Cheryl Chase (activist)

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This article refers to the intersex activist; for the American actress, see Cheryl Chase.

Cheryl Chase (born August 14 1956) is an American intersex activist, and the founder of the Intersex Society of North America.

Chase was born Brian Sullivan in New Jersey with XX male syndrome, and her genitalia baffled doctors. After the discovery of ovaries and a uterus, a sex change operation was performed when she was aged 17 months, removing her clitoris/penis and opening a vagina.

Her parents, as advised by doctors, moved to a new town and raised her as a girl, Bonnie Sullivan. Although she had begun speaking before the operation, she fell silent for six months after the operation. She found out about the clitoroplasty and vaginoplasty aged 10, and as a young adult succeeded in gaining access to her medical records.

Chase graduated from MIT with a degree in math and studied Japanese at Harvard University. She moved to Japan and founded a company. When she was 35, she returned to the U.S. and badgered her mother for answers, then embarked on a search for a fuller understanding of what she had learned.

Chase moved to San Francisco and began to live as a lesbian. She contacted many academic researchers and people with personal experiences. In 1993, via a letter to the editor published in The Sciences March/April issue, she founded the Intersex Society of North America by fiat and asked for people to write to her under her new name, Cheryl Chase, the beginning of the movement to protect the human rights of people born with intersex conditions in the U.S.

Largely due to Chase's activism, the urology and endocrinology disciplines have begun to reopen their consideration of intersex conditions. Chase advocates against early sex reassignment surgery, the opposite of the long-held belief that growing up with one physical sex is psychologically healthier, a view promulgated by psychologist John Money, founder of the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic.

In August 2006, Pediatrics published a letter signed by 50 international experts including Chase titled "Consensus Statement on the Management of Intersex Disorders" arguing this position, without making a specific recommendation for parents of intersex children. Chase herself believes that surgery should only be done on consenting adults; that children should be assigned a gender at birth, but parents should be ready to reassign as the child grow; and that parents should be open with their children about their condition. Nevertheless, many medical professionals believe that few parents will make this choice. She also lobbies for the abolition of the word wikt:hermaphrodite in favor of disorders of sex development. Among the doctors supporting Chase is Melvin Grumbach, who had cared for her as an infant and later became a leading American pediatric endocrinologist.

In 1998 Chase wrote an amicus brief for the Colombian constitutional court, which was then considering a ruling on surgery for a six-year-old boy with a micropenis. In 2004, Chase and the Intersex Society persuaded the San Francisco Human Rights Commission to hold hearings on medical procedures for intersex infants.

Chase was honored with the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission's 2000 Felipa de Souza Human Rights Award. Chase is also the creator of Hermaphrodites Speak! (1995), a 30 minute documentary film in which several intersex people discuss the psychological impact of their condition and the medical treatment and parenting they received.

Chase married her partner of five years, Robin Mathias, in San Francisco in 2004. They live on a hobby farm in Sonoma.