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An Interview with Cheryl Chase

Cheryl Chase, the founder and current Executive Director of the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA), is an internationally recognized leader in intersex activism. She brings a passion to this work fueled by a painful intersex history. Chase had a tumultuous childhood and adolescence marked by tomboyism, social isolation, and unhappiness. She was kept in the dark about her early medical treatment. She underwent a mysterious abdominal surgery at age eight, followed by annual pediatric endocrinological check-ups until age twelve when she began menstruating. She was seen by a child psychiatrist between the ages of ten and eleven because of her disruptive behavior. At nineteen she began seeking information about her medical history only to be stonewalled by her parents and doctors. It was after much perseverance that she learned that she had been declared a boy at birth but this had later been reversed. Doctors then performed a clitoroplasty, which effectively removed her phallus. Histology of her gonads had ultimately shown that she had ovotestes, a condition still labeled with the misleading and archaic term “true hermaphroditism.” The decades of shame, depression, and anger she suffered were redirected into social activism in 1993 when she started a support network for intersexed individuals. In its first years, ISNA was at once an international support group and a brash activist group in the style of AIDS and Queer activism of that time. Chase and ISNA were instrumental in