This Should Have Never Happened!

We learned that this was wrong decades ago and doctors should not play god to satisfy their egos. The doctors took it upon themselves to perform “corrective surgery” on a healthy vibrant baby and created lifelong problems.

South Carolina Couple Files Lawsuit For Gender Reassignment Surgery Performed On Their Adopted Son
Huffington Gay Voice
Posted: 09/12/2013
A South Carolina couple has filed a groundbreaking lawsuit against their home state over a gender reassignment operation performed on their adopted son when he was just a year old.

WYFF 4 reports that the child, who is now 8 years old and identified by the network only as "M.C.," received the surgery after being born with both male and female reproductive organs and identified as intersex. Doctors removed M.C.'s male genitals in April 2006 and he was raised as a girl by his adoptive parents Mark and Pam Crawford, but he now identifies as a boy.

"We don't think that [the doctors who performed the surgery] are evil people," Mark Crawford, who adopted M.C. a few months after the surgery, noted. The Crawfords' lawsuit alleges that the decision to turn M.C. into a girl never went before a judge, nor did the doctors involved ever go before an ethical consultation.

In 2006 the doctors should have known better than to operate on an intersex child, there has been a number of studies that showed the child should be allowed to when they are old enough to decide for themselves. At the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. in 2005 Science Daily reported that presenters at the conference said,

"Surgical sex assignment of newborns with no capacity to consent should never be performed for cosmetic reasons, in my opinion," said Vilain, an associate professor of human genetics who also serves as a chief of medical genetics and director of research in urology and sexual medicine within the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. "We simply don't know enough yet about gender to be making surgical or legal assumptions."

Another AAAS speaker, William G. Reiner, M.D., agreed. "The most important sex organ is the brain," said Reiner, a psychiatrist and associate professor in the Department of Urology, Oklahoma University Health Science Center. "We have to let these children tell us their gender at the appropriate time."

In a 2004 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine, William G. Reiner, M.D., and John P. Gearhart, M.D. on a study of 16 genetic males patients with Cloacal exstrophy of which 14 were “…neonatal assignment to female sex socially, legally, and surgically…” found that,

Eight of the 14 subjects assigned to female sex declared themselves male during the course of this study, whereas the 2 raised as males remained male. Subjects could be grouped according to their stated sexual identity. Five subjects were living as females; three were living with unclear sexual identity, although two of the three had declared themselves male; and eight were living as males, six of whom had reassigned themselves to male sex. All 16 subjects had moderate-to-marked interests and attitudes that were considered typical of males. Follow-up ranged from 34 to 98 months.

And their conclusion was,

Routine neonatal assignment of genetic males to female sex because of severe phallic inadequacy can result in unpredictable sexual identification. Clinical interventions in such children should be reexamined in the light of these findings.

Two years after these results were publish the doctors at Medical University of South Carolina decided to perform “corrective surgery,” WYFF reported that,

The lawsuit states doctors, acting as agents of defendant hospitals, performed the surgery for the purpose of "assigning" the child the female gender despite their own conclusion that the toddler "was a true hermaphrodite but there was no compelling reason that she should either be made male or female."

At birth, the child was identified as a male because of his external genitalia, but shortly after that doctors discovered the baby had "ambiguous genitals" and both male and female internal reproductive structures, according to the lawsuit.

Defendants decided to remove the child's healthy genital tissue and "radically restructure his reproductive organs in order to make his body appear to be female," the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit contends that the surgery was not done with proper oversight and to make adoptions easier.

I find the use of the word “hermaphrodite” offensive; the television station should have consulted AP Style Sheet for correct word to use. I don’t even think they had a clue that the word was archaic and offensive to some people.