As a child, she was brutally cut.
As an adult, she underwent hours of surgery to reconstruct what was taken from her.
As a mother, she vowed to protect her daughter from female genital cutting.
As a social media influencer, she is persuading others to do the same.
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She Survived Genital Cutting, Then Shared Her Reconstruction on TikTok
She became famous for her funny, irreverent videos on TikTok about a topic that most people avoid thinking about. Taking a razor blade to a rose and slicing into its soft petals, she recounted to millions of viewers her experience with genital cutting at age 6. She was held down by her aunt in Somalia, where almost all women and girls are cut.
Now 32, Shamsa Sharawe is a sweary and self-possessed British anti-cutting campaigner — perfect for the TikTok generation.
“Trigger warning, guys,” is how she begins her filmed account of how she was cut, fingering the needle and thread that she will use to stitch up the disfigured rose petals. Then she says louder: “Trig-ger warn-ing! If you don’t like horrific stories, go — now!”
In 2023, Ms. Sharawe regrew the rose. She traveled from her home in Britain to a clinic in Germany and put herself under a surgeon’s knife to create something she had never had: an adult vulva — external female genitalia.
The night before her operation, alone in a country she had never been to before, she was frightened.