Community Chat

[Marp2]

WINSTON-SALEM, North Carolina (Reuters) - A South Carolina couple sued doctors and state social workers on Tuesday for subjecting a 16-month-old child born with both male and female genitalia to what they say was medically unnecessary and irreversible s3x-assignment surgery while the toddler was in foster care.

The state and federal lawsuits - believed by the couple's lawyers to be the first of their kind in the United States - argue that doctors should not have performed surgery to make the child's body appear to be female when they knew they could not predict how gender would develop.

The child, now 8, has shown strong signs of identifying as male and recently began living as a boy, according to Pam and Mark Crawford, who adopted him after the surgery.

The couple, a psychiatrist and stay-at-home dad, said they are taking legal action in the hopes of helping other children who face similar medical conditions.

"We feel very strongly that these decisions to permanently alter somebody's genitalia and their reproductive ability for no medical reason whatsoever is an abhorrent practice and can't be continued," Pam Crawford said in a phone interview.

"It is too late for our son," she added. "The damage has been done to him."

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