Bodies Like Ours Girlfriends Article Page 2

No one talked about the baby's sex change. Like homosexuality--which at the time was still regarded by the medical establishment as a mental disorder--it was a verboten topic. Cheryl herself didn't know until she was twenty-one and dug up her medical records that she had been born intersexed, meaning, with genitalia that doctors decided weren't standard male or female equipment.

Chase isn't the only one with a childhood horror story. One or two children out of 2,000 are born intersexed. Over the course of this year, 2,000 surgeries will be performed in the U.S. on infants to "normalize" their genital appearance. The vast majority of surgeries are done to girls with large clitorises and--less frequently--to boys with small penises who are reassigned as female. In the case of Gaby Tako, who was born in the Bronx in 1960, her surgery was deferred until she was thirteen. Then her fused labia were split, her vagina extended, and her extended clitoris buried under a layer of flesh. "I felt dirty after the surgery," Tako told Ms. magazine. "My genitalia were never painful before, but since then, to one extent or another, they've been a source of pain." Now living as a lesbian, Tako regrets her "forced feminization." Other girls have endured daily dilations to keep open their newly created vaginas, repeated cosmetic surgeries, and most of all, the shame of knowing that an unspeakable "something" is wrong with their bodies.

This seemingly impregnable wall of secrecy that surrounds intersexuality motivated Cheryl Chase to form the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) in 1993. "ISNA literally started in Cheryl Chase's kitchen," says Alice Dreger, an associate professor at Michigan State University's Center for Ethics and Humanities in Life Sciences and author of Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex. Monica Casper, Chase's successor as executive director of the Seattle-based ISNA, concurs: "Before Cheryl started, there was no public discussion of intersex issues." Though the woman who was once a little boy named Charlie had broken the wall of silence, no one knew if it would be enough to change the long-established medical protocols. (next page>>)