Gendered analysis of the Armenian Genocide and the Kurdish conflict is characterized by a tendency of equating gender with “woman” or the universally feminized category of “women-children”. This work explores the male-gendered topographies of these histories of violence by tracing the politics of circumcision that have involved in their making since the late nineteenth century. Male circumcision is a formidably polysemic practice that seals group boundaries and hierarchies in the materiality of the body according to ever-shifting sets of outsiders across time-space. In the historical Ottoman East, the practice was observed by Muslims, Jews and heterodox communities as simultaneously a religious prescription and a ritual of phallic acculturation. With the late 19th century context of anti-Armenian antagonism “being uncircumcised” gained a meaning in-itself as sign of an irreducible Muslim-Christian alterity. During the Hamidian era Armenian men encountered circumcision as one distinguished threshold of their relation to life and death over the course of pogroms and mass conversions. Circumcision gained a novel nationalizing function under the reign of the secular Ittihadists: While invalidating Armenian conversions to Islam, the Ittihadists also pursued a systematic policy of circumcising Armenian and Kurdish male orphans of the Genocide and World War I as means to inscribe the mark of the Turkish father on their bodies following the murder of their non-Turkish fathers. The non-Turkish men’s ordeal with circumcision continues in Turkey in circulations of the sexist and racializing trope of “the uncircumcised terrorist,” coined by the Turkish state toward the legitimate murder or symbolic castration of male Kurdish rebels for the past three decades. By tracing the shifting political semantics of circumcision across these thresholds, this paper seeks to contribute to critical feminist scholarship on modern Turkish identity and sovereignty, and also the understandings of the affiliative genealogies between the Armenian and Kurdish issues from a yet unexplored terrain.