Ten years ago, MC was born with both male and female parts–a year later, Pam Crawford saw MC on an adoption website for children with special needs. While in state custody, doctors operated to remove the male parts. MC was now legally a girl.
As Buzzfeed reported recently, MC identified as a male by age 10. Now that he is on the brink of adolescence, the South Carolina couple are suing the state against the hospitals and state guardians who thought it was OK to put their son through sex-assignment surgery.
Typically, the intersex condition happens to 1 out of every 2,000 children; as a result, surgery is usually performed while the children are young so parents can help the child identify with the chosen sex. In 2012, U.S. hospitals administered intersex procedures about 1,759 times to children younger than 5.
Which ultimately leads us to beg the question: Should doctors be allowed to operate on intersex babies, and subsequently, why should anyone other than the child decide what sex they should be?
Rightly so, the Crawfords believe the surgery robs children born as intersex, with both male and female genitalia, of the ability to be able to naturally identify with a gender themselves.
In a YouTube video produced by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Crawfords discuss why this is a due process issue, and how they don’t want this surgery to happen to other children, stating,
“It’s become more and more difficult, as his identity has become more clearly male, the idea that mutilation had been done to him became more and more real.”
