Many anthropologists believe there are significant overlaps in the motivations, rationalizations, and degrees of psychological, physical, and sexual harm associated with genital cutting of both sexes. Some of the milder forms of FGC involve a pinprick that draws blood but removes no tissue.

Female genital mutilation (FGM) and male circumcision: Should there be a separate ethical discourse? By Brian D. Earp, University of Oxford

[A]s the anthropologist Zachary Androus has written: The attitude that male circumcision is harmless [happens to be] consistent with Western cultural values and practices, while any such procedures performed on girls is totally alien to Western cultural values. [However] the factof the matter is that what’s done to some girls [in some cultures] is worse than what’s done to some boys, and what’s done to some boys [in some cultures] is worse than what’s done to some girls. By collapsing all of the many different types of procedures performed into a single set for each sex, categories are created that do not accurately describe any situation that actually occurs anywhere in the world.

Nancy Ehrenreich writes in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review: … the mainstream anti-FGC position is premised upon an orientalizing construction of FGC societies as primitive, patriarchal, and barbaric, and of female circumcision as a harmful, unnecessary cultural practice based on patriarchal gender norms and ritualistic beliefs. … Lambasting African societies and practices (while failing to critique similar practices in the United States) … essentially implies that North American understandings of the body are “scientific” (i.e., rational, civilized, and based on universally acknowledged expertise), while African understandings are “cultural” (i.e., superstitious,un-civilized, and based on false, socially constructed beliefs).

As Sara Johnsdotter has pointed out, there is no 1:1 relationship between amount of genital tissue removed (in either males or females), and subjective satisfaction while having sex, so “FGM” (and male “circumcision”)—of whatever degree of severity—will affect different people differently. Each individual’s relationship to their own body is unique

Rebecca Steinfeld, a political scientist at Stanford who studies ritual cutting, has speculated as follows: Alongside the differences in harm and misperceptions about the contrasting settings and ages at which the procedures take place, the double standard stems from two further factors: sexism and ethnocentrism. Male bodies are constructed as resistant to harm or even in need of being tested by painful ordeals, whereas female bodies are seen as highly vulnerable and in need of protection. In other words, vulnerability is gendered. And little girls are more readily seen as victims than little boys. The consequence of this … is that patriarchy often allows men’s experiences to remain unquestioned.

FGM is a lot worse but they are bad for the same reasons: violation of bodily autonomy and mutilation of ones gentials which impairs function.

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Neither are climate change and local biodiversity loss, yet both are terrible things and we need to take them more seriously