 The opposition to the practice is not without its critics, particularly among anthropologists, who have raised difficult questions about cultural relativism and the universality of human rights.Until the 1980s, FGM was widely known in English as female circumcision, implying an equivalence in severity with male circumcision.From 1929, the Kenya Missionary Council referred to it as the sexual mutilation of women, following the lead of Marion Scott Stevenson, a Church of Scotland missionary.