This is the hardest kind of story to tell, and we tell it carefully. Alex Hardy underwent an adult circumcision and described a catastrophic, unrecoverable loss of sensation and function before taking his own life. His mother, Lesley Roberts, has spoken publicly to warn others.
We don't present one man's tragedy as proof of a universal outcome — most circumcised men do not experience what Alex did. But his account matters because the harms he described are exactly the harms that consent exists to guard against: a permanent change to his own body that he never agreed to and could not undo.
AntiCirc's view: the right to refuse a permanent, non-therapeutic operation on your own body is not negotiable. Stories like this are why.
If you are struggling, please contact a crisis line in your country — you are not alone.
Some stories have to be told carefully, and this is one of them. Alex Hardy was, by every account, an intelligent and popular young man with no history of mental illness. At 21 he underwent an adult circumcision. Two years later, in November 2017, he took his own life, leaving his mother, Lesley Roberts, a final email — timed to arrive after his death — explaining a decision she had no idea was coming.
What Alex described
In that message, which Lesley later allowed the campaign group 15 Square to share, Alex described a catastrophic and, to him, irreversible loss of sensation and function following the surgery. He had come to regard what was done to him as a mutilation, and he had told no one — not family, not friends — that he had been circumcised at all. The silence is part of the tragedy: he carried it alone, and the people closest to him only understood after he was gone.
Why one account matters — and what it doesn't prove
We are deliberate about what a story like this can and cannot establish. It is not evidence that circumcision routinely ends in despair; most circumcised men do not experience anything like what Alex described, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. There is, frankly, very little systematic follow-up on long-term sexual and psychological outcomes after circumcision, which means the men who do feel harmed are easy to overlook — there is no register, no routine outcome study, no obvious place for their experience to register in the statistics.
That is exactly why individual accounts carry weight. The harms Alex named — lost sensitivity, a sense of permanent loss, distress that he could not voice — are precisely the harms that consent exists to protect against. A man who chooses a procedure for himself, with full information, owns the outcome. A child circumcised in infancy never had that chance; and even an adult, as Alex's case shows, can be left without a way back.
A mother's campaign
Lesley Roberts went public because it was her son's dying wish that his story be used to warn others. Organisations such as 15 Square — a UK charity focused on the foreskin and the harms of circumcision — have helped carry that warning, precisely because the formal channels that might record such outcomes largely do not exist.
Our view
The right to refuse a permanent, non-therapeutic operation on your own body is not negotiable. Stories like Alex's are why we hold that line so firmly — not because they are typical, but because when this harm does occur it is total and irreversible, and the person it happens to may never have agreed to the risk.
If you are struggling, please reach out to a crisis line in your country — you are not alone.
