little balls
sitting there.
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One was covering one of my ovaries.
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And there came then the big news.
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"We don't think you can
have children, Khadija."
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And once again, I was
an angry black woman.
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I went home and I said to my mom,
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"Your act, your action,
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no matter what your may defense may be"
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-- because she thought
she did it out love --
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"what you did out of love is harming me,
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and it's hurting me.
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What do you have to say for that?"
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She said, "I did what I had to do
as a mother."
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I'm still waiting
for an apology, by the way.
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Then I got married.
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And once again,
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FGM is like the gift that keeps giving.
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You figure that out very soon.
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Sex was very painful.
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It hurt all the time.
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And of course I realized, they said,
"You can't have kids."
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They thought, "Wow, is this my existence?
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Is this what life is all about?"
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I'm proud to tell you,
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five months ago,
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I was told I was pregnant.
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(Applause)
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I am the lucky girl.
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There are so many women out there
who have gone through FGM
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who have infertility.
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I know a nine year old girl
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who has incontinence,
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constant infections, pain.
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It's that gift. It doesn't stop giving.
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It affects every area of your life,
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and this happened to me
because I was born a girl
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in the wrong place.
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That's why it happened to me.
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I channel all that anger, all that pain
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into advocacy,
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because I needed my pain
to be worth something.
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So I'm the director of an organization
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called No FGM Australia.
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You heard me right.
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Why No FGM Australia?
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FGM is in Australia.
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Two days ago, I had to call
Child Protective Services,
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because somewhere in Australia,
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there's a four-year old
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whose mom is planning on performing
FGM on her.
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That child is in kindy.
I'll let that sink in: four years old.
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A couple of months ago, I met a lady
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who is married to a Malaysian man.
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Her husband came home and said
he was going to take the daughters
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back to Malaysia
to cut off their clitoris,
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and she said, "Why?"
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He said they were dirty.
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And she said, "Well you married me."
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He said, "Oh, this is my cultural belief."
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They then went into a whole discussion
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where she said to him, "Over my dead body
will you do that to my daughters."
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But imagine if this woman
wasn't aware of what FGM was,
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if they never had that conversation?
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Her children would have been
flown over to Malaysia
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and they would have come back
changed for the rest of their lives.
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Do you know how many millions of dollars
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it would take us to deal
with an issue like that?
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One in three children in Australia
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is at risk of having FGM
performed to them.
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This is an Australian problem, people.
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It's not an African problem.
It's not a Middle Eastern problem.
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It's not white, it's not black,
it has no color, it's everybody's problem.
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FGM is child abuse.
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It's violence again women.
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It's saying that women don't have
a right to sexual pleasure.
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It says we don't have
a right to our bodies.
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Well, I say no to that,
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and you know what? Bullshit.
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That's what I have to say to that.
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(Applause)
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I am proud to say that
I'm doing my part in ending FGM.
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What are you going to do?
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There may be a child in your classroom
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who is at risk of FGM.
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There may be a patient
who comes to your hospital
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who is at risk of FGM.
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But this is the reality,
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that even in our beloved Australia,
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the most wonderful place in the world,
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children are being abused
because of a culture.
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Culture should not be
a defense for child abuse.
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I want ever single one of you
to see FGM as an issue for you.
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Make it personal.
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It could be your daughter,
your sister, your cousin.
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I can't fight FGM alone.
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I could try, but I can't.
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So my appeal to you is, please join me.
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Sign my petition on change.org
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and type in Khadija, my name,
and it'll come up, and sign it.
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The aim of that is to get support
for FGM victims in Australia
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and to protect little girls
growing up here
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to not have this evil done to them,
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because every child
has a right to pleasure.
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Every child has a right
to their bodies being left intact,
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and dammit, ever child
has a right to a clitoris.
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So please join me in ending this act.
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My favorite quote is,
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"All it takes for evil to prevail
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is for a few good men
and women to do nothing."
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Are you going to let this evil
of female genital mutilation
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to prevail in Australia?
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I don't think so,
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so please join me in ensuring
that it ends in my generation.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)