Cheryl Chase, Executive Director

Cheryl Chase is our founder and current Executive Director. Her ongoing efforts to improve the social and medical treatment of intersexed people have been recognized with the year 2000 Felipa de Souza Human Rights Award, and in diverse publications and numerous television and radio programs including Newsweek, the New York Times, NPR’s Fresh Air, NBC Dateline, ethicist Alice Dreger’s Intersex in the Age of Ethics, social psychologist Suzanne Kessler’s Lessons from the Intersexed, molecular biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling’s Sexing the Body, and Pulitzer Prize winning medical writer Natalie Angier’s bestseller, Woman: An Intimate Geography.

In 1997 Ms. Chase produced Hermaphrodites Speak!, the first documentary in which intersex people speak openly about their personal experience. The film has been screened in dozens of film festivals on four continents, in university classrooms, in medical school grand rounds, and at professional conferences in medicine, ethics, psychology, and history.

In 2003, she produced The Child with an Intersex Condition: Total Patient Care, a 20 minute video addressed at healthcare professionals working with children with intersex conditions.

In 1999, the Supreme Court of Colombia issued an historic decision establishing human rights protections for people born intersex, leaning heavily on Ms. Chase’s 10,000 word amicus brief. A scholar as well as a patient advocate, Ms. Chase has by invitation delivered Grand Round presentations at Stanford University, UCSF, UCLA, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Michigan State University, University of Michigan, and others. Her presentation “Sexual Ambiguity: The Patient-Centered Approach” at the 2000 meeting of the Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society is considered an unprecedented patient-led breakthrough in medical reform. Her work has also been published in the Journal of Urology, Journal of Clinical Ethics, and Pediatric Nursing.