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

Cheryl Chase

Cheryl Chase is an American voice actress best known as the voice of Angelica Pickles on Rugrats, All Grown Up! and Angelica and Susie's Pre-School Daze...

.

Bo Laurent, better known by her pseudonym

Pseudonym

A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...

 Cheryl Chase (born August 14, 1956), is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 intersex

Intersex

Intersex, in humans and other animals, is the presence of intermediate or atypical combinations of physical features that usually distinguish female from male...

 activist

Activism

Activism consists of intentional efforts to bring about social, political, economic, or environmental change. Activism can take a wide range of forms from writing letters to newspapers or politicians, political campaigning, economic activism such as boycotts or preferentially patronizing...

 and the founder of the Intersex Society of North America

Intersex Society of North America

The Intersex Society of North America was a non-profit advocacy group founded in 1993 by Cheryl Chase to represent the interest of intersex people. Their objective was to end shame, secrecy, and unwanted genital surgeries...

. She began using the names Bo Laurent and Cheryl Chase simultaneously in the 1990s and changed her name legally from Bonnie Sullivan to Bo Laurent in 1995.

Early life

Chase was born in New Jersey

New Jersey

New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...

 with ambiguous genitalia that baffled doctors. According to the New York Times, her parents originally named her Brian Sullivan, noting that "Chase is XX

XY sex-determination system

The XY sex-determination system is the sex-determination system found in humans, most other mammals, some insects and some plants . In this system, females have two of the same kind of sex chromosome , and are called the homogametic sex. Males have two distinct sex chromosomes , and are called...

, and the reason for her intersex condition has never been fully understood." Other sources state her original name was Charlie, since until recently Chase preferred to use pseudonyms when referring to her early life.

Chase told Salon she was born with "mixed male/female sex organs" and after the discovery of ovaries and a uterus

Uterus

The uterus or womb is a major female hormone-responsive reproductive sex organ of most mammals including humans. One end, the cervix, opens into the vagina, while the other is connected to one or both fallopian tubes, depending on the species...

, a clitoridectomy

Clitoridectomy

Clitoridectomy is the surgical removal of the clitoris. It is rarely needed as a therapeutic medical procedure, such as when cancer has developed in or spread to the clitoris...

 was performed when she was aged 18 months. 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 afterwards.

She told Salon that she developed ovotestis at age 8 (later clarified as "the testicular part of her ovo-testes").
She found out about the clitorectomy aged 10, and at age 21 succeeded in gaining access to her medical records (some sources say this occurred in her early thirties).

Education and career

Chase graduated from MIT

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

 with a B.S.

Bachelor of Science

A Bachelor of Science is an undergraduate academic degree awarded for completed courses that generally last three to five years .-Australia:In Australia, the BSc is a 3 year degree, offered from 1st year on...

 in mathematics

Mathematics

Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

 in 1983. She then studied Japanese

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

 at Harvard Extension School

Harvard Extension School

Harvard University Extension School, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of the thirteen degree-granting schools of Harvard University and is part of the Division of Continuing Education.-Origins:...

  and at Middlebury College

Middlebury College

Middlebury College is a private liberal arts college located in Middlebury, Vermont, USA. Founded in 1800, it is one of the oldest liberal arts colleges in the United States. Drawing 2,400 undergraduates from all 50 United States and over 70 countries, Middlebury offers 44 majors in the arts,...

’s Intensive Summer Language Institute. In 1985, Chase was working as a graphic designer

Graphic designer

A graphic designer is a professional within the graphic design and graphic arts industry who assembles together images, typography or motion graphics to create a piece of design. A graphic designer creates the graphics primarily for published, printed or electronic media, such as brochures and...

. She then moved to Japan

Japan

Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

 as a visiting scholar at Hiroshima University

Hiroshima University

, located in the Japanese cities of Higashihiroshima and Hiroshima, was established 1949 by the merger of a number of national educational institutions.-History:Under the National School Establishment Law, Hiroshima University was established on May 31, 1949...

. She later started a computer software

Computer software

Computer software, or just software, is a collection of computer programs and related data that provide the instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it....

 firm near Tokyo

Tokyo

, ; officially , is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan. Tokyo is the capital of Japan, the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the largest metropolitan area of Japan. It is the seat of the Japanese government and the Imperial Palace, and the home of the Japanese Imperial Family...

. While in Japan, she also did translation work. "I was good at all the hard stuff, the non-emotional stuff that’s considered more masculine." Upon return to the United States, Chase began working as an intersex activist. In 2008, Chase received a M.A.

Master of Arts (postgraduate)

A Master of Arts from the Latin Magister Artium, is a type of Master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The M.A. is usually contrasted with the M.S. or M.Sc. degrees...

 in organization development

Organization development

Organization development is a new term which means a conceptual, organization-wide effort to increase an organization's effectiveness and viability...

 from Sonoma State University

Sonoma State University

Sonoma State University is a public, coeducational business and liberal arts college affiliated with the California State University system. The main campus is located in Rohnert Park, California, United States and lies approximately south of Santa Rosa and north of San Francisco...

.

Activism

Chase had a "nervous breakdown

Mental breakdown

Mental breakdown is a non-medical term used to describe an acute, time-limited phase of a specific disorder that presents primarily with features of depression or anxiety.-Definition:...

" in her mid-30s. She told Salon she once contemplated committing suicide

Suicide

Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Suicide is often committed out of despair or attributed to some underlying mental disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse...

 "in front of the mutilating physician who had rendered her genitalia numb and scarred." When she was 35, Chase 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 contacted many academic researchers and people with personal experiences of intersex conditions. In 1993, via a letter to the editor published in The Sciences

The Sciences

The Sciences was published from 1961 to 2001 by the New York Academy of Sciences. Each issue contained articles that discussed science issues with cultural relevance, illustrated with fine art and an occasional cartoon. The periodical won seven National Magazine Awards over the course of its...

July/August issue, she founded the now-defunct Intersex Society of North America

Intersex Society of North America

The Intersex Society of North America was a non-profit advocacy group founded in 1993 by Cheryl Chase to represent the interest of intersex people. Their objective was to end shame, secrecy, and unwanted genital surgeries...

 (ISNA) 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

Human rights

Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...

 of people born with intersex conditions in the U.S. In the 1990s, she began using the names Bo Laurent and Cheryl Chase simultaneously, sometimes in the same publication. She is the creator of Hermaphrodites Speak! (1995), a 30 minute documentary film

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

 in which several intersex people discuss the psychological impact of their conditions and the medical treatment and parenting they received.

In 1998 Chase wrote an amicus brief for the Colombia

Colombia

Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia , is a unitary constitutional republic comprising thirty-two departments. The country is located in northwestern South America, bordered to the east by Venezuela and Brazil; to the south by Ecuador and Peru; to the north by the Caribbean Sea; to the...

n constitutional court, which was then considering a ruling on surgery for a six-year-old boy with a micropenis

Micropenis

Micropenis is an unusually small penis. A common criterion is a dorsal erect penile length of at least 2.5 standard deviations smaller than the mean human penis size. The condition is usually recognized shortly after birth...

. In 2004, Chase and the ISNA persuaded the San Francisco Human Rights Commission

San Francisco Human Rights Commission

The San Francisco Human Rights Commission is a department of the City and County of San Francisco that works to increase equality, eradicate discrimination, and to protect human rights for all people...

 to hold hearings on medical procedures for intersex infants. Chase has published commentaries in medical journals and has criticized feminist writers, including Alice Walker

Alice Walker

Alice Malsenior Walker is an American author, poet, and activist. She has written both fiction and essays about race and gender...

 and Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt is an American feminist poet, essayist and critic. She is the author of four essay collections and two books of poetry...

, for not putting intersexuality on the feminist agenda, despite their condemnation of female genital cutting

Female genital cutting

Female genital mutilation , also known as female genital cutting and female circumcision, is defined by the World Health Organization as "all procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or other injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons."FGM...

 in Africa

Africa

Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...

 and elsewhere. ISNA was honored with the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission

International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission

The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission is a US-based international non-governmental organization that addresses human rights violations against lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, intersexuals, transgender people and people with HIV/AIDS...

's 2000 Felipa de Souza Human Rights Award.
Chase’s activism was a factor in the urology

Urology

Urology is the medical and surgical specialty that focuses on the urinary tracts of males and females, and on the reproductive system of males. Medical professionals specializing in the field of urology are called urologists and are trained to diagnose, treat, and manage patients with urological...

 and endocrinology

Endocrinology

Endocrinology is a branch of biology and medicine dealing with the endocrine system, its diseases, and its specific secretions called hormones, the integration of developmental events such as proliferation, growth, and differentiation and the coordination of...

 disciplines’ reopening of their consideration of intersex conditions. Chase advocates a more complex view of intersexuality: in particular, that difficulties cannot be eliminated by early genital surgery. In August 2006, Pediatrics

Pediatrics (journal)

Pediatrics is an official peer-reviewed journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. In the inaugural January 1948 issue, the journal's first editor, Hugh McCulloch, articulated the journal's vision: "The content of the journal is... intended to encompass the needs of the whole child in his...

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 patients who are able to make an informed choice; that children should be assigned a gender at birth, but parents should be ready to permit gender transition as the child grows; 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 hermaphrodite

Hermaphrodite

In biology, a hermaphrodite is an organism that has reproductive organs normally associated with both male and female sexes.Many taxonomic groups of animals do not have separate sexes. In these groups, hermaphroditism is a normal condition, enabling a form of sexual reproduction in which both...

 in favor of disorders of sex development

Disorders of sex development

Disorders of sex development , sometimes referred to as disorders of sex differentiation, are medical terms referring to "congenital conditions in which development of chromosomal, gonadal, or anatomical sex is atypical." Lee et al...

. Among the doctors supporting Chase is Melvin Grumbach, who had cared for her as an infant and later became a leading American pediatric endocrinologist.

Chase has written about being openly lesbian

Lesbian

Lesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...

 since her 20s. Chase married

Same-sex marriage in California

The status of same-sex marriage in California is unique among the 50 U.S. states, in that the state formerly granted marriage licenses to same-sex couples, but has discontinued doing so...

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

Hobby farm

A hobby farm is a smallholding or small farm that is maintained without expectation of being a primary source of income. Some are merely to provide some recreational land, and perhaps a few horses for the family's children...

 in Sonoma

Sonoma County, California

Sonoma County, located on the northern coast of the U.S. state of California, is the largest and northernmost of the nine San Francisco Bay Area counties. Its population at the 2010 census was 483,878. Its largest city and county seat is Santa Rosa....

 and remarried in 2008 following the In re Marriage Cases

In re Marriage Cases

In re Marriage Cases 43 Cal.4th 757 [76 Cal.Rptr.3d 683, 183 P.3d 384], was a California Supreme Court case with the dual holding that "statutes that treat persons differently because of their sexual orientation should be subjected to strict scrutiny" and the existing "California legislative and...

.

External links

• Intersex Society of North America
• Chase, Cheryl (1997). The Child with an Intersex Condition: Total Patient Care.