It sounds abusive to me too. But I'm sure legal guidelines for this are incredibly vague and rely largely on the advice of physicians re individual cases. And of course, we may yet find some clear physiological abnormality that accounts for some of these cases, just as a few decades ago we didn't have the ability to inventory chromosomes to pin point that sort of abnormality. But with a young child who is anatomically and chromosomally normal, it seems to me it would always be better to encourage formal identification with the apparent gender, and just be very flexible about the child's behavior. Even giving the benefit of the doubt that there might be physiological abnormality that we just can't identify yet, it's still going to be better in most cases for the child/adult to choose the roles s/he wants in life without surgery and/or hormonal interventions that just result in another form of being neither a normal male nor a normal female.
I had a passing acquaintance (she was mainly of friend of some friends of mine) with a woman who had been born an anatomical hermaphrodite and surgically made as female as possible. She made the right choice for her (I'm not sure what sort of chromosomes she had), but with the hell she went through growing up, it's a wonder she didn't become a serial killer. Her parents were evangelical Christians of some sort, and the father was apparently totally domineering in the home. He wanted a son and that was that; the mother either didn't have or wasn't free to express an opinion different from her husband's. Bottom line was that through middle school this poor child had to leave home dressed as a boy, but was met nearby by a sympathetic school counselor who let her change clothes before arriving at school. She was later put in foster care (IIRC because the father was physically abusive), and lived as a girl. She had the surgery somewhere along the line, and finally started college in her early 40s. Last I heard she was in law school. I don't know what became of her, but she's an example of why there need to be some clear legal standards about this sort of thing.
Good post. It's complicated because there are genuine disorders where it appears that the wires got crossed, through no one's fault or will, and these cases need to be dealt with rationally (and legally).
One of the big problems, however, is that everything relating to sex has become so politicized that common sense and charity - and science, for that matter, which is more objective on these matters - have fallen by the wayside, and individuals who have these problems are being used as poster children by groups with entirely different agendas.