Male circumcision has been widely practiced for mainly religious reasons in Turkey. Surrounded by public rituals, male circumcision is an enormously important event for young boys. Along with compulsory military service and marriage, circumcision is culturally regarded as a rite of passage that prepares and shapes boys for manhood. Considering the absence of socially regulated and culturally coded rite of passage for girls, we can suggest that the celebratory nature of the event produces gender differences. The circumcised male body is furthermore a crucial part of the Turkish religious imagination. Although male circumcision is not compulsory in Islam, it is widely seen as a prerequisite for being a true Turkish Muslim. In other words, in Turkey, the circumcised body represents a site for inscribing both gender and religious differences. The Turkish state’s intervention in the custom in the 1960s was a decisive moment in the history of male circumcision. The state introduced new medical norms and modern techniques into male circumcision as part of the project of socialization of health services in the Post-World War II period. The goal of the project was to colonize, nationalize, and modernize the Turkish countryside, while simultaneously extending the state’s authority over the rural areas. This paper analyzes the Turkish state’s attempt to regulate male circumcision, and asks how the state problematized and de-ritualized the custom according to its own bio-political concerns regarding the well-being of children/boys in the 1960s. The Turkish state challenged families’ authority as it claimed to represent the best interests of their children, and aimed to replace circumcisers trained by apprenticeship with modern practitioners. By focusing on the two new circumcision techniques, local anesthesia and sutures that the new practitioners introduced, the paper examines the moral landscape surrounding male circumcision in the 1960s, and elaborates on the question of how the bodies of children became a site of conflicts, struggles and resistance between the state, circumcisers and families in this period.