First Do No Harm – South Carolina Guesses Wrong, Removes Baby Boy’s Penis

By Jean Ann Esselink on June 6, 2013

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He is referred to only as MC in court filings, but we know he was born prematurely in 2004 to a mother who didn’t want him, so his fate was placed in the hands of the State of South Carolina. The Department of Social Services found MC a guardian, and began looking for a permanent home. But there was a problem. The State identified MC as a “special needs” child, which is never a good category assignation if you’re in need of adoptive parents.

MC was an intersex baby, born with both male and female genitalia; unusual, but not a life threatening condition that required immediate action. What MC needed most in the world was time. Time to grow. Time to mature. Time to self-identify as a boy or a girl. But when he was 16 months old, the DSS and medical professionals who should have known better, decided to surgically change MC into a girl.
Perhaps the social workers and the medical professionals involved thought they were doing MC a kindness, giving him a better chance at finding adoptive parents, or sparing him the stigma of being “different.” But even in 2006, when MC’s surgery was preformed, the prevailing medical opinion was that intersex children should be allowed to develop, and to self-identify as male or female, before any decision about irreversible sexual assignment surgery was made.
Today at 8, MC is the adopted son of Mark and Pam Crawford. Yes, I said son. The State guessed wrong. MC now identifies as a boy, and his parents consider what was done to him to be nothing short of “mutilation.” You can hear them tell their story in the video below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qH4P5PtC4w&feature=player_embedded
The Crawfords are suing the State of South Carolina, and the doctors who did not give MC’s guardian and case workers enough information about intersex babies to make a decision in MC’s best long term interest. The Southern Poverty Law Center has taken the case.

“By performing this needless surgery, the state and doctors told M.C. That he was not acceptable or lovable the way he was born,” said Pam Crawford. “They disfigured him because they could not accept him for who he was – not because he needed any surgery. M.C. Is a charming, enchanting and resilient kid. We will not stop until we get justice for our son.”

MC’s tragic story highlights the need to educate the public about gender identity issues. Very few “regular” people understand that gender does not reside in a person’s genitalia, but in a person’s brain, but social workers and (especially) urologists should not be among them. Until that changes, babies born intersex are at risk from these well-intentioned decision makers.
First do no harm. It is the medical imperative we are all familiar with. Yet harm was definitely done to MC. He deserved so much better.