Cheryl Chase is the founder of the movement to protect the human rights of people born with intersex conditions. Chase founded the Intersex Society of North America in 1993, via a letter to the editor published in The Sciences March/April issue. 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 (1995) of Hermaphrodites Speak!, a 30 minute film in which several intersex people discuss their lives, and the harm they suffered under medical management intended to "normalize" them. An intersexual is a person (or individual of any unisexual species) who is born with genitalia and/or secondary sexual characteristics of indeterminate sex, or which combine features of both sexes. ... The Intersex Society of North America is an organisation formed to represent the interest of intersexuals: people whose bodies do not fit the accepted conventional ideas of male or female. External links Intersex Society of North America Categories: Intersexual ...
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Intersex Society of North America
INTERSEXUALS audio interview with Cherly Chase from All Things Considered, November 28, 1997
Cheryl sometimes uses language in a way that people who are not familiar with her might take the wrong way, and she said there are these medical teams that fix intersex kids.
CherylChase: My background was in science, and my professional career was in science, and here is what I know about science and social justice movements: Science cannot tell us what values we should have.
CherylChase: We don’t have statistics, but we hear on an ongoing basis [about parents] who are making decisions about abortion when they have a prenatal diagnosis.
When CherylChase became an intersex activist nine years ago, few people knew that as many as one in 2,000 babies is born with genitals that aren't clearly male or female.
Chase was born with an enlarged clitoris that doctors first thought might be a penis.
Chase, who has no clitoral sensation and has never had an orgasm, wants an end to surgeries on children's genitals -- unless it's needed for normal urination or other function -- until the child is old enough to decide.
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