Columbia couple sues state over toddler’s sexual-reassignment surgery

COLUMBIA, SC Mark and Pam Crawfords 8-year-old adopted child recently declared that he is a boy asking for a haircut like his fathers and telling his pediatrician that he, indeed, is a boy.

It was a change the Columbia couple said they saw coming for their child, who was born with both male and female internal sex organs and ambiguous genitalia. However, when the child was 16 months old and in foster care, surgeons removed the childs penis and testicular tissue in an effort to assign him to the female sex.

Now, seven years later, the Crawfords are suing the state Department of Social Services, physicians and state employees who were involved at that surgery, arguing it was medically unnecessary and denied their child who they call only M.C. in lawsuits to protect his privacy the constitutional right to make decisions about his own body.

The state took something very special away from our son, and for no reason except for adults inability to deal with people who are born different, said Pam Crawford, who adopted M.C. a few months after his surgery.

We hope to put other doctors, hospitals and state agencies on notice that they cannot mutilate children without being held accountable for the damage they cause, Mark Crawford said.

The Crawfords lawsuits, filed Tuesday in state and federal courts, are the first of their kind in the nation, said Ken Suggs, a Columbia-based attorney, who joined the Crawfords and other civil-rights advocacy groups to announce the suits.

The federal suit names as defendants three physicians and several named and unknown Social Services employees who, the lawsuit alleges, violated M.C.s constitutional rights when they approved and carried out the surgery.

The other lawsuit is a state medical malpractice lawsuit against Social Services and the hospitals the Greenville Hospital System and the Medical University of South Carolina where the doctors providing M.C.s care worked. The malpractice suit alleges the doctors repeatedly discussed in M.C.s medical records that the child could be raised as either a boy or a girl, and that there was no medical necessity to remove any of his genital tissue.

One doctor named as a defendant wrote in a medical journal that performing surgery to feminize the childs sex could be catastrophic if the child later identified as a boy.

But the doctors moved forward with the surgery, without consulting an ethics board, the lawsuit alleges.

Read more here:

Columbia couple sues state over toddler’s sexual-reassignment surgery