Pam and Mark Crawford of Greenville, SC, adopted MC when he was just 20 months old and then considered female. Born with “true hermaphroditism” or both male and female anatomy—including a penis, vagina, testicle, and ovarian tissue—doctors had performed surgery to remove MC’s male anatomy two months before the Crawfords took him home. The surgery wasn’t so unusual. An estimated one in 2,000 babies born in the US are considered “intersex,” somewhere between male and female, and thousands of surgeries designed to give them either male or female anatomy are performed each year. But in the case of MC, the surgery occurred before the Crawfords could prevent it. Now 10, MC identifies as male and his parents are waging what Buzzfeed calls “a landmark lawsuit against the hospitals and state guardians who decided to put their son through sex-assignment surgery.”
Original by Newser
